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Seven million account holding customers of a major UK Bank have less than £100 in savings. According to retail banking specialists, it’s the same for customers at the other banks as well. The same people also have no home insurance and no life insurance. That’s not a narrow margin when things go wrong, it’s no margin at all. When we followed up with other professionals and ex-professionals, we found the same situation exists for millions without pensions. A little more digging revealed the appalling levels of personal debt that many people carry around with them, particularly the under 35s.

The reason we at LSS are shocked is that the situation is so unstable. Poor hungry people with little to lose will always be vulnerable to the promises of revolutionaries and extremists. Poor hungry people have little money to throw around, and that will quickly deepen recessions and slow recoveries, as the most simple textbooks will show. Their children are poor learners, with long term implications for the future of the economy, and society.

We don’t know the causes. It could be hyper-consumerism and addiction to debt. It may be low wages; we trembled for free market economics when we learned that ” the reason that teaching assistants had no pensions was that their meagre wages would not let them afford them.” It may be as long term as the decline of the Protestant Work Ethic, which has led to the end of saving and deferred gratification, leading to a narcissistic cult of everything today. We don’t know; and we doubt that you do either, gentle reader.

The consequences of a deeply unequal society were well outlined in The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The UK Government has said it wants to level up, a desire that we fervently support. But from what we learned today, we think they have a mighty, mighty mountain to climb.

Wilkinson R, Pickett K The Spirit Level Allen Lane 2009

#poverty #inequality #savings #pensions #levellingup #rishisunak #ukgovernment

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It is not often that we at LSS find ourselves sunk in despair, in existential terror, but such is our state at the news of a terrible disease which has begun to sweep the world. It has the potential to destroy the very bases of our civilisation, to wreak untold havoc with our way of life, to tear at the very bounds of existence itself. Read now, if you dare * UK Gin supply under threat from Sarah Young in the Independent.

The basic facts of impending disaster are these. Gin, as every schoolchild knows, is flavoured using the berries of the Juniper tree. Otherwise it would just be insipid old hooch, a bit like vodka. Now the poor old juniper trees of Scotland are threatened by a deadly new fungal disease called phytophthora austrocedri: and get this, pop pickers-Scotland produces no less than 70% of the gin for the four home nations! We are in trouble. Deep deep trouble.

How did it get there, and who brought it in? Aliens? The Illuminati? Trotskyists? We don’t know. Clearly the first step must be for the SAS and security services to hunt down the culpable (we know the latter like a good cocktail, so they should be sufficiently motivated). Secondly, that Men of Science drop all else they are doing, and work on a cure for this terrible pestilence. Thirdly, to form Citizens’ Action Groups in local public houses, to hold politicians’ feet to the fire until the crisis is solved, once and forever. There can be no room for traitors and backsliders.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, go forward together, so that, if the British Hospitality Industry should choose to last for a thousand years, men will still say “This was our finest night out for a long time.”

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/uk-gin-supply-under-threat-from-deadly-plant-disease/ar-BB19ni9j?ocid=

#gin #juniper #phytophthora austrocedri, #tonic #disaster #illuminati

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We’ve all known them, and worked for them at some time in our lives. The manager or team leader who just isn’t up to the job. There are two types. Type A is the one who used to be a good worker- engineer, salesman, scientist or driver- who just can’t make the transition to the new skills set which a manager requires. Type B may be more familiar- the blustering narcissist, adept at working the higher ups, but whose relations with underlings and peers are already below floor level. Either way, the results for your company or organisation are disastrous. Toxic culture. Poor morale. Dreadful sales and productivity. Above all, that most precious business commodity of all is destroyed-trust.

It can take epic quantities of time and money to get rid of such an individual, by which time the damage to your balance sheet and reputation my be terminal. Better by far to spot them and weed them out before they are appointed. But how?

One man with some answers is Tomas Chamorro-Premusic, Professor of Psychology at such august institutions as University College and Columbia, among other things. We’ve attached a couple of links from Tom: but he writes clearly and well, and you should enjoy his pieces. Suffice this extract:

Overconfidence is the natural result of privilege. If the future of leadership were more meritocratic, and managers selected leaders on the basis of their talent and potential rather than Machiavellian self-promotion, reckless risk taking, or narcissistic delusions, we would not just end up with more women leaders, but also with better leaders. Many competent men are also overlooked for leadership roles because they don’t match our flawed leadership archetypes — meaning, they are perceived as “not masculine enough,” or fail to display the very attributes that make leaders less effective.

