I’ve thought this for yonks:

Few mainstream therapists would contemplate trying to persuade a gay man or lesbian to “grow up, get real, and stop being gay.” But most insist that long-term sexual monogamy is “normal”.

This doesn’t mean I’m throwing the switch to polygamy or wife swapping any time soon, but it’s always struck me how inconsistently we throw round arguments in the area of sexuality. Anyway, the quote above comes from this article which is well worth a read. HT  Three quarks.

I went to see this movie owing to a misunderstanding. I heard that the director had directed Love Serenade and having enjoyed that, and hearing that this movie was good, and wanting to see a movie, I went along.

The premise is, well, dull.  A woman and her uncle settle into a barely inhabited island to run a lighthouse. There is one other family on the island with a few kids, and then there are a few other people dotted around on the island for reasons that are not clear.

Miranda Otto is the woman and Barry Otto is her uncle (I think he’s her father in real life).  Things go badly with the other family because the wife is a pushy, unpleasant relentlessly unreceptive person who isn’t nice to Miranda. Then Miranda has a pathetic affair with the husband. This ends badly.

Virtually nothing of interest happens, though someone dies. No real connection is made with anyone except Miranda who plays a pathetic, well intentioned but insecure character.  We left the cinema after nearly two hours with Miranda going to the dunny in a gale with the walls of the outhouse having blown away. Not sure why we needed to be shown this, not as they say on Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with going to the dunny in a naked outhouse in a gale.

If I were to look for a psychological explanation for why it has been quite well reviewed, I would say that it is perfectly well acted and executed, and there’s a nasty young girl who Miranda meets who is a top notch little actor. Perhaps reviewers flatter themselves that it’s a very ‘quirky’ and ‘real’ film.  So is the trip to the dunny, but trust me, nothing happens.

This movie is very very dull.  Very very very dull.

Oh and the misunderstanding.  The movie I enjoyed was not Love Serenade. It was Hotel de Love which was a lot of fun.

subito constitit ante eltum tegumentum ferreum corporis tam occupatus fuerat in effugiendo e biblioghecca ut non animadvertisset quo iret. fortisan quod tenedbrae erant, haudquaquam agnovit ubi esset sciebat tegumentum ferreum corporis esse prope culina, sed debebat eesse quinque tabulatis altior illis.

Where does this paragraph come from? (And warning, I may have mistranscribed something above. I’m not being paid to work here so you’ll have to cope.)

As usual the prize is a Mercedes Sports of the Troppo editorial board’s choosing (I’ll be proposing to the board that you can have the one Ken’s driving). In addition, the winner will be flown first class to London to receive his Mercedes sports in an awards ceremony from the UK’s latest  Tony Blair clone, smooth new PM David Cameron.

Well I can complain about the media till I’m blue in the face, they’re after ratings, entertainment and so on.  Anyway, I said to one journalist that it was ‘crazy’ that public servants who I knew read Troppo didn’t comment, not because I don’t understand that they don’t want to get embroiled in controversy – that is generally speaking fair enough, but because they can stop way short of any of that and still participate.  Anyway, my guess is that the journo in question led with the word ‘crazy’ because it was a good word to lead with, and the subbie did the rest with this headline. ”

Public servant blog mentality ‘crazy’: Gruen (Continued)

One of the big mistakes responsible for the outbreak of WWI was that existing Western powers actively tried to contain the influence of emerging powers. England and France tried to hold on to all their colonies and keep Germany out of the colonial game. Conversely, Austria and Germany were wary about Russia’s growth and housed opinions that advocated war as a means of halting the growing threat. The notion of aggressively holding on to the current division of the spoils was a large factor in the outbreak of WWI. It seems a valid question to ask whether we are making the same mistake with China and India now, or whether ‘we’ have apparently learned our lesson.

Thinking about the openness of markets, the West has learned its lesson well. Export growth of China and India is hardly contained by new trade barriers at all, even surviving the recent financial crisis. Comparing this to the collapse of trade relations during the great Depression of the 1930s, one has to see this as a victory of reason. Slightly worrying is that this support for continued relatively ‘free’ international trade had to be carried by elites (governments and economists) rather than by whole populations. Lessons might have been learned, but apparently not by whole countries.

