Peter's shared items in Google Reader

These Are The Companies That Protect Your Data From The Government

2012-06-02T06:30:00Z

The Electronic Frontier Foundation took a look at 18 different web companies to see which ones are serious about user privacy — and which ones are likely to hand your data over to the government at a moment’s notice.

The Pirate Bay Introduces 'Physibles': Napster For Physical Objects

2012-01-26T12:22:45Z

A little over a year ago, we wrote about a fascinating paper from Public Knowledge with the splendid title, "It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology." It was written by Michael Weinberg, who recently recorded an interview going over much the same ground, if you prefer to listen rather than read. At the heart of both is the concern that once 3D printers become better and cheaper, and people start posting digital blueprints for commercially-available physical objects on the Net, then the manufacturing industries will recapitulate the war on sharing currently being waged by the music and film companies.

The output quality of 3D printers may still leave something to be desired, but the second part of the equation – freely swapping digital blueprints of objects without too much concern for any intellectual monopolies that are infringed upon – just became much easier thanks to The Pirate Bay:

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

That's probably true. Whether you will risk prosecution for doing so depends on how the post-SOPA legal landscape turns out.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

New Satellite Takes Spectacular High-Res Image of Earth

2012-01-25T23:32:50Z

NASA released this incredible new high-res image of the Earth, taken by the recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP.

The image, which centers on North and Central America, has been nicknamed “Blue Marble 2012″ after the famous “Blue Marble” image (below) taken during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The original Blue Marble, featuring the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, is one of the most well recognized photographs of all time.

Suomi NPP is designed to help improve weather forecasts and increase scientists’ understanding of long-term climate change. Originally called the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, the probe was renamed Jan. 24 in honor of the late Verner E. Suomi, known as the “father of satellite meteorology.”

The Suomi satellite compiled this enormous image from small sections that it photographed over the course of Jan. 4, and the pictures were later stitched together.

You can download the full image in extremely high resolution (8,000 x 8,000 pixels!).

Images: 1) NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring; 2) NASA

IMF embraces Keynes

2012-01-24T21:04:02Z

Following last week’s dire World Bank report, the IMF has now released its latest six monthly update and the reading is less dour but still pretty gloomy. The bank slashed its global growth forecast for 2012 0.75% of a per cent to 3.25%. That is still over a per cent higher than the World Bank [...]

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

The Tuesday Podcast: Who Loaned Money To Greece, Anyway?

2012-01-25T00:31:00Z

Listen to the Podcast

[15 min 4 sec]

Sang Tan/AP

It's the 11th hour for Europe's debt crisis. Again.

Greece still can't pay back all the money it owes. So it's trying to cut a deal with its creditors. (Again.)

We've been wondering for years: Who are the people who loaned money to Greece? Are they suckers? Brilliant investors?

On today's podcast we find someone who loaned Greece money: Hans Humes. He runs a hedge fund called Greylock Capital Management. Turns out, his office is just a few blocks away from ours.

Humes is one of the guys trying to hammer out a deal with Greece. He explains just how complicated the negotiations are — and how, even among people who loaned Greece money, there are huge divisions.

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: The Big Pink's "77" Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify.

Mr Robb's Error

2012-01-17T06:05:00Z

Mr Robb's representation of the growth is debt is easily explained, which makes his alarmist "analysis" all the more contemptible. The reporting of it, unquestioned, it just as extraordinary.

I'll explain it this way.

Think of two countries of similar size in terms of GDP.

In time Period 1, Country One has net debt of $2 billion. Country Two has net debt of $50 billion.

In time Period 2, Country One's net debt rises to $20 billion. Country Two's net debt rises to $150 billion.

The way someone like Mr Robb would mischievously present these numbers is that Country One's net debt has risen by a whopping 900%; Country Two's net debt has only risen by only 200%.

Hence, County One has had a massive blow out in debt compared to Country Two.

Hhhmmm.

You decide which country has the debt problem. Mr Robb can't.

Lifting the super guarantee isn't good for everybody

2012-01-09T03:00:28Z

Of the many policy debates in Federal Parliament in 2011, one which gathered support from both major parties was the proposal to lift the superannuation guarantee employer contribution from 9% to 12%.

Not surprisingly, this was wholeheartedly endorsed by the superannuation industry. However, superannuation contributions impose large burdens on young adults at a time when they can least afford them. With this proposed increase, it is time that the policy be amended to improve the match between retirement saving and costs across the life course.

More superannuation, it is argued, will increase intergenerational equity, relieve fiscal stress on governments and compensate for the myopia suffered by individuals when saving for their future retirement.

Even though the superannuation guarantee is paid by employers, it is generally agreed by analysts that the cost of the employer contribution ultimately falls on wage earners via reductions in wage increases. This means that while superannuation saving addresses one important issue of lifecycle resource transfer (low incomes in retirement), it exacerbates another. Uniform rates of contribution increase the financial stresses faced by families during the household formation stage of life.

The mis-match between superannuation contribution patterns and financial stress across the life course is illustrated in the figure below.

The red line shows the percentage of households where people report being not able to pay utility bills on time over the previous year (people were interviewed across the 2009-10 financial year). These results are grouped by the age of the highest income earner in the household (using the ABS “household reference person” gives very similar results).

This measure of financial stress is highest for those aged under 45, then declines steeply, even past retirement. Measures of financial stress such as this are an imprecise indicator. They might reflect changes in resources relative to needs over the life course, but could also reflect other factors such as improvements in financial management skills, increases in aversion to the risk of utility disconnection, or more modest consumption preferences due to the lower income of one’s own age cohort.

A more direct measure is the “saving rate” shown as a blue line in the figure. This is the excess of disposable income over expenditure (as a percentage of disposable income). This is imprecise because of measurement error in both income and expenditure and also because it omits key components of wealth accumulation such as capital gains.

Nonetheless, it is a useful indicator of how saving capacity varies across the lifecycle. (The saving amount shown here is in addition to that due to existing employer super contributions and home purchase). Those aged under 30 are high savers, but this drops dramatically when people reach their 30s and start taking time off work to care for children, purchase goods for children and purchase housing. This is despite the substantial cash and service transfers that governments make to people with children in their household. Using this saving measure, saving capacity only increases again once people reach their 50s. Even in retirement, it is not as low as in the 30s and 40s.

Now, most people paying attention to superannuation are probably aged above 50. For the average pre-retirement person aged over 50, a larger contribution to super probably makes sense (unless they have some other preferred form of saving). But younger families might start to pay attention when they find a reduced growth in their pay packet. Are the early adult years really the best time to be saving additional money for retirement – particularly when they are already saving via home purchase? How can we rescue the young from superannuation?

Within the current system, it is not practical to simply reduce the contribution rate for the young (or any other demographic group). Since employer contributions are effectively incorporated into wages, this would mean different wage rates for different employees. However, there are a range of secondary mechanisms that could be employed.

