The Braindump Blog

Seem I missed that 2 years ago McVities officially confirmed that the side of a chocolate digestive that has the chocolate on is in fact the bottom of the biscuit, not the top.

(So did 84% of respondents to a recent DeltaPoll survey.)

A study from a few years ago looked at some results from Alaska’s “Permanent Fund Dividend” - a policy that’s akin to a universal basic income scheme. It concluded that one of the side-effects of providing (mostly) unconditional money to its citizenry was a reduction in childhood obesity.

…we find that an additional one thousand dollars in PFD payments decreases the probability of an Alaskan child being obese by as much as 4.5 percentage points.

Behold a new entry into the cesspit that is much online marketing: ads that load podcast episodes in the background so as to increase the download and potentially ad impression count, even whilst the user likely has no interest whatsoever. Bad for everyone except the middleman.

This post by Emily Riederer is a great summary of four potential approaches to trying to infer causality from data where a formal experiment wasn’t run.

She covers the concepts behind

• stratification
• propensity score weighting
• regression discontinuity
• difference in differences analysis

in a short and very readable article, with business-focussed examples.

In amongst the economic chaos, voters appear to think that the Labour Party is more trustworthy than the Conservative Party in terms of…well, everything they asked.

Except Brexit, where the larger mass of folk apparently don’t trust either party to handle that well.

Mortgage payments look to be one of the next crises the UK is going to have to stare into the existential void of, or do something about.

Not content with folk being unable to afford food to eat or energy to heat, it seems like housing may be the next to go. Even for those people who are rich or lucky enough to be mortgaged home owners - in many places it’s been nearly impossible for first time buyers to get onto the housing ladder in the first place.

As the British economy appears to destroy itself in reaction to the Conservative’s recent bewildering and reckless mini-budget, the Bank of England has felt compelled to raise interest rates. This has many consequences, but of note here is the fact that many mortgages are directly linked to the BoE interest rate. Those that aren’t are likely influenced by it, at least at the time of taking out the loan.

The Bank of England’s web page shows how the interest rate has changed over the past decade.

So it’s been very low, under than 1% for most of the decade, but has already shot up to more than double that figure recently. But that’s not where it’s likely to stop. The markets are apparently pricing in an expected rate of 6% for next year.

This certainly isn’t historically unprecedented - the rate was last 6% back in 1999, and it was more than double that a decade before. But people have obviously been taking out mortgages - and companies have been offering them - based on the situation in contemporary times rather than the state of the world 20 years ago. Even if a consumer did proactively try and integrate future interest rate considerations into their mortgage decision they wouldn’t have been saved; just a few months ago the projected interest rate for next year was just a quarter of what it seems like it may turn out to be.

There are about 2.2 million people on variable rate mortgages, who are likely to be affected in the short term. About 3 times as many people currently hold fixed rate mortgages so are “safe” in the short term, but as soon as they come to the end of their fixed rate - usually 2 or 5 years after they took the mortgage out - they will end up in the same disaster-laden boat.

The consequential differences in the monthly payments homeowners will be required to make are not small! Unfortunately a rise of 1 percentage point in the bank rate doesn’t mean your payments get 1% larger. For mortgages that follow the Bank of England rate, the interest rate relates to that of your debt. I’m sure many of us have been schooled about the miracle of compound interest when it comes to savings. Unfortunately the same applies to debt.

Various articles have given some example calculations. A tweet from economist Samuel Tombs calculated that the average household looking to refinance a 2 year fix next year would need to find £627 extra a month.

If mortgage rates rise to 6%—as implied by markets’ current expectations for Bank Rate—the average household refinancing a 2yr fixed rate mortgage in the first half of 2023 will see *monthly* repayments jump to £1,490, from £863. Many simply won’t be able to afford this (1/2) pic.twitter.com/hkoZCcSfjJ

— Samuel Tombs (@samueltombs) September 26, 2022

Others examples quoted by Yahoo Finance include someone with a £140k mortgage that went from 2.25% to 6% would need to pay an additional £270 a month.

You can choose your own example using one of the many mortgage calculators, such as the one from MoneySavingExpert.

