Alcopops and Food Engineering

I have a friend who works at a company that chemically manipulates the taste, texture etc of food products.

Her company was in the process of creating a new version of a well-known alcopop containing vodka that would increase its highest-alcohol version from alcohol content of around 7% to 10%. The 7% version was a triumph in flavour engineering. Apparently my friend’s company laboured over the precise formula of food acids, alcohol, sugar and the like to make it readily palatable without much of an alcoholic flavour. It is still available although the alcohol content has been slightly lowered.

When it came to the crunch amid the media hysteria over binge drinking and the new taxes on alcopop, the distiller decided to abandon plans for the 10% version. From personal experience the 7% version is like drinking lemonade and before you know it you’re drunk. The fact that it contains carbonated water also helps to open the valve between the stomach and small intestine (small colon), allowing for rapid intoxication without stomach bloating associated with, say, beer. One step behind injecting pure alcohol.

Before my friend told me about the company scrapping the project for the 10% version I knew that it would be lethal and result in adverse publicity for the company and I suspect such concerns were involved in the abandonment.

As a footnote I’ll mention that a pub in Newtown has been selling the drink with a 70% hike on its full sale price - not a 70% increase in tax - resulting in it selling the product for $28 per four-pack compared to $18 at other outlets.

Cyclical Phenomena and Means/Medians/Modes

You can’t take an arbitrarily selected period in a cycle and then average out the position where the mean or median lies. I’m reading a (poorly written and argued, littered with nonsensical sentences but somewhat informative) book called Blinded By Starlight: The Pineal Gland and Western Astronomia by Frank McGillion in which he writes that a study found that the “mean” day of delivery for babies was the first or second day after the full moon.

The lunar cycle is a natural continuous sine wave so it is logically impossible to pin down the average day on which something happens. Humans impose on the cycle periods - usually beginning at new moon as appears to have happened in this study. Arbitrarily deciding the point of the beginning of the cycle will give a distortion in which the mean will usually lie somewhere near the middle of the period. So the mean birthday humans have would be around the first of July because we have arbitrarily fixed this as the midpoint of the period in the annual cycle. But there cannot be such a thing as a mean birthday.

It is possible to have a mode in an arbitrarily selected period in a cycle.

Earth’s Orbit; Mathematical/OCD Conscious Design of the Universe?

The Earth’s orbit around the sun is elliptical. This means that its distance from the sun varies, meaning that the whole Earth - not just one hemisphere - gets hotter twice yearly at the same time. Then there is the tilted axis of the Earth causing each hemisphere to be more exposed to the sun and therefore hotter at diametrically alternating points in the year. The first of these effects doesn’t seem to talked about. I need someone to explain this to me! I don’t want to trawl through astronomy books.

The only two explanations I can think of is that the decrease in distance from the sun is too small to influence the Earth’s temperature, or that the Earth orbits so that the equinoxes or solstices occur at exactly the points at which the Earth is closest to the sun.

I love how the Earth doesn’t have years that are perfectly divisible by a whole number of days. It’s like one of many pieces of evidence against conscious design of the Universe. Or against “Intelligent Design“. I also love all the pieces of evidence that strongly suggest the Universe was created by an entity with a deep love of mathematics and a bad case of OCD. It’s as if humans have been put in a puzzle with deliberate contradictions that can never be resolved. Perhaps resolution isn’t important, but the way humans go about debating the contradictions is instead. Process, not purpose

Steve Fielding; Kevin Rudd Possible Double Dissolution Election

The Australian Senate is hilariously numbered to force the Government to secure all non-Coalition votes to get Opposition-opposed legislation enacted. So far with pieces of important legislation the Greens and Nick Xenophon have been savvy, principled and mature in negotiating with the Government. Steve Fielding has been a mess. The man shrieks and gesticulates wildly in Senate speeches, betraying his sense of inadequacy in the face of giant responsibility. He was savaged for capitulating into support for the Government’s stimulus package without extracting significant concessions as the other cross-benchers did. This criticism seems to have motivated him to try to extract big concessions from the Government to pass other disputed legislation. I applaud Fielding’s desire to eliminate alcohol advertising in sport. But he has to be realistic in his demands. He is not a mature negotiator as the other cross-benchers have proved to be.

The Labor Government won a landslide election in 2007 on the back of years of activism by the union movement against WorkChoices. The Senate is now opposing the dismantlement of WorkChoices with Fair Work over a few points of dispute with Xenophon and Fielding. The ALP is leading the Coalition 56-44 in the latest Newspoll. Still landslide territory. Fielding won a Senate seat with 2% of the vote in Victoria in 2004, defeating the Greens’ candidate David Risstrom who won 9% of the vote as a result of undemocratic and non-transparent preference deals with the major parties as are available in the election system for the Australian Senate. Family First won 3% of the Victorian Senate vote in the 2007 election, failing to win a seat. Fielding will, in all probability, be flushed from the Parliament in the next election. If Kevin Rudd called a double dissolution election now he would probably win control of both houses. I think this course of action is seriously being considered by Rudd.