One that is often mentioned is to allow people to access superannuation balances for house purchase. This has been criticised as undermining the life course saving objective of superannuation, but can also be seen as a mechanism to redress a key flaw in the superannuation saving model.

However, while this might make sense in the context of our current housing markets, housing is not the best means of saving for retirement. It is hard to liquidate and increases the amount of wealth passing to the next generation rather than being used for consumption in old age (see papers on my website).

If we don’t want to encourage housing investment, there are nonetheless other potential strategies. We could allow access to super for other life course-related expenditures such as childcare fees or to supplement paid parental leave. Finally, one could simply allow super funds to pay out some funds to people under certain ages. In turn, decisions would have to made on whether and how to claw back the tax concessions associated with the initial super contributions.

The plan to increase the super guarantee to 12% now makes the task of addressing these life course implications more important than ever.

This article originally appeared on Club Troppo.

Bruce Bradbury receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DP0878643).

Australians Are Stunningly Rich

2012-01-09T03:28:00Z

Recently released IMF estimates show that Australians are the fifth richest people in the world, behind only those living in Luxembourg, Qatar, Norway and Switzerland (see http://tiny.cc/v6k0g ).

In the last couple of years, Australians have not only overtaken those living in the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada and the US, but have roared past as we become richer and richer and richer.

The per capita GDP data (in US dollar terms) shows just how powerfully strong the terms of trade boom has been in delivering what is probably a once in a century boost to incomes, wealth and living standards.

In US dollar terms, Australia’s per capita GDP is:

6% higher than Denmark;
10% higher than Sweden;
31% higher than Canada;
32% higher than Singapore;
39% higher than the US;
50% higher than Germany;
69% higher than the UK;
75% higher than New Zealand;
101% higher than Spain;
140% higher than Greece; and
1,192% higher than China.

Of course the best comparison of per capita GDP should be on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis and not US dollar terms. This is because the PPP estimates take account of differences in the relative cost of living among other things. The next update from the IMF of GDP per capita on a PPP basis is due to be released in the next month or so, but even on that measure, it is likely that Australia will be comfortably in the top 7 or 8 higher per capita income earners in the world.

We are clearly very well off which makes it curious how dominant the "doing it tough" message "for working families" type rubbish is. Imagine how tough things would be if per capita GDP fell to levels prevailing in Germany? How's about a 50% haircut on Australia's output in US dollar terms? That might well justify some of the "doing it tough" messages going around at the moment. For now, we are rolling in wealth.

Of course, these figures do not take account of income and wealth distribution, and as always, there are about as many people below average are there are above.

That said, there is no doubt it is better to being an average Australian than it is to be an average Canadian, American, French or New Zealander, at least in financial terms.

Killing the Kodak moment ... is the iPhone really to blame?

2012-01-09T04:01:41Z

According to the Wall Street Journal, camera manufacturer Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, following a long struggle to maintain any sort of viable business.

The announcement has prompted some commentators to claim that Kodak’s near-demise has been brought on by:

a failure to innovate, or
a failure to anticipate the shift from analogue to digital cameras, or
a failure to compete with the rise of cameras in mobile phones.

Actually, none of these claims are true. Where Kodak did fail is in not understanding what people take photographs for, and what they do with photos once they have taken them.

Before looking at what people actually take photos for, and how Kodak got it wrong, let’s look at the two reasons others have given for Kodak’s failure: that the camera in phones has replaced the stand-alone camera, and that Kodak failed to innovate.

‘The dedicated camera is dead’

In an article for ReadWriteWeb tech columnist John Paul Titlow claims Kodak is failing because of the dominance of camera phones.

In the article, Titlow uses a graph (see below) from photo sharing site Flickr, showing the growth in popularity of the iPhone camera over several digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras.

Click for a larger image. Flickr

Unfortunately this graph doesn’t tell the whole story.

I downloaded Flickr data and analysed the number of items uploaded to Flickr over the past year for several popular camera and phone manufacturers.

The charts below show that images taken with camera phones only represent approximately 3% of the total. The actual number may be a little higher because Flickr can’t always identify the type of camera that has taken the image, but it’s still a very small percentage of the overall whole.

Origin of Flickr.com photos, by camera manufacturer. David Glance

The other thing to note is that Kodak cameras are only responsible for 6% of images overall and that Canon and Nikon are by far the most dominant players in this market.

(Admittedly, the number of images on Flickr is about 5% of that on Facebook. It would be interesting to repeat this analysis using Facebook data, but there is no reason to believe the results would be substantially different.)

Origin of Flickr.com photos, by camera type. David Glance

‘Kodak failed to innovate’

Kodak’s financial problems aren’t necessarily due to a failure to innovate, or a failure to recognise the shift from print to digital photography. In fact, Kodak has been involved in the rise of digital cameras at virtually every step:

Kodak electrical engineer, Steve Sasson, actually “invented” the digital camera in 1975.
Kodak partnered with Nikon in 1991 to produce a professional-grade digital camera with a whopping 1.3 Megapixels (you can buy 12 Megapixel cameras for under $100 now).
In 1995, Kodak released their first “point-and-shoot” camera.

One of Kodak’s chief assets is its collection of patents, which company executives have been trying to sell. Kodak has also been pursuing other companies – including phone manufacturers Apple and Research in Motion – for infringing their patents on the ability to preview photos on their phones.

The first digital camera, designed in 1975, used cassette tapes to store images. Kodak

Why people take photographs and what they do with them

Where Kodak got it wrong was its perception that people were still taking photographs which they would then print.

But this is increasingly no longer the case.

From dedicated photo print shops to automated kiosks, Kodak persisted with this notion for longer than it should have. A large part of the company’s more recent business strategy has focused on printers and ink. But here, as with their digital cameras, Kodak only holds a small market share – roughly 2.6%.

In the days of film cameras, personal photography was principally about holding on to personal memories, with photos usually ending up in a shoebox.

Photography was once about saving personal memories. deflam

But recent research by anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists suggests personal photography has moved from being mostly a tool for remembering, to one of emphasising communication and our individual identities.

As with most change, researchers have noted this switch most prominently in teenagers and young adults.

This shift has been supported by the changes in underlying technology and the advent of “frictionless” sharing of photos and video via social network platforms. In the context of photography, “frictionless sharing” means minimising the number of steps between taking a photo and sharing it via a social network platform.

But in terms of technology, the real shift came when camera phones (in particular) reached a certain quality.

Many of the cameras found on today’s phones are at least five Megapixels. For people making a decision between using their phone and bringing along a dedicated point-and-click camera, this five Megapixel resolution probably represents the tipping point in favour of the phone.

But as we have seen with the data from Flickr, the move to the camera phone is still gathering momentum and other digital cameras are still popular.