With that for example you can see that you’d taken out £150k over 25 years at say 1.5%, that’s a monthly payment of £600. The same borrowing at next year’s expected interest rate of 6% would cost you £967 a month.

In the mean time, the state of affairs is in such disarray that 985 mortgage products were withdrawn from sale overnight, with some banks and building societies entirely stopping offering mortgages to new customers.

Am excited that the Labour party finally have a plan that I both know what is, and at least on the surface, thoroughly support.

….the Labour leader says he will double the amount of onshore wind, triple solar and more than quadruple offshore wind power, “re-industrialising” the country to create a zero carbon, self-sufficient electricity system, by the end of this decade.

As well as the much needed environmental impact, the hope is that it’ll also create a whole lot of jobs, and make energy bills permanently lower, as well as make the UK less dependent on Putin et al.

It’s ambitious, perhaps overly so in some people’s opinion - but if we don’t even try then we’ll definitely not get there.

Watched Everything Everywhere All At Once 📽.

A truly wild ride, following a bored woman struggling to pay taxes getting dragged through her lives in various multiverses - including one where everyone has sausage fingers - in an effort to save multiple universes from destruction. Surely a potential cult classic.

Haven’t thoroughly dug into the Conservative’s latest mini-budget yet but I think a chart from the Resolution Foundation gives some insight as to its nature.

Given the most immediate problem to solve is along the lines of poorer people not having enough money to heat their homes or eat, this seems to be the kind of outcome only a cartoon supervillain would think was a goer.

Jim Pickard confirmed that the removal of the 45p income tax rate gives away an average of £10,000 to the top 629,000 earners. James Ball notes that if there’s that much spare money on offer it could instead have been used to give every single household with an income of less than £20k an extra £1000 each.

Luckily most of the public realise this, according to YouGov, with 63% of respondents realising the wealthy would benefit more (with most of the rest saying they aren’t sure either way).

Finished reading: Turning the Tide on Plastic by Lucy Siegle 📚.

A very readable book that highlights the astronomical amount of dangerous plastic waste that gets into the environment. Many practical tips to help reduce your personal footprint, with a UK focus.

🌱 For the first year ever, our apple tree has produced fruit that’s both plentiful and palatable.

TIL: Bubblewrap was originally designed to be used as a textured wallpaper.

Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes invented it in 1957, but it didn’t work out so well as house decor. 4 years and 400 ideas later they convinced IBM to use it for shipping computers. The rest is history.

I’m one of the literally 99% of subscribers who never used Netflix’s mobile games library 🎮, assuming they’d be pretty uninteresting. But looks like there’s some gems in there - I’ve wanted to play Into the Breach for a while, and Before Your Eyes sounds pretty interesting too.

A new study estimates that there are 20 quadrillion ants on our planet. That’s 20,000,000,000,000,000 for anyone unfamiliar with quadrillions. Or roughly 2.5 million ants per living human.

By weight they outweigh all wild birds and mammals, and are about 20% of human biomass.

Under the Trump administration, the US instantiated policies aimed to reduce the number of refugee and asylum seekers settling in their country between 2017 and 2020.

It seems like the policies were fairly “successful”, with a decrease in annual US refugee arrivals by 86% between 2016 and 2020, alongside a drop in successful applications for asylum of around 68% between 2017 and 2019. I don’t know enough about the subject to know how much of this was down to the policies themselves, but the numbers certainly went in the direction the leadership wanted.

However, contrary to many lay-people’s intuitions, there’s a reasonable consensus amongst economists that, in their role as “economic actors”, immigrants are on average net positive for the receiving country’s economy.

All are consumers, most are (or become) workers, and many are (or become) investors. All incur fiscal costs by using public services directly or indirectly, and all generate fiscal revenue either directly or indirectly.

A recently published paper by Michael Clemens examines the specific effect of the afore-mentioned decrease in asylum and refugee admissions along these lines. It concludes that the the reduction in admissions now costs the US economy more than $9.1 billion per year, and the government itself has lost out more than $2 billion. These costs will keep accruing as time goes on because the population that would have generated this extra economic activity is simply not present.