Compulsory Superannuation and its Interaction with the Stock Market and Property Prices

It’s really interesting and informative that the current global economic crisis is resulting in a reluctant collision between socialism and capitalism. I’ve already commented on the US government nationalising privately-owned finance entities. It’s ironic and hilarious to watch car companies grovel to the US congress. Save us from our own capitalism! The “consumer” (what a revoltingly derogatory term for a “human”) has become more the “taxpayer” now that it suits those in power.

Paul Keating - who I respect greatly on some levels - was the architect of much of Australia’s degeneration into an individualistic, greed-infested, socially “recalcitrant” (if I can use that word) nation. His were the culpable free-market reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s, not John Howard’s and Peter Costello‘s economic reforms which don’t really extend beyond the GST (how visionary!) and the abortive attempts at destroying the unions.

One initiative of Keating’s was to force workers to funnel part of their income into superannuation funds. The rate is currently 9% of income. The tax rate on such diverted income is much lower than that of income tax rates, affording a taxpayer-funded boost to the assets of people whose income allows them to divert extra income into superannuation. Howard/Costello further raided government coffers to introduce a co-contribution scheme in which the taxpayer transfers cash into the hands of those who can afford to divert income above the mandated amount.

The superannuation funds have been mostly invested in the stock market and property. This extraordinary interaction of socialism (mandated income contributions) and capitalism (the recipient stock market and property markets) over-inflates the value of the stock market and property markets at the expense of workers. Exacerbates the bubbles. One trillion dollars - the value of one year of Australia’s GDP - is in superannuation funds. Despite, or partly because of, this distortion in the free market, the markets are plummeting, exposing workers to massive losses in savings. Australians have the most money invested in managed funds in the world per capita. Now that the world recession has hit, ordinary Australians are finding their socialised income frittered away in the free market. And they have Keating to thank for it.

Nathan Rees’ and Tony Kelly’s Quiet War on Civil Liberties

The NSW government is quietly stripping away civil liberties while everyone’s pre-occupied with the global financial crisis.

The deployment of 500 mobile fingerprint scanners is an outrage. Police play loose with definitions of reasonable suspicion and people, especially from marginalised groups, will have to walk down the street under Big Brother-style threat of being subject to a biological determination of identity. There are four million fingerprints on Australian databases - out of a population of 20 million - and many of these are fingerprints that should have been discarded under present rules (those taken for minor offences).

The second act of Nathan Rees and Tony Kelly attacking civil liberties is to allow already-occurring illegal police searches of properties and hacks into computers to yield evidence that will be admissible in court. To legitimise police breaches of the law is inexcusable. Such searches are occurring without the property/computer owner’s knowledge. From now on police will be able to conduct searches and hacks without the owner knowing for three years. Absolutely draconian.

The familiar catchcry when civil liberties are being thus attacked is that you have nothing to fear if you’re a law-abiding citizen. But who decides what behaviour constitutes criminality? The police clearly cannot be trusted if they’re breaking the law already. NSW has a long history of police corruption. Three years’ grace will open the door to evidence being planted more easily.

It’s a slippery slope, and, if you end up with authoritarian governments, which is a distinct possibility in dire economic times, everyone should be afraid. Australians have fought off the “Australia Card” before, with good reason. The portable fingerprint scanner issue is the same issue. Let’s not lose the fight now. Democracy always has to be constantly fought for and can never be taken for granted.

Kevin Rudd's First Economic Stimulus Package and Increased Savings/Reduced Debt

There is nothing wrong with some of the cash from the first economic stimulus package being squirrelled away in savings or used to pay off debt, one of the open wounds left by the now-ending era of massive private/consumer debt. Fixing a problem that is exploding in our faces (debt) is no bad thing. Less people will lose their houses. In turn it will add extra liquidity to the Australian banking system as people put their money in deposits and pay back debt. The boost in consumption is a good thing as long as the goods bought add genuine utility to society. Shifting debt from the private to the public sphere is wise; the government is better able to manage debt than hapless McMansionites and the interest rates afforded to the government are considerably lower. People need to remember that economics is about people being better off, happier and more able to pursue their life paths, and society/civilisation progressing. Raw GDP numbers don’t tell the whole story. It’s bad for people to lose their jobs in the short term but it is long term unemployment that erodes self esteem the most. Short term dips in GDP are therefore of less import than what the government does to ensure long term job growth, quality of pay and conditions in work and the general progress of civilisation.

Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard must be spooked to consider dropping paid maternity leave exactly when we need it the most. This is a proven economy-booster, protects the jobs and retains the skills of working parents, only Australia and the US don’t have it among developed countries, and, moreover, it is a social good. The same goes for funding of the SBS, another job booster (the media is hurting right now) and is, again, most importantly, a social good.

Rudd is in general doing a reasonably good job handling the crisis. He should be applauded for his plans to push for a global regulatory framework for banks and for his position in favour of letting some US banks fail. As I’ve said before, Australia is lucky that John Howard and Peter Costello were ousted before the crisis started hitting hard