Frictionless photo sharing

The real accelerator for frictionless sharing of photos has been the ability to instantly upload photographs to social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and to blog software such as Posterous and Tumblr. The iPhone, in particular, has popularised specialised photo sharing apps such as Instagram and Hipstamatic.

iPhone apps, such as Hipstamatic, are driving a change in the way we share photos. itspaulkelly

Sharing a photo in this way is more about communication and less about remembering. The photo usually has some commentary (“Miserable in New York today.”) and is “liked” and commented on by friends and others with whom it is shared.

Another important part of photography’s shift from memory tool to communication medium is that the photos are purposely temporary. The sheer volume of photographs taken and uploaded by individuals limits the shelf-life of these photos.

Of course this may change with features such as Facebook’s timeline, which attempts to make it much easier to access photos for the purpose of remembering.

(It’s worth noting that in 2011, approximately 70 billion photographs were uploaded to Facebook, with some estimates putting that figure closer to 100 billion photographs. Either way, Facebook is the largest photo sharing site by a considerable margin.)

It is hard to see a role for Kodak in all of this. Even with a company restructure, they would still be competing with companies such as Nikon and Canon; companies which are much stronger in the hardware and technology markets.

The real value in photography today is the software and platforms used for sharing and distribution. Kodak would need to pull off a miracle to become a major player in this space.

In all likelihood, Kodak’s moment might have passed.

David Glance does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Pigovian taxes save lives

2012-01-08T11:23:00Z

New research via the NBER:

On January 1, 1991, the federal excise tax on beer doubled, and the tax rates on wine and liquor increased as well. These changes are larger than the typical state-level changes that have been used to study the effect of price on alcohol abuse and its consequences. In this paper, we develop a method to estimate some important effects of those large 1991 changes, exploiting the interstate differences in alcohol consumption. We demonstrate that the relative importance of drinking in traffic fatalities is closely tied to per capita alcohol consumption across states. As a result, we expect that the proportional effects of the federal tax increase on traffic fatalities would be positively correlated with per capita consumption. We demonstrate that this is indeed the case, and infer estimates of the price elasticity and lives saved in each state. We repeat this exercise for other injury-fatality rates, and for nine categories of crime. For each outcome, the estimated effect of the tax increase is negatively related to average consumption, and that relationship is highly significant for the overall injury death rate, the violent crime rate, and the property crime rate. A conservative estimate is that the federal tax reduced injury deaths by 4.7%, or almost 7,000, in 1991.

Why Johnny Can't Read Any New Public Domain Books In The US: Because Nothing New Entered The Public Domain

2012-01-03T21:31:49Z

Every year, January 1st is "public domain day" around the globe. It's the day when all works that have had their copyrights expire enter the public domain, since copyright term is based on the year of publication, rather than the exact date. While some parts of the world still have something to celebrate on public domain day -- such as how the works of James Joyce are now in the public domain in the EU, here in the US as we've noted in the past, we're left waiting... for nothing. Because thanks to massive changes to copyright law, as well as copyright term extension, absolutely nothing has or will enter the public domain for many years in the US (minus a specific declaration by the copyright holder... and even then it's not entirely clear that qualifies).

The good folks at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University put together a depressing list each year of what would have gone into the public domain under copyright law if the law prior to 1978 remained in effect. You can check out this year's unfortunate list of works seized from the public in a retroactive one-sided renegotiation of the deal the copyright holders had with the public. These works should be in the public domain, and they're not... and the public got nothing in exchange for having these works taken away from us. Pulling from their writeup, here are just a few of the works that I thought you might find interesting:

Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do About It
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King, the final installment in his Lord of Rings trilogy
Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 8–September 30, 1945, translated by Warner Wells, md
Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, the second book in his Sword of Honour trilogy
C.S. Lewis' The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth volume his The Chronicles of Narnia
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee's play about the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Inherit the Wind
Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity
Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers
Arthur C. Clarke's Earthlight
Elvis Presley's first TV appearance (on Louisiana Hayride, March 5, 1955)
Episodes of "I Love Lucy"
The first issue of William F. Buckley's "National Review."
"The Seven Year Itch," directed by Billy Wilder; starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell
"Lady and the Tramp," Walt Disney Productions' classic animation
Alfred Hitchcock's "To Catch a Thief," starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly
Two of James Dean’s three major motion pictures: "East of Eden," directed by Elia Kazan and co-starring Raymond Massey and Julie Harris; and "Rebel Without a Cause," directed by Nicholas Ray and co-starring Natlie Wood, Sal Mineo, and Jim Backus

They also list out a bunch of songs:

Unchained Melody (Hy Zaret & Alex North), Ain't That a Shame (Antoine "Fats" Domino and Dave Bartholomew), Blue Suede Shoes (Carl Perkins), Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash), The Great Pretender (Buck Ram), Maybellene (Chuck Berry, Russ Fratto, & Alan Freed), and Tutti Frutti (Richard Penniman (aka Little Richard), Dorothy LaBostrie, & Joe Lubin),

As they point out, it's really even more ridiculous than this, because under pre-1978 copyright law, most works didn't even go to the full 56 years of copyright protection. Instead, the vast majority of works gave up their copyright after 28 years. If the rates from the time held up, about 85% of the works created in 1983 would be in the public domain today. Instead, they'll be locked up until most of us are dead. Isn't that wonderful?

The thing is, with the list of works from 1955 above, when they were all created, the maximum term of copyright of 56 years was a perfectly acceptable trade-off for those creators. They got their monopoly, and they created their works. What I can't understand is what the logic is in extending those rights retroactively. Clearly the incentive to create was fine as it was. Why should it change after the work was created?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

What Do We Really Know About Losing Weight?

2012-01-03T22:32:10Z

Tara Parker-Pope had an article in the New York Times Magazine a week or so ago pointing out that we don't know any very good way to lose weight and keep it off if you are very heavy. There are obese people who lose weight and keep it off, but they do so by superhuman attention to their diets and energy output. If they let up for even a short while, the weight piles back on:

During the first years after her weight loss, Bridge tried to test the limits of how much she could eat. She used exercise to justify eating more. The death of her mother in 2009 consumed her attention; she lost focus and slowly regained 30 pounds. She has decided to try to maintain this higher weight of 195, which is still 135 pounds fewer than her heaviest weight.

"It doesn't take a lot of variance from my current maintenance for me to pop on another two or three pounds," she says. "It's been a real struggle to stay at this weight, but it's worth it, it's good for me, it makes me feel better. But my body would put on weight almost instantaneously if I ever let up."

So she never lets up. Since October 2006 she has weighed herself every morning and recorded the result in a weight diary. She even carries a scale with her when she travels. In the past six years, she made only one exception to this routine: a two-week, no-weigh vacation in Hawaii.