His model suggests that

…relative to 2019 levels, a 10 percent reduction in refugee resettlement to the United States likely causes a loss to the American economy of more than $1.4 billion, and a loss to public coffers (federal, state, and local) of more than $310 million, cumulatively over the subsequent five years.

Turning to asylum seekers: A 10 percent reduction in affirmative and defensive asylum seekers likely causes a loss to the American economy of more than $8.9 billion, and a loss to public coffers of more than $1.5 billion, cumulatively over the subsequent five years.

Whilst I certainly don’t think the primary driver of asylum policy should be economic - a basic moral concern for other people should surely be paramount - the fact that imposing barriers to this form of migration imposes serious and potentially permanent economic costs on one’s own country seems like something that should be present in the consciousness of the public and the decision makers.

Finished reading: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss 📚.

I’d probably never have selected this one myself, it being over 600 pages long and me having only medium levels of interest for many fantasy worlds. But it came highly recommended and I’m grateful for that. I enjoyed the systems and structures of its world and the story was engrossing such that it it didn’t feel like 600 pages! One caveat though: the end of the trilogy hasn’t been written yet, so that’s always a risk!

Earlier this month Disney released a trailer for their upcoming film “The Little Mermaid”.

Of course it caused a certain amount of uproar on some of the less savoury parts of the internet (such as Youtube) based on the claim that Disney somehow ruined it by being “too woke”. As noted in a recent edition of The Present Age’s newsletter, given the lack of dialogue or really anything other than swimming in the sea action, this basically means that people don’t like the fact that a Black actress, Halle Bailey, was cast in the role of Ariel.

This isn’t surprising, not least because the same rants and raves happened upon the announcement of the casting 3 years ago, and the world doesn’t seem to have improved much in that respect since then. I guess the people in question just forgot they’d already made that particular angry attempt to cancel Disney.

Perhaps one of the more glaring confirmations of what is going on here was when a Twitter user shared the results of “using AI” to convert a still from the trailer from featuring the original Halle Bailey to a fake white person, commenting that it was possible to “fix” the entire movie like than in 24 hours. It is apparently, to quote the poster in question, “over for wokecels.”

Trying to abstract the topic away from what is hard to read as anything other than simple racism, I think Adam Serwer, in his Atlantic article “Fear of a Black Hobbit” is right in saying:

The demand to keep politics out of art is too often a demand for art to conform to conservative politics.

To what extent does truly apolitical art exist? I don’t mean “can you make a film that isn’t about politics?” - of course you can. But it’s hard for me to imagine many films that aren’t touched by society and politics one way or another.

If what is really meant is “I want films that resemble the ones that used to be made in my society 30 years ago” then those films will naturally have been influenced the society and politics at the time. Nothing is born into a cultural vacuum. Even if one can find a story that can’t be interpreted “politically” then there’s still the considerations of who created the art, under what circumstances, why they chose that particular story, what their intent was with it and why they, as opposed to someone else, were the one to tell it.

If one wants a specific example of this then we can look at the various ways that Jesus has been portrayed over time. All sorts of skin colours have been used. Many detailed and vigorous debates have been had as to which is the ‘correct’ one. And this is for an actual person for whom the consensus is that they likely did exist as a historical figure - so there is an actual true answer to know in theory.

On which note, the backlash to the The Little Mermaid’s casting is a particularly wild and confusing phenomenon if taken at the surface level. For one, I’m sorry if this traumatises anyone, but mermaids are mythical beings. We’re not misrepresenting some fact of nature. How we choose to portray these folkloric beings is up to us.

Secondly, the colour of Ariel’s skin is totally irrelevant to the story. It’s more about whether she has a fish tail or not.

Where skin colour is a pivotal aspect to the story of course it often makes sense to preserve that in whichever way the story requires. Likewise if you’re trying to recreate an actual historical event as accurately as possible. Switching the races of the actors in BlackkKlansman would be pretty nonsensical given its topic and basis in real life. The story of a fictional creature living in a fictional world where their salient experience is dependent on whether they have a fish tail or human legs does not have this limiting factor.