Thinking about access to resources, the question is whether the West is allowing China a growing share of overseas spheres of influence in order to secure its supply of raw materials, i.e. is China allowed to encroach upon the traditional overseas dependent territories? Here again, it has to be said that the West is not making great efforts to keep the Chinese from gaining footholds in the regions of great natural resources. The explicit Chinese program of investment in natural resource sectors of other countries has not been opposed, and the buying up of mineral deposits in Africa and Latin America of the Chinese is still proceeding relatively unopposed (for a discussion of China’s investment in Africa and Latin America see here). It is the case that the recent introduction of the resource tax effectively means we Australians have cheated the Chinese out of some of their expected profits from investing in Australian mining, but in the scheme of things this is small potatoes.

Thinking about ego-rents, it is also clear that the West is allowing both China and India their ‘place in the sun’. The Olympics were in Beijing; skilled Chinese and Indian migrants are welcomed in Australia and the US; China has a permanent veto at the UN security council; Taiwan and Tibet are not recognised as separate countries by most Western countries; thinking about the future, Taiwan will clearly be abandoned as an ally to appease the Chinese and no-one will seriously interfere in Tibet; Western governments are not talking up the threat of Chinese investments in their army; etc.

On balance, you would have to say that the West seems to be applying the main lessons of WWI when it comes to China and India. It recognises that China is the next world superpower and is letting it happen without too much fuss.

You’ve probably noticed some slowness in the past 2 hours. That’s me, your loving Ozblogistan admin / tyrant, trying to debug a plugin. Apparently asking for debugging information is too much for PHP and MySQL to bear, so they threw an unedifying tantrum which choked the site.

It’s pretty obvious that if science involves standing on the shoulders of giants (and the odd pygmy) then exclusive rights to ideas can slow down innovation. Still it’s quite hard to demonstrate this. Some econometric studies are persuasive that it does. But there are presumably cases where patents do at least generate incentives which are instrumental in getting innovation funded. Pharmaceuticals is probably the best example, though patents may be far from the optimal arrangement even there. But the burgeoning of new areas like software and the extension of patents in other areas – the extension of patents to 20 years under TRIPs and patent extensions in pharmaceuticals – has been thoroughly craven and stupid public policy. Sad, but true.

And here’s some hard evidence of the damage gene patenting does.

Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation: Evidence from the Human Genome by Heidi L. Williams – #16213 (AG HC PR)

Abstract:

This paper provides empirical evidence on how intellectual property (IP) on a given technology affects subsequent innovation. To shed light on this question, I analyze the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, and estimate the impact of Celera’s gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development outcomes. Celera’s IP applied to genes sequenced first by Celera, and was removed when the public effort re-sequenced those genes. I test whether genes that ever had Celera’s IP differ in subsequent innovation, as of 2009, from genes sequenced by the public effort over the same time period, a comparison group that appears balanced on ex ante gene-level observables. A complementary panel analysis traces the effects of removal of Celera’s IP on within-gene flow measures of subsequent innovation. Both analyses suggest Celera’s IP led to reductions in subsequent scientific research and product development outcomes on the order of 30 percent. Celera’s short-term IP thus appears to have had persistent negative effects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.

Vietnam is the site of a rapidly emerging and evolving capitalism, something we may as well date to the introduction of Doi Moi (fn1) in the mid 80s.. Given my own interests, and continuing exposure to discussions about Adam Smith’s ideas on the marketplace and sympathy, it’s natural that my visit provoked some substantial thoughts on my part. [Warning - This post is quite optimistic. Don't think I was viewing things through rose tinted glasses (I certainly wasn't), this is just a focus on the positive]

Despite my optimism, the marketplace remains disheartening for some

Commerical life is absolutely everywhere. It throngs the street and intermingles with private homes in a way that I don’ t think  has been seen in English speaking society since the demise of the old style public house of Pepys day, when they were merely people selling beer in their own home. The costs of entry for many industries, particularly those that are encountered in everyday life such as retail or services are also far lower than here due, both for reasons of regulation (including licensing) and an apparent lack of demand for genuine premises/uniforms and other peripheral aspects to what is being sold. Jane Jacobs would most likely approve.

As a result you’re vastly more likely to be dealing with a owner operator or a very small business than in Australia. This is interesting because it results in far greater prevalence of market behavior.  this means that you are interacting in the market with another person who is also operating in the market. This is largely not the case in Australia. Here you are more likely dealing with an employee. This means you are operating in a market, but interacting with a person who is operating in a firm, or corporation, which is then operating in the market. The social norms and incentives they face in the firm are different from those that are faced in the marketplace. The firm is influenced by the marketplace it is in, but the prevalence of market influence on social and economic behavior is lessened. (Continued)