We at LSS still believe in meritocracy, for our sins. But you have to be very, very careful about the merit bit. Over to you, Tom.

https://hbr.org/2020/03/how-to-spot-an-incompetent-leader

https://www.businessinsider.com/my-boss-is-incompetent-signs-personality-science-expert-2019-3?r=US&IR=T

#overpromotion #incompetence #management #hr #narcissism #peterprinciple

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

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There never was a more noble cause than the Emancipation of Women. Never was an untruth so blatant that women were morally and intellectually inferior to men. Never was there a better case for Reason to oppose itself to ignorance and hate, which appeared in their usual guises of “common sense” and “the way we’ve always done it”.

The trouble with humanity is that good causes can be hijacked by others, very often to make money. Such was the case with Torches of Freedom*. It was the way that the tobacco industry and early geniuses of marketing like Edward Bernays jumped on the bandwagon of feminism in order to sell cigarettes. And how they succeeded! There had been quite strong social pressure against women smoking for decades. But by pushing their Torches of Freedom campaign, and many other marketing ploys linking smoking to freedom for the gals, they soon had the entire second half of the population hooked, and well on the way to the cancer ward.

The success of advertising, marketing and PR has educated vast groups of people to believe that they can choose their facts in the same way they choose their brand of toothpaste or car. In place of critical thinking, the ideals are unquestioning brand loyalty, personal identity and unconscious choice. These are not the skills that created the Enlightenment or underwrote the Industrial Revolution. Some people call for teaching critical thinking in schools. There will be others who will fight that tooth and nail, as their jobs and power depend on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

#edwardbernays #smoking #criticalthinking #smoking #pr #marketing #emancipationofwomen #feminism

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Waiting for us after Covid 19 has blown out is a series of far more terrible pandemics. More terrible because there will be several of them. Because their symptoms will be more unpleasant. And because transmission will be harder to stop. Welcome to the war against antibiotic resistant bacteria. Update: we are losing. Regular readers will recall our several posts on rays of light in the gloom (LSS passim). But so far, it ain’t enough.

We need something extra, a game changer, that will give us a completely new way of tackling resistant bacteria, to eke out the precious supply of antibiotics. Writing in the Guardian,* Clement Giradot seems to have it. They are called Bacteriophages-little viruses that eat bacteria. They can be targeted, lab-grown and produced to high standards. Of course they are not the total answer, we will still need antibiotic drugs. But the link gives a real example of clearly-written popular science, and if you have any interest in the world outside your self, then read it for its own sake

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/21/phages-the-tiny-viruses-that-could-help-beat-superbugs

if you want to help the world’s first charity designed to tackle the antibiotics crisis, click on this link

Homepage with ASK

#bacteriophages #antibioticresistance #antibioticresearchuk #billandmelindagatesfoundation

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The most important thing to know when you have a problem is to know that someone can do something about it. It’s called hope. As the Coalition of the Greedy and the Ignorant smash up the planet, it’s not just a question of stopping them. it’s also a question of offering practical, targeted solutions.

Once such is the Foundation for Climate Restoration*, whose admirable initiatives are well covered by Santi Carneri in El Pais today.* Their essential aim is to restore the atmosphere to preindustrial levels of CO2 by 2050. That’s about 300 ppm, give or take the odd ppm. Nice aim, guys-but how are you going to make that one stick? Well, their aim is to bring in all stakeholders-business, governments, ONGs, religious groups and ordinary citizens, to make the elimination of CO2 commercially viable. That’s the key bit for us: give enough people a selfish motive and the common good will result. The ghost Adam Smith will be cheering from the sidelines. The organisation’s website and Santi’s piece will give you some good reading; once again, we want to get out of the way. What impresses us is the array of stakeholders that they are bringing in. We particularly like the Canadian firm Carbon Engineering, whose link is posted below.

here’s two for the foundation

Resources

Home Page

This one is El Pais; translators at the ready! https://elpais.com/elpais/2020/09/17/planeta_futuro/1600328554_467174.html

And this SHOULD get you to carbon engineering

Home

#globalwarming #climatechange #extremeweather #carbonengineering #carboncapture

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Children of the nineteen-sixties will recall the famous Waddington’s board Game Risk. It was simple enough. The world was divided into 42 territories via five continents. There were six players. The aim of each player was to launch aggressive warfare and acquire sufficient armies to crush all other players and achieve world domination. (On the up side, we learned the names of faraway places like Irkutsk and Kamchatka).