In reality, even a writer who wants to tell stories about race has many degrees of freedom. Science fiction for example contains many stories about social prejudice and discrimination paralleling racism but set in an entirely different looking and behaving world populated with distant aliens. Experimenting with other identities can work similarly - Naomi Alderman’s famous book “The Power” explores a future where women become a physical threat to men, as opposed to the current world where the opposite is usually true.

Next up, well, Black mermaids are nothing new even within the canon of Disney-specific Little Mermaid productions. Disney has had them for three decades. You’ve somewhat missed the boat on umm…“proving” they don’t exist.

Introducing Gabriella, from 1992’s Disney’s Little Mermaid TV series:

Unlike most Disney mermaids, Gabriella was actually based on a real person, albeit not one with a tail. Her design was inspired by 2 year-old Gabriella Bommino who unfortunately died of leukaemia so young, but was already a Little Mermaid superfan.

I don’t if this choice caused any consternation in 1992 to be honest. I hope not. But Twitter and YouTube weren’t a thing back then so perhaps it was more containable if it existed at all.

Moving on: is there really a danger of ruining the purity (?) of the Little Mermaid by “introducing politics”? As noted above, so many - perhaps all - stories are already touched or contextualised by politics and society. But it seems to me that the Little Mermaid is particularly easy to interpret using political and social metaphors. Many people have done so, years before last week’s trailer came out.

Whilst some may now find aspects of Disney’s original 1989 film interpretation of The Little Mermaid problematic, the Smithsonian Magazine wrote in some detail about the political subversion embedded within it at the time.

The last thing Americans would expect from Disney was a critique of patriarchy, but sure enough, Ashman’s The Little Mermaid is a gutsy film about gender and identity—a far cry from the staid Disney catalog.

Lenika Cruz writing in the Atlantic saw it as a “stepping stone” for Disney from a set of animations with few female leads (and those that did feature were often asleep for most of the film - think Snow White or Sleeping Beauty) to the more rounded, well-developed female cartoon stars of recent years.

More fundamentally, there has been many an interpretation of the original story, for example as an allegory for growing up, as a commentary on identity or a metaphor for gender relations. After all, poor repressed Ariel believes the only way she can be happy is to marry a rich man, so feels compelled to change her appearance, giving up her treasured voice in an effort to do so. I haven’t got access to the essay, but Wikipedia describes Susan White’s interpretation of the story as the “difficult liminal passage of the girl into the order of speech and social symbolism (power, politics, and agency) which is symbolically understood as masculine”.

This is even more salient when we remember that the Disney movie in many ways does not actually reflect the original story. If Disney is to be held at fault for changing the original then perhaps it’d make a little more sense to be cross at them for entirely changing the ending and, to some people, the whole point of the story 33 years ago. For the “anti-wokers”, surely casting a person that doesn’t look exactly like your mental image of Ariel is nothing compared making up a whole new soppy ending, perhaps fearing that the snowflake audience can’t cope with the original.

For people, like me as of 2 days ago, who don’t know the original story, brace yourself - it’s not pretty.

First we discover that, unlike the story’s humans, mermaids are mere creatures; they don’t have souls. Human souls go to heaven for eternity when they die. Mermaids simply turn into foam and cease to exist. As well as questing for the love of the handsome prince, what Ariel is battling for is to complete herself with a soul.

The witch still gives Ariel the magic turn-tail-into-legs potion in exchange for her voice. But in the original, drinking it is physically agonising. Walking on her resulting legs feels like walking on sharp knives from that point on.

The conditionality is also more severe. If Ariel can’t make the prince love her then the day after he marries someone else, Ariel will die. In that case she will also never have become a full human, so will die soulless, vanishing from existence entirely.

Unfortunately the prince marries someone else.

But all is not lost; Ariel’s sisters negotiate with the witch, swapping their lovely hair for a knife they give to Ariel. Ariel must use this knife to murder the prince. Only when his blood drips on her feet the witch will let her return to her original mermaid life. Grim.

Despite the personal consequences, she can’t bring herself to do this so commits suicide, throwing herself into the sea and dissolving into foam as expected. But at the last minute she’s kind of saved: rather than vanishing into nothingness forever she’s been turned into a spirit - a “daughter of the air”. There’s still a glimmer of hope for her to get into heaven, but for now she’s stuck in purgatory for 300 years, and must try and prove herself worthy by doing good deeds for mankind.