She also weighs everything in the kitchen. She knows that lettuce is about 5 calories a cup, while flour is about 400. If she goes out to dinner, she conducts a Web search first to look at the menu and calculate calories to help her decide what to order. She avoids anything with sugar or white flour, which she calls her "gateway drugs" for cravings and overeating. She has also found that drinking copious amounts of water seems to help; she carries a 20-ounce water bottle and fills it five times a day. She writes down everything she eats. At night, she transfers all the information to an electronic record. Adam also keeps track but prefers to keep his record with pencil and paper.

"That transfer process is really important; it's my accountability," she says. "It comes up with the total number of calories I've eaten today and the amount of protein. I do a little bit of self-analysis every night."

Bridge and her husband each sought the help of therapists, and in her sessions, Janice learned that she had a tendency to eat when she was bored or stressed. "We are very much aware of how our culture taught us to use food for all kinds of reasons that aren't related to its nutritive value," Bridge says.

Bridge supports her careful diet with an equally rigorous regimen of physical activity. She exercises from 100 to 120 minutes a day, six or seven days a week, often by riding her bicycle to the gym, where she takes a water-aerobics class. She also works out on an elliptical trainer at home and uses a recumbent bike to "walk" the dog, who loves to run alongside the low, three-wheeled machine. She enjoys gardening as a hobby but allows herself to count it as exercise on only those occasions when she needs to "garden vigorously." Adam is also a committed exerciser, riding his bike at least two hours a day, five days a week.

Janice Bridge has used years of her exercise and diet data to calculate her own personal fuel efficiency. She knows that her body burns about three calories a minute during gardening, about four calories a minute on the recumbent bike and during water aerobics and about five a minute when she zips around town on her regular bike.

"Practically anyone will tell you someone biking is going to burn 11 calories a minute," she says. "That's not my body. I know it because of the statistics I've kept."

Based on metabolism data she collected from the weight-loss clinic and her own calculations, she has discovered that to keep her current weight of 195 pounds, she can eat 2,000 calories a day as long as she burns 500 calories in exercise. She avoids junk food, bread and pasta and many dairy products and tries to make sure nearly a third of her calories come from protein. The Bridges will occasionally share a dessert, or eat an individual portion of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, so they know exactly how many calories they are ingesting. Because she knows errors can creep in, either because a rainy day cuts exercise short or a mismeasured snack portion adds hidden calories, she allows herself only 1,800 daily calories of food. (The average estimate for a similarly active woman of her age and size is about 2,300 calories.)

Just talking to Bridge about the effort required to maintain her weight is exhausting. I find her story inspiring, but it also makes me wonder whether I have what it takes to be thin. I have tried on several occasions (and as recently as a couple weeks ago) to keep a daily diary of my eating and exercise habits, but it's easy to let it slide. I can't quite imagine how I would ever make time to weigh and measure food when some days it's all I can do to get dinner on the table between finishing my work and carting my daughter to dance class or volleyball practice. And while I enjoy exercising for 30- or 40-minute stretches, I also learned from six months of marathon training that devoting one to two hours a day to exercise takes an impossible toll on my family life.

Bridge concedes that having grown children and being retired make it easier to focus on her weight. "I don't know if I could have done this when I had three kids living at home," she says. "We know how unusual we are. It's pretty easy to get angry with the amount of work and dedication it takes to keep this weight off. But the alternative is to not keep the weight off. "

This is not to stay thin, by the way: this woman is 5 foot 5 and weighs 195. This is what she has to do in order to remain merely very noticeably overweight rather than seriously obese. And though this news seems to be surprising lots of people, it shouldn't; we have known for years (actually many years) that people's metabolisms and even psychologies change when you put them on severely restrictive diets; that obese people who diet down to "normal" weight act like starving skinny people; and that the success rate of diets in studies is somewhere comfortably under 5%. (Hard to say exactly how far under, because these studies tend to have high dropout rates, and it's reasonable to believe that the people most likely to drop out are probably the ones having the hardest time with the diet.) The article was a near-perfect rewrite of Gina Kolata's Rethinking Thin, and also of large portions of The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos.

This is not to criticize Parker-Pope--it was a great article! And a sorely needed corrective to the vast amount of "That fatty should put the Cheetos down" sniggering that fat people are subjected to. But it's maddening that so many people found this so surprising. Almost all popular writing about obesity seems to be based on introspection about the writer's experience losing an unwanted 10-30 pounds, augmented by statistics grabbed from other newspaper articles, or the executive summaries of studies they haven't read. There's almost zero awareness that almost no one loses more than 15-30 pounds and keeps it off long term--and that the reason this is so hard is that it requires constant mental and physical effort to maintain that weight loss that is, for most people, incompatible with anything approaching a normal life.

This lack of awareness is by no means confined to the general public, or opinion journalists. It is incredibly prevalent among public health "professionals", such as the folks in Georgia who think that the reason that kids in that state are fat is that we haven't made it sufficiently clear that the rest of us think they're revolting.

However, my colleague has provided a bright spot of commentary. As he so often does, he's asked an interesting and fresh question: is this finding merely a result of the fact that they're studying crash dieting?

But I thought her basic conclusion--that weight loss is essentially impossible for majority of humans--was underserved by her reliance on studies that looked a lot like crash diets. 550 calories a day, much of it coming from shakes sounds insane, as does 30 pounds over eight weeks. It isn't shocking that someone on that diet would gain it all back, and then some. In another case the subjects were on a liquid diet of 800 calories a day.

I'm not a scientist, but I have lost roughly a quarter of myself. I've done it at a glacial pace--almost eight years. So glacial in fact that I wouldn't even call it a "diet.": I've gained some in that time, but never yo-yoed back to the heights of my girth. The pattern has been more like lose lot, gain a some, lose some gain a little, lose a lot etc.

Obviously I wish this had happened faster and smoother. But the upshot of taking the long way is that I've learned a lot about how to negotiate world where, at almost every step, cheap high calorie food is at the ready. You can't get that understanding in a lab and you're unlikely to get if your trying to burn of 3-4 pounds a week. That sounds like masochism.

It's a really interesting question, on which I have a few thoughts.

The first is simply that I don't think that it would be possible to study weight loss at the pace he mentions.

First of all, to really study intake and outtake, you need to have people in the lab, where you can control how much they take in and use up. (Otherwise, you may not be proving that "this diet doesn't work", but rather, that "the 30 people in this study didn't follow the diet"). You can't do that for eight years. It's hard enough to do it for eight months, or for that matter, eight weeks.

Second of all, the kind of alternative diet he offers (gradually cut out more and more unhealthy foods) is virtually impossible to specify. I'm not saying it can't be done by a person. But it's nearly impossible to describe in a way that constitutes a research protocol. You can tell someone to cut out Cheetos and the can of coke they eat every day, but if they make that up by taking an extra serving of rice at dinner, you'll see no effect.