Well our world of the twenties is not so different, except that now the weapons can be financial as well as military. The two principal players are the USA and China. The question that worries US policymakers is: what sort of financial cards is China holding?

As every schoolchild knows, China has been buying up US debt big time. There current holdings are estimated at $1trillion-about 5% of US debt. What would happen if they suddenly liquidated.if things got nasty over Taiwan, for example? In a fascinating article for The National Interest, Scott B MacDonald discusses the effects on markets, countries and economies. That means every person reading this.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/politics/china-holds-lot-americas-debt%E2%80%94could-beijing-weaponize-it-169222

#USChina #debtweapon #reservecurrency

we thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for this piece

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Ask anyone about the Australian Dream, and most people will come up with the same sort of picture: a world of modern suburbs with huge gardens and herds of SUVs. Where everyone is hardworking and prosperous, enjoying endless summers of barbecues and sport. Where the beer and chardonnay are ever-flowing and the only problem is the odd huntsman on the wall.

There’s a lot to like about it: democratic, unpretentious -with ordinary people at last coming into their own. But, unless Australians are very careful, it may be impossible to sustain. Emily Cadman in Bloomberg Green* describes how uncontrolled development in the age of global warming, may be making the great city of Sydney uninhabitable. Already temperatures in the west of the city are reaching 50 degrees, and you can find yourself hit with eighty on the tarmac in a car park. Roads melt, violence soars-and some people die from the heat. That’s before the bush fires.

We at LSS have always admired a lot about Australia. The essential egalitarianism, the blokeish no nonsense spirit, toughness of their sports teams. It is a dream worth preserving- but sometimes even dreams must be adapted.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-09-15/sydney-s-new-suburbs-get-so-hot-that-people-could-die-there

#climatechange #globalwarming #sydney

we thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for the lead to this story

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“Is there Life on Mars?” sang David Bowie in the nineteen seventies. Try fitting the word “Venus” into that song at all necessary points. Because astronomers have now announced that the discovery of the gas phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus may be evidence of life on that planet. We include two articles from El Pais for your links. You may want to use a translator. But for once we can translate the entire content of both articles for you in a single word. CAUTION.

We have seen so many false dawns in the search for extra-terrestrial life. In the late nineteenth century Percival Lowell, then using the best telescope in the world, thought he had discovered a whole civilisation on Mars. There were the Viking results of 1976, which after initial excitement faded into “not proven”. Remember the Martian fossils twenty years later?

We at LSS once had the privilege of working alongside some of the best forensic scientists of their day. (we emphasise alongside, not as!) And the problem they faced was the same as these space scientists. You get a data point. It is real. Obviously it has implications; and once you think about these you are speculating by definition; you have moved out ahead of the data. How far can you go safely? The answer that the forensic scientists gave was very simple; don’t go very far; always apply the rules of logic; if possible, do more tests.

We at LSS have a sneaking hope that the results do prove the existence of life on Venus. But until more is understood about the chemistry of phosphine, particularly on hot, high pressure worlds like Venus, we think it is best to reserve judgement.

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-09-14/hallados-posibles-indicios-de-vida-en-venus.html

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-09-15/mas-dudas-que-microbios-flotando-en-las-nubes-de-venus.html

#phosphine #venus #astrobiology #life

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It isn’t often wen get a ray of sunshine in times as gloomy as these, but we couldn’t stop ourselves from congratulating Google on reducing their corporate emissions to zero. (tell them to look at the link below-Ed.) Funny how that company has so crept up in our lives and language! “What was the total exports of industrial resin molds from New Brunswick 1997-2011? Oh, I’ll Google it!” “How many times did Royal Engineers defeat Woolwich Arsenal in the Cup Final? Google it!” It’s a verb now meaning to search on the internet, and deservedly so. Even its competitors are just pale imitations, like Prosecco compared to Moet et Chandon. And if you remember Ask Jeeves, then you must be an Oasis fan.

According to the article from the BBC*, Apple and Microsoft are now hurrying to following suit. Haters of capitalism might not like it, but really big companies can show the way. Unlike certain governments, they are not in hock to various special interests. How long now before other organisations and corporations of high ethical standards follow suit? How about Saudi Aramco? The Southern Baptist Convention? News Corp? We await with pleasure. Meantime, we are off to google some tea bags and milk, as we fancy a cup of tea.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54141899

#carbonneutral #globalwarming #google #bbcnews #microsoft #apple