Per YouGov, the public’s perception of whether King Charles III will be a good king or not has increased since the sad death of his mother.

Whether it’s the way he’s handled recent events or down to more basic human psychology, the change is pretty dramatic.

Don’t want to accuse the NYT of spreading fake news, but this definitely didn’t happen!

No, you're not reading that wrong. The average number of guesses for today's Wordle is 6.4.
Just 41% of players solved it after 6 turns. Normally it’s around 99%.

See how you did: https://t.co/ynpDkiEPc7 pic.twitter.com/d6ddPJLMv2

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 16, 2022

Wordle gives you 6 chances to guess the word then it’s game over.

Today’s is easier.

Wordle 455 3/6

⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I’ve been something of an anti-monarchist every since I can remember, primarily based on the general idea that holding the privilege and powers associated with the office, both explicit and implicit should not be something that someone gets based on who their parents happened to be and whether their ancestors won a battle hundreds of years ago. There are also convincing arguments that the institution is expensive, unaccountable, and so on.

To me, the UK has really just been lucky that for so long we’ve had a queen, that at least as far as I know (which is not all that far), in recent times has been a committed, principled and dutiful holder of the post, not being unduly meddlesome or inflammatory. Quite the opposite, you’ll not find too many hot takes on the Royal Family’s Twitter account. It feels sad that she has left us, irrespective of whether or not the institution itself is valid. But it’s a bit of a risky proposition to say that all future holders of the crown will be of a similar type.

The usual “pragmatic” argument I have heard about in favour of the British monarchy is, sure, they cost money, but they also generate a lot via for instance tourism. I haven’t looked into it in any detail, but given most tourists don’t get to meet the queen or king themselves, I wonder how we go about separating the specific impact of the power structure of the monarchy and the people involved from the more available parts of the associated tourism; the fancy buildings, soldiers dressed up in unusual costumes, museums full of jewelry, the history and mythology and so on, all of which could exist without a formal monarch.

A recent edition of Ian Leslie’s newsletter provided a take I’d not really considered before. It seems inspired in part from an essay by Clement Atlee - yes, that same socialist Prime Minister, beloved by some of the British left, no flag-waving conservative here! - who wrote that “I have never been a republican even in theory, and certainly not in practice.”

Leslie (and Atlee) note that, as irrational and hierarchical as the system of a constitutional monarchy may be, several countries that are widely acknowledged to have high levels of both wellbeing and relative equality have one - think of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. That’s not to say this style of monarchy causes these good outcomes, but it clearly doesn’t prevent them, and perhaps may even be positively associated with them.

Why do they appear to work well? Leslie argues that the unavoidable irrationality of bestowing power and finery upon someone predicated solely on who their parents are may be part of the attraction - “they speak to the heart as well as the head.”

Humans are not purely rational beings, and perhaps the “sentimental loyalty” humans are prone to is better to be absorbed by a monarch than left to be picked up by the leader of a faction, with Atlee citing Hitler, Mussolini and de Gaulle as contenders. To the extent that a constitutional monarchy isn’t the obvious centre of day-to-day power in practice, perhaps it’s safer and more uniting to have irrational sentimentality directed that way.

The fact that the queen didn’t have to fight for votes in an election (or, to at least some extent popularity in the media) gave her the ability to not become part of any major argument. There are plenty of people who aren’t a fan of the monarchy in principle, but nonetheless the queen did seem to be able to unite swathes of people in a way that it’s almost inconceivable a leader of a more “democratic” institution such as a political party could. This may be a particular property of some kings and queens more than others - after all support for Queen Elizabeth was substantially higher than the support for Britain remaining a monarchy at the same time - but it almost by definition cannot be a property of anyone involved in a close-run battle for electoral success.

The US of course famously has no monarch, having torn themselves away from the British one in 1776, but to many external observers seems to be riven by a particularly polarised politics. Certain presidential candidates appear to attract high amounts of almost conditionless blind-seeming loyalty from their supporters, as sentimental and irrational as anything one might feel for a monarch.