Now, you can control for that by having people do very precise journaling, weighing all their food and writing every single thing down. That will show you if they're making up the lost calories . . . but you're not going to get people to do it consistently for eight years. You might get some people to do it consistently, but most of them would eventually drop out (or provide you with spotty, useless records). In the end, the best that could tell you is that the kind of people who are willing (and have enough time) to spend years obsessively journaling their food can keep weight off.

But beyond that, even if you could study it, I'm skeptical about translating the results into the real world. Realistically, how many people would sign up for a diet that was going to take them eight years to get close to their target weight?

And the final question is whether Ta-Nehisi has actually reset his set point range, or just migrated from the top to the bottom of it. Most people have a range of somewhere between 15-30 pounds (it gets larger as you get taller) that they can stay in pretty easily. At the bottom you're exercising somewhat more control over what you eat than at the top, but it's not really unpleasant; you just have to pass up some of the dessert, cheese, and junk food that you'd like to eat.

This is fundamentally different from what someone who is 5'8 and 100 pounds overweight has to do. They have to exert rigid discipline. And that discipline is not a matter of "eating healthy"; it's fundamentally a matter of eating a lot less than you want--of being pretty hungry, and pretty focused on food, every waking moment*.

If you have a fairly "thin" set point, you can go from the top of your range to the bottom and lose a quarter of your weight (my range is probably slightly higher than that) because the "overweight" portion of your weight at the top of your range is (relatively) small compared to your overall weight. But if you're 100 pounds overweight, and your "normal" weight is 165, the amount of weight you have to lose is much larger relative to your overall weight--and it almost certainly takes you below that set point range.

Karl Smith, who has done some of the best writing on the web about this, explains it thus:

The problem is that the calorie balance interpertation implies a completely false understanding of what is going on. There is an extent to which geekdom can tolerate this level of nonsense and there is a point at which it must be combated.

I will compare to something I know Kevin gets. The calorie balance logic is equivalent to saying.

Government deficits drain savings. Savings are the engine of growth. Therefore, cutting the deficit immediately is our best shot at growth.
In both cases you are taking an accounting identity

Private Savings - Public Borrowing = Net National Investment
Calories-In - Calories-Out = Calories Contained in the Body
And, treating it as if it were a model of the world.

You have to be aware that public borrowing might effect private savings. In particular if public borrowing stimulates the economy it will increase private income which in turn will increase private savings.

You also need to be aware that Calories-In affects energy and hunger levels which not only feeds back to Calories-Out but also to other Calories-In.

I used to post this thing a lot, but since the blog has new readers it might be worth our while to look at how a properly functioning metabolism responds to a rapid increase in Calories-In

The big question we have is why does this stop working in some people? Just to note, there are many, many other feedback loops that are important as well. I point out this one because it so obvious both that it works in the healthy metabolism and that it fails in the unhealthy one.

You are probably aware of the relationship between diabetes and obesity. It is commonly assumed that obesity causes diabetes. This is in part because even some scientists are fixated on the accounting identity. However, there is a reasonable case that diabetes may cause obesity.

That is, the resistance of the muscles to insulin causes the breakdown in the "sugar rush" response (and other loops) which then breaks down the feedback from calories-in to calories-out.

Now, if it is in fact the case that sugary drinks induce insulin resistance this connection may still hold. However, it is almost certain that the simple minded thinking that in general dropping a 150 calorie item from your diet will not feedback on other metabolic components promotes a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on.

I think it's certainly possible that very, very slow dieting will reduce set points. But I also think it's possible that this sort of dieting is just fundamentally different from the kind of dieting that seriously heavy people would have to do.

And that matters, because the seriously healthy people are the ones with health problems. Let me emphasize that: remember last year when you resolved to "get healthy" and lost twenty pounds? There's really very, very little evidence that this did anything at all for your health.

In fact, people with "overweight" BMIs have better mortality rates than people with "normal" or "thin" BMIs. Going from 185 to 165 is not going to add years to your life.

Exercising probably will (but there's no evidence that it makes you thinner), and eating better might (though there's also not really much evidence that this--as separate from deliberately restricting your calories--will make you thinner). But simply losing some weight doesn't have big effects unless you're already really heavy.

It can have big effects if you're really heavy. But those people probably need to lose large amounts of weight to cut their mortality risk, not twenty pounds; going from 360 to 330 is fine in its way, but you'll still have all sorts of elevated risks.

So I think a real danger remains that those of us whose set points range from "thin" or "normal" to "overweight" are simply inappropriately extrapolating our experience to obese people whose needs and challenges are fundamentally different. And unfortunately, I think that's a very hard question to resolve empirically.

* And yes, this applies to low-carb too; you can keep the weight off if you stay on Atkins/Sugarbusters/Paleo, but just as with other sorts of diets, people mostly don't. They do great for 6-18 months, and then they start getting cravings for carbs, and eventually they give in, and the weight comes back . . . and the diet's advocates explain that of course paleo works, but not for lazy slobs who inexplicably go off it. At least from what I've seen, the pattern is really surprisingly un-different from other sorts of diets.

The Australian Editorial - Fiscal fact check fail

2012-01-02T20:39:00Z

Whoops! Today's editorial in The Australian http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/meeting-economic-challenges/story-e6frg71x-1226235125197 was a good read with some constructive suggestions and comments about the economic outlook confronting Australia in 2012.

It is good to see a careful assessment of the risks for Australia of being too heavily dependent on growth in China and the mining boom and the need for further reform to lock in the tremendous gains in Australia over the past 30 odd years. Identifying and responding to the problems in Europe and the US will be key issues for economic policy makers this year. As the editorial says:

"At home, Treasury and the Reserve Bank are worried about the impact of the European crisis on Australia."

The editorial quite correctly notes:

"The economic outlook is one of continued volatility and uncertainty, highlighting the need for Australia to undertake significant reform if we are to maintain growth, jobs and high living standards."

Later it says:

"we should be using our relatively strong position to identify future growth opportunities and address our weaknesses."

Three cheers for The Australian in outlining a very broad requirement for further economic reform. There is no doubt that the Government should continue to roll out meaningful economic reform after the successes delivered in 2011 but also with an eagle eye on offshore economic trends. I certainly will be one person watching the reform agenda unfold.

But then the editorial falls over. It makes this extraordinary claim that:

"Fiscal policy must also be a priority. Rapid fiscal consolidation is necessary given the wasteful spending and loose fiscal policy of recent years, which has fluctuated from being an aid to macroeconomic policy to being its principal driver." (my emphasis)

Huh?

According to the national accounts, GDP grew by 2.5% in the year to the September quarter. Within that, government demand fell 2.0%, driven by a 10.2% fall in public investment which was largely the unwind of the GFC stimulus. Government demand cut GDP by around 0.5 percentage points in that 12 month period. Australia is part way through the most rapid fiscal consolidation ever recorded.