Leslie also considers that the constitutional monarchy gives us a way to express positive sentiment for our fellow country-people. Not that we don’t understand that they live an incredibly privileged and unusual live, and sometimes we may quite legitimately feel jealous or resentful of that. But at the end of the day we can acknowledge their common humanity. As a human family they proxy for all the country’s families. The widespread doting over whoever the latest royal child is - who is after all just one of the hundreds of children born each day in the UK - being a reminder that we could and should feel love all those other children too.

I see the queue of people waiting their turn to see Queen Elizabeth’s coffin - now known across the internet as The Queue - now has its own Wikipedia page. Although perhaps not for long; the discussion as to whether it should be deleted for not being notable enough for its own page is ongoing.

By reading the debate, I learned that by deliberately limiting its length to 5 miles the queue controllers are preventing it from reaching the length of the queue for the grave of the current world record holder for the largest funeral gathering. This was the funeral of Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai in India, whose funeral was apparently attended by 15 million people, with a queue of 6 miles.

Earlier today the Queen Elizabeth queue maxed out its allocated length, with wait times expected to be at least 14 hours. The Queue was thus temporarily closed to new entrants. Cue the queue for The Queue.

For people that don’t mind spoilers, a live stream of the destination of the queue is available from the BBC. Although I find the coverage a little creepy because the camera often focuses in on individual mourners rather than the coffin.

I hope that they have been made aware that their expression of sorrow is being transmitted to the world at large. For me, that would surely take something away from what I’d expect to be a solemn, personal and perhaps emotional moment.

In a particularly dour sounding move, AirBnB has introduced “anti-party tools”.

This seems to be a statistical model that uses factors like the nature of the place being booked, your past reviews, recency of signup, distance and duration of the trip and weekday to predict whether you’re likely to be making a booking with the intent of having a party. If the computer says yes then the booking is denied.

Finished reading: How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS by David France 📚.

A book about a global pandemic that appears to have been dramatically mismanaged at first with some appearances by Dr Fauci seems all too contemporary. But this one is actually about the HIV/AIDS pandemic, primarily in the US.

There was of course a staggering death count - an estimated 40 million lives lost so far - with all the associated heart-breaking pain and misery, physical and mental, for those who caught the disease and those who loved them.

But of course what was particularly insidious in this case was that the large majority of those afflicted with the deadly infection at the start of the pandemic were gay men. And this was a population that the extraordinarily prejudiced mainstream opinion at the time was all too happy to disparage, disregard, ignore or blame. The world just seem didn’t care.

A large part of the book surrounds how in the end activist groups, often largely composed of people very ill with AIDS themselves, simply had to keep fighting for years - sometimes to the extent of basically infiltrating government or medical research organisations - until the government, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, media and indeed the rest of society couldn’t ignore the devastation any more.

In case you haven’t had enough of awful viruses yet in 2022, it seems that polio is back in the US, at least in New York.

Polio has no known cure. Whilst most infected people don’t develop noticable symptoms, it can cause outcomes as harmful as paralysis in some patients, a fraction of which may die due to paralysis of their breathing muscles. It was once known as infantile paralysis, due to children’s heightened vulnerability to the disease.

Only one human case had been detected as of four days ago, but it’s been seen in the city’s wastewater and become enough of an issue that the mayor declared a state of emergency. The CDC has confirmed that the US should now be considered a country with circulating poliovirus again, after 43 years of polio-free status.

One driving factor is likely the fact that polio vaccination rates are really not very high in some places any more, as shown in this map from the City of New York’s website. Nearly half of Williamsburg’s young children haven’t been fully vaccinated.

Over here in the UK we’re hardly immune - polio has been detected in our sewage too, although we don’t seem to have found any reported transmission within the community. It’s also been spotted in many countries within Africa this year.

A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that between 19-29% of the decline in US murder rates in the 1990s may have been due to the impact of mobile phones on the illegal drug trade.

The theory is that accessible mobile phones allowed the black market trade to be conducted and coordinated privately by phone. Customers could be met at discreet locations rather than trade needing to be plied directly on the street in fixed locations. This reduced street-level turf battles between gangs who funded their activities via drug sales in ways that frequently involved violence, as well as potentially “democratising” the market to allow other types of sellers in.