For The Australian to suggest that Australia has "loose fiscal policy" is clearly not supported by the facts. The general call for further policy reform while entirely valid, looses something with emotive comments on "wasteful spending" and its factual error on fiscal policy. These errors do not help the debate.

That is a pity because the rest of the editorial was quite good.

Josh Frydenberg hopelessly wrong on some key budget and economic facts

2011-12-30T23:50:00Z

Oh no – the Liberal Party is showing that the lack of understanding of the budget, the bond market and economics is broadly based, even among the new blood in its ranks. This time it is Josh Frydenberg, the Member for Kooyong who shows he cannot read the budget papers, nor understand economics and the bond market, with his Op Ed article in today’s The Australian.

The link to the article is here:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/coalition-picks-its-path-from-menzies-road-map/story-e6frgd0x-1226233538249 .

From that article, Frydenberg suggests:

“But as a party we will not and must not compromise on those fundamental issues that go to the heart of what the Liberal Party stands for: lower taxes, smaller and more efficient government, freedom in the workplace and an individual's freedom to choose.”

As I have written before, the current facts show:

Total government receipts (tax, dividends, fees and the like) was 21.6% of GDP in 2010-11, the lowest level since 1973-74. Josh – that is lower than for EVERY year of the Howard and Fraser governments.

The tax to GDP ratio fell to 20.0% in 2010-11, the lowest since 1978-79 and is a whopping 4.2% of GDP below the record tax to GDP ratio raked in by the Howard government in 2004-05 and 2005-06. That's a lesser tax take of around $60 billion for one year that was taken from tax payers during the peak period of the Howard government. As mentioned elsewhere, it is easy to register a budget surplus when you tax the living daylights out of the population.

These facts should embarrass Freydenberg who then suggests:

“Menzies said of the Liberals, "we are a tax reduction party", understanding that "real tax reductions would be the best of all incentives to increase effort, earnings and production".”

Funny that when the Howard Government was elected, the tax to GDP ratio was 21.8% (1995-96). At the end of his term, the ratio was 23.7%. When Fraser was elected, the tax to GDP ratio was 20.3% and at the end of his term the ratio was 21.7%.

Freydeberg goes on:

“Tragically, the Rudd-Gillard governments have become addicted to spending, squandering the strong fiscal position bequeathed to them in 2007. In just four years they have taken government spending from 22.9 per cent of gross domestic product to 26.2 per cent. “

That 26.2% is wrong – the MYEFO Table D1 shows that spending to GDP was 26.0% of GDP in 2009-10. Whatever. Freydenberg for some reason then ignores the outcome for 2010-11 spending to GDP ratio was 24.7% and further “forgets” to mention that the government spending will be 23.6% of GDP in 2012-13 - around 1.5% of GDP below the average of the last 30 years. In the 12 Howard Government Budgets, spending to GDP averaged 24.2% of GDP: and only in 3 years out of 12 of the Howard Government was the spending to GDP ratio lower than the Gillard Government is projecting for 2012-13.

Freydenberg then suggests:

“In addition to expanding government debt, increasing taxes and bloating the bureaucracy with more than 20,000 new public-sector employees.”

This is wrong. According to the ABS, between June 2008 and June 2011, the number of Commonwealth public servants rose by 6.0% - from 237,100 to 251,400, a rise of 14,300.

There was some hope that the new blood in the Liberal Party would have some understanding of economics and markets. This dreadful Op Ed article is dashing that hope.

Copyright Tourism: Korean Companies Sue Guy From Australia For Copyright Infringement... In California

2011-12-28T20:06:00Z

In the past we've talked about the horrors of libel tourism -- mostly involving the UK. That's where a plaintiff living outside the UK sues a defendant also outside the UK for defamation... in the UK. The reasoning is that the UK's defamation laws are especially draconian and harsh on defendants. There have been efforts to change that and the US government was supposedly so offended by this practice that it passed the SPEECH Act a year and a half ago to make it clear that Americans wouldn't be subject to such libel tourism rulings.

But is the US now becoming a home to copyright tourism lawsuits just as bad as the UK's libel tourism efforts?

Eric Goldman points us to a bizarre default judgment ruling out of a district court in Northern California involving a bunch of Korean entertainment companies suing a guy who lives in Australia. The Korean companies claim that the guy, Kenny Tran, infringed on their copyrights by distributing their works. As the court describes it:

Defendant uses his websites to disseminate to internet users content, in the form of both music and accompanying artwork, that has been unlawfully copied.... To listen to or download an infringing copy of a work, the user clicks on a link next to an image of the copyrighted album cover.... The user is then directed to a third-party website where the user may download the album that was uploaded onto the third-party website by Plaintiff.... Users are able to download unauthorized copies of the DFSB Plaintiffs' copyrighted material without Plaintiffs’ permission.

If the allegations are true, then it appears that Tran has, in fact, violated DFSB's copyrights. But the big issue that doesn't make any sense at all: why is this in a US court? Again, the plaintiffs are in South Korea. The defendant is in Australia. The music in question is Korean pop music. There's simply no reason that this is in a US court, and it seems like the court should have just tossed it out on jurisdiction issues. Instead, it goes forward and issues a default judgment against Tran, who, one would imagine, had no reason to travel from Australia to the US to deal with this.

So how does the court defend California as a reasonable jurisdiction? It seems to come down to the fact that Tran uses Facebook, Twitter and YouTube... and all three are California companies.

Moreover, it appears as though Defendant has specifically used several California companies to further his scheme of perpetrating illegal downloads. Tran uses California companies Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to promote the websites he operates, and to allow users access to the pirated copies of the copyrighted music and artwork. Additionally, it appears as though Defendant uses a privacy service located in California to shield his identity.... In light of the nature of the websites run by Defendant, it appears that Defendant’s activities are expressly aimed at California.

That seems like a very broad definition of targeting California, and it means that users of a ton of popular online services that can be used to break the law are now subject to California jurisdiction, no matter where they are in the world. That seems extremely questionable, and open to widespread abuse.

Separately, the court again goes a little wacky in arguing that Tran knew that his activities would "cause harm in California" because he's using California companies:

DFSB and the other plaintiffs, however, are not residents of California. Nonetheless, Defendant likely knew that his activities would cause harm in California. Tran relied on several California companies to further his scheme of providing copyrighted music to a world-wide audience of users. Additionally, given the evidence provided by Plaintiffs of the reach of Defendant’s activities, Tran likely knew that harm – in the form of distribution and download of copyright protected material – would be suffered in the forum state.

I don't see how this makes any sense at all. If the "harm" was done to the copyright holders, what does it matter where Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are located. Tran wasn't targeting "harm" at any of those companies. The court also later claims that it's "not clear" if the plaintiffs could bring similar suits in South Korea or Australia. Why? Again, this simply makes no sense.

It seems like with a ruling like this, plenty of others could start dragging pretty much anyone who may infringe on their works to court in California. This seems ripe for serious "copyright tourism" cases. Separately, it raises questions about the claims from SOPA supporters that copyright holders can't go after "foreign" infringers. Apparently a district court in Northern California disagrees...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

White House Kills Dollar Coin Program

2011-12-13T18:09:00Z

by Robert Benincasa and David Kestenbaum

December 14, 2011

Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approx. 9:00 a.m. ET

Transcript

John W. Poole/NPR

Dollar coins gathering dust in the Fed's Baltimore brach.

The federal government will stop minting unwanted $1 coins, the White House said Tuesday. The move will save an estimated $50 million a year.

Earlier this year, we reported on the mountain of $1 coins sitting unused in government vaults. The pile-up — an estimated 1.4 billion coins — was caused by a 2005 law that ordered the minting of coins honoring each U.S. president.

We calculated that the unwanted coins had cost taxpayers some $300 million dollars to make. There were so many coins piling up that the Federal Reserve was redesigning a vault in Texas to help hold them all.

We got to see a vault in Baltimore. It was the size of a soccer field, filled with bags of dollar coins.

You can see the presidents' faces on the coins. Andrew Jackson, John Adams, James Buchanan. The mint is only about half way through the presidents.

And the pile of coins has been growing. The mint makes enough of each new coin to meet initial demand. But about 40% of those coins get returned to the Fed, where they sit unused.

"As will shock you all, the call for Chester A. Arthur coins is not there," Vice President Biden joked on Tuesday, as he announced the new policy. "I don't mean to comment on his presidency, but it just is not very high."

The mint will continue to make a small number of the presidential coins, for collectors.

The Treasury department estimates it will take about 10 years for the economy to absorb the 1.4 billion $1 coins now in storage.

Whatdoyaknow! Funding markets still open to Aussie banks...

2011-12-13T21:27:00Z

In stirring up trouble about funding costs, some have claimed that the wholesale funding markets were closed to Aussie bank. Au contraire. From the best banking publication in Australia, Banking Day (you should subscribe if you don't--it is dirt cheap):

"National Australia Bank has this week broken an eight-week lull in the sale of unsecured term debt by banks in the domestic market, with the sale of A$800 million of three-year floating rate notes. NAB yesterday priced the bonds, which mature in December 2014, at 130 basis points over the swap rate. This is around 28 basis points wider than the price quoted on Monday by Yieldbroker for the bank's corresponding floating-rate debt maturing on September 14, and around the same yield as the bank's five-year floating rate debt. The last sale of term debt in the domestic debt market was in the third week of October, when ANZ sold $1 billion in four-year floating rate notes at 135 basis points over swap. They are still quoted at this spread on Yieldbroker. Otherwise, major banks have largely restricted their sale of term debt to the structured market; with two banks (ANZ and Westpac) selling covered bond issues on terms that at the time deterred planned follow-up sales by NAB and Commonwealth Bank. NABa, however, has this week also privately placed the equivalent of A$200 million in covered bonds in a 10-year deal. The newspaper did not reporting pricing."

How Kyle Sandilands was humbled by Twitter

2011-11-23T11:21:09Z

Kyle nearly got away with it.

Almost exactly 16 hours passed between his nasty attack on journalist Alison Stephenson and the world beyond his listeners noticing.

And the way that this eventually became a news story was slightly more random than you may realise. Here’s how it happened.

On Monday night, like a rapidly diminishing number of viewers, I was watching Kyle & Jackie O’s Night With The Stars on Seven. I was one of many on Twitter who had a view. My tweet:

“If you’re not watching Kyle & Jackie O’s Night With The Stars, tune in for a little piece of history – the worst Monday night TV of all time”

It was vacuous, unimaginative television, with some very lame guests. It helped demonstrate just how good the production team on the duo’s radio show is. I turned over to Housos.

Naturally I was intrigued to see what the ratings would be like the next day. I made a mental note to examine the 15 minute breakdowns the next morning, to view the audience behaviour as the show progressed.

Meanwhile, over at News Limited, Alison Stephenson was tracking the sentiment on Twitter. While it’s a crude tool, as Twitter only reflects the view of the tweeting demographic, not heartland Australia, it can be a useful first focus group.

So Stephenson was among the first to post.

Ratings don’t come in until 8.30am, so at 6am Tuesday, there weren’t yet many stories for Sandilands – broadcasting from LA – to look at. So he began the radio show by telling viewers:

“Some fat slag on news.com.au has already branded it a disaster. You can tell by reading the article that she just hates us and has always hated us.

“What a fat bitter thing you are. You’re deputy editor of an online thing. You’ve got a nothing job anyway. You’re a piece of shit.

“This low thing, Alison Stephenson, deputy editor of news.com.au online. You’re supposed to be impartial, you little troll.

“You’re a bullshit artist, girl. You should be fired from your job. Your hair’s very 90s. And your blouse. You haven’t got that much titty to be having that low cut a blouse. Watch your mouth or I’ll hunt you down.”

Then they got on with the show.

And that was nearly that. It would appear that nobody at News Limited caught it. Indeed, I don’t think it made a ripple anywhere in the media.

Among those listening though was Mark Colvin, presenter of ABC Radio’s PM programme. That became relevant later.

Meanwhile, I don’t have a subscription to the OzTam ratings service, so rely on the kindness of strangers for detailed numbers, so I was asking for favours. Initially, it looked like I wasn’t going to get the data, and I wrote off the story.

Again, Kyle nearly got away with it.

But at 3pm (usually far too late in the day for a ratings story) it arrived – and the minute-by-minute graph of what happened to the post-X Factor audience was compelling. So at 3.30pm I posted the story, complete with the graph.

It was much retweeted. So much so that individual reaction on Twitter around it merged somewhat as far as I was concerned.

Among those who responded was Colvin. I missed his tweets at the time.

Again, Kyle nearly got away with it.

But about five hours later, I decided to catch up on my tweets before grabbing an early night.

What I’d missed from Colvin – who tweets as @Colvinius – earlier in the day (and these were public tweets so I’m not busting a confidential source):

@mumbrella Listen to 1st few minutes of Kyle on the radio this morning: he calls a journalist a fat slag and says he’ll “hunt her down”.

@mumbrella Plus remarks about her “small titties”. All for the crime of writing a bad review and quoting some unfavourable twitter comments

He then provided a link to the 2Day FM podcast. You’ve gotta love a journo as a source. You don’t have to do too much work.

They’ve since removed the audio, but you can hear it here:

It was stunning stuff, as you now know. Not quite as horrific as the rape detector scandal, but certainly unpleasant, personal and threatening.

And it seemed to pretty much contradict the very first paragraph of the new Commercial Radio Code of Conduct which was only issued in September. Check out clauses (a) and (e):

Proscribed Matter
1.1 A licensee must not broadcast a program which in all of the circumstances:
(a) is likely to incite, encourage or present for its own sake violence or brutality;
(b) simulates news or events in such a way as to mislead or alarm listeners;
(c) presents as desirable: (i) the misuse of alcoholic liquor; or (ii) the use of illegal drugs, narcotics or tobacco.
(d) depicts suicide favourably or presents suicide as a means of achieving a desired result; or
(e) is likely to incite hatred against, or serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of, any person or group of persons because of age, ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual preferences, religion, transgender status or disability.

Or clause 1.3 (a): “Program content must not offend generally accepted standards of decency (for example, through the use of unjustified language)”

Or a further guideline: “Avoid the use of overt sexual references in relation to a woman‟s physical characteristics which have no relevance to the issue under discussion.”

And: “Do not broadcast material which condones or incites violence against women.”

So I posted the story.

Despite getting late, it rocketed on Twitter. Look what it did to our page views. On a typical weekday, we’d be pleased with 30,000. Last night we had double that.

Source: Google Analytics

As you may know, from there, it took off. The comment threads were angry. Particularly once Penbo went to war the next morning.

It was only then going to be a matter of time before show sponsor Holden pulled its ads.

Chopper Read – yes, Chopper Read – became a focus on Twitter. (Anyone know if this is a real or satirical profile?)

And sure enough…

But the point here is that this is yet another example of how Twitter altered the path of this debacle.

If Twitter hadn’t allowed the public instant feedback to the show, Stephenson never would have written that story.

And if Twitter doesn’t offer such easy information sharing then Colvin – who I don’t think I’ve met – wouldn’t have come across my ratings story. And he wouldn’t have had a means of sharing what he knew.

And of course, without social media, the blow torch would not have been applied as quickly and aggresively as it was onto the sponsors.

As Twitter demonstrates, even Kyle Sandilands’ luck can run out.

Tim Burrowes

Some Great Big New Facts - On Tax

2011-11-14T20:48:00Z

A few ill informed commentators enjoy rattling off the changes to the tax coverage in the four years since Labor won the 2007 election. They try to create an impression that the current government "is addicted to tax". It is also a line the Opposition have used when trying to attack the government over the flood levy, the price on carbon, the mining tax among other things.

Unfortunately for them, the claim of "tax addition" is not supported by any facts.

Mark Textor this morning tweeted a list of recent tax changes with the introductory line "Tax Addiction Tally". He mentioned:

"Alcopops Tax (2008), Increased luxury car Tax (2008), Working Overseas Tax (2009), Increased Cigarette Tax (2010) Mining Tax (2010), Up'ed Ethanol Tax (2010), Up'ed LPG Tax ( 2010), Flood levy Tax ( 2011) Carbon Tax (2011) NEXT!"

The "Tally" from Mr Textor includes some temporary tax changes, some that didn't become law and others which were designed to influence behaviour that raised trivial amounts of money. Fair enough if he and others wish to pursue that line, but it opens the door for some analysis of the recent history of taxation in Australia.

So how intrusive has the tax system been in Australia over recent decades?

Let's start with the Hawke/Keating years which for annual budget purposes, I will take to be 1983-84 to 1995-96. The average tax to GDP ratio over those 13 years was 21.6% and only in one of those 13 years did the ratio exceed 23% (it hit 23.1% in 1986-87). When the Howard Coalition Government took office from Keating in March 1996, the tax to GDP ratio was 21.7% - a touch above the average for Labor over 13 years.

For the next 11 years under the Howard Government, the tax to GDP ratio rose, never once falling below 22% of GDP. It averaged, over those 11 years, 23.3% of GDP, some 1.7 percentage points above the average of the Hawke/Keating years. In today's dollars, that is about $25 billion a year or a total of about $275 billion over the course of the Howard government when compared to the tax take under Hawke/Keating.

Since Labor took office in November 2007, in the three completed years of budgeting, the tax to GDP ratio has averaged a comparatively tiny 20.7% - a stark number highlighting the revenue loss from the GFC and the income tax cuts that were delivered in its first three years of office. If we take the forward estimates out to 2012-13 (which may actually overstate the tax take), the average rises to 21.4%. This number is 1.9% of GDP below the average of the Howard government and is 2.7% of GDP below the highest taxing years in Australia's history which Howard delivered in 2004-05 and again in 2005-06.

If you think that 1% of GDP is small, it isn't. Even 1% of GDP in 2012-13 dollar terms is a whopping $15 billion. The 1.9% of GDP lower tax take at the moment is around $30 billion per year or about $130 billion over the 4 years of the forward estimates when compared to the peak tax take under the Howard Government.

Or think of it this way, if the current government were to raise the tax take to the peak level under the Howard government, it wound be the equivalent of $4,000 a year, every year, for each household.

The facts are the facts. They might be uncomfortable or inconvenient, but this is a low taxing government despite that little tally that excitable characters like Mark Textor trot out from time to time.

Sources: http://www.budget.gov.au/2011-12/content/bp1/html/bp1_bst10-04.htm

http://www.budget.gov.au/2010-11/content/fbo/download/06_AppendixB.pdf

Note: The MYEFO, due soon, will provide an update of these numbers. Stay tuned.

Long term trends in global CO2 emissions

2011-11-14T09:21:25Z

This excellent EU reports tells us – up to 2010 – where the world is in terms of carbon emission trajectories. Over 2009 to 2010 there was a rapid switch back to trend in global carbon emissions. World emissions fell by 1% in 2009 but rose by more than 5% in 2010, an unprecedented increase over the past 2 decades but comparable to what happened when the world economy recovered in 1976 from the effects of the first oil crisis. The emissions growth in 2010 was dominated by India and China whose emissions grew by 9 and 10% respectively. The world is returning to high rates of overall CO2 emissions after a brief respite offered by the financial crisis.

The industrialised countries who ratified the Kyoto Protocol cut their emissions in 201o to a level 7.5% below year 1990 levels. The picture however is being blurred by the emerging countries such as India and China which increased their fraction of total emissions over this period from 1/3 to 1/2. In 2010 33 billion tons of CO2 were poured into the atmosphere, the highest level in world history. Industrialised countries will, overall, hit their Kyoto targets though there is considerable variation in national responses.

Converging per capita emissions levels are becoming very interesting. China now emits 6.8t/capita CO2 compared to the EU-27′s 8.1t and the US’s 16.9t. China is catching up to the low carbon developing countries. The enormous sleeper whose emissions have the potential to expand enormously is India whose per capita emissions at 1.7t/capita – a tiny fraction of developed country levels. Both India and China have relatively high levels of CO2 emissions per dollar of output - they have high emissions intensities – indicating huge potential for ‘no regrets’ energy conservation policies of the type currently comprising much of their CO2 mitigation response.

An excellent report and well worth reading.