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Listed below are comments made by mittfh between Monday, 23rd November 2009 and Tuesday, 24th November 2009 (15 Hours Ago) .

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• PM Glass Box. 4:39pm on 24 Nov 2009 @3:
  * Grabs a bunch of keys *
  * Drags them across the strings of an old piano *
  * Adds a few effects *
  * Plays back recording at a different speed *
  * Watches as the Glass Box materialises into position *
• PM Glass Box. 4:19pm on 24 Nov 2009 Argh! Proofreading 101 - check twice, post once...
  
  "being held close to the camera"
• PM Glass Box. 4:18pm on 24 Nov 2009 The wonders of perspective - that box is presumably normal sized and being help close to the camera, but courtesy of the background looks several feet high. Attack of the Giant Glass Boxes, anyone?! :)
  Not sure how they'd move, or what their speciality attack would be (apart from crushing whatever was beneath them, whilst giving spectators a clear view of the gore...)
• AM Glass Box. 3:59pm on 24 Nov 2009 For those predicting the end of capitalism, bear in mind that although far from perfect, and creating significantly more losers than winners, it's the world's predominant financial model for a reason - in Darwinian terms, it's the fittest.
  
  What do I mean? Look at societies that have attempted to impose an altruistic alternative over the past 100 years. Strangely enough, the changes to the financial model have usually gone hand in hand with changes in governance from whatever existed beforehand (absolute monarchy? Democracy?) to (quite often ruthless) autocracy. The problem with altruism is it requires everyone's cooperation. As soon as a prominent official starts accruing extra wealth, or decides that some sections of the population are "more equal than others", it breaks down rapidly.
  
  As detestable as capitalism may seem, the concept of "every person for themselves" is pure Darwinian in nature. Imagine a group of animals living on an island. Whichever animals accrue the most food have a better chance of surviving than the others. Even if they worked out an agreement to share food equally, it only takes one to secrete away extra rations to tip the balance in their favour. Replace food with money and you should get the analogy...
  
  -oOo-
  
  And talking of Darwinian concepts, today's the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."
  
  Oh, and spare a thought for Alfred Russell Wallace, who independently arrived at a very similar theory but has largely been ignored by the public consciousness.
• AM Glass Box. 3:03pm on 24 Nov 2009 Mac:
  Most large scale modern industries appear to have this cost structure...Certainly the ones I mentioned above have for sure.
  
  Err...I can't see any specific examples above that line...
  
  Government can general tariffs charged on all users in these cases and tax away monopoly profits in the case of increasing cost industries.
  
  So what level should VAT be set at to compensate for the decreased revenue from other sources? And if the company's making a marginal loss (I still can't quite see the logic behind your argument, but at least you quote sources I could look at if I was sufficiently bored...), how does it plan for capital expenditure such as expanding manufacturing facilities (purchase the land, build the unit, equip it, hire sufficient staff etc. - all of which need to be paid for well before you can earn a return on your capital investment - unless you borrow it from a bank beforehand, which will cost more in the long term [interest!])?
• AM Glass Box. 12:53pm on 24 Nov 2009 @18: Climate change / global warming.
  
  On the one hand, you have the arch sceptics that think that even if you cut down and burned every tree in every rainforest on Earth, there would be precisely zero impact on global climate.
  
  On the other hand, you have the alarmists that think that unless CO2 emissions are reduced to zero immediately, there will be climate chaos in the next hundred years or so.
  
  Unfortunately, proponents clinging to both theories will readily accept even the flimsiest of scientific evidence as "proof" of their theory.
  
  Look at the graphs of global temperature change, and hopefully you shouldn't see a straight line up, but a general trend over many decades / centuries, with plenty of variation en-route (e.g. during periods where the trend was up, there have been years of declining temperatures, and during periods where the trend was down, there have been years of ascending temperatures). Extend the timeline and you will see global temperatures have been both higher and lower than now in the past. The truth is somewhere between the two extremes, but probably somewhere near the middle ground (i.e. climate change is happening, but may not have such disastrous consequences as some scientists predict).
  
  Temperature fluctuations probably have significant impacts upon climate, weather and vegetation. Unfortunately in past centuries there weren't that many educated humans around with the inclination to document (and safely store!) what was going on. So a large coastal flood wouldn't have affected many people - besides which communities living many centuries ago preferred to settle on higher ground, out of the way of flooding etc.
  
  Unfortunately we now have millions of people living within range of coastal or river flooding, hard landscaping is reducing the capacity of the land to store excessive water, and geologically we may be nearing the end of one of the most stable periods in climatic history. So nowadays, large scale events that would have only affected a few dozen people in the past could affect millions now.
  
  So, as I've said before, perhaps it's time to stop worrying on the causes, and concentrate more on predicting what's likely to happen in the future regardless of energy policies, and start working out adaptation strategies.
  
  And while human impacts upon temperature change are debatable, the effect on the water table and land stability of deforestation isn't. Attempting to minimise unsustainable deforestation and encouraging the planting of native trees in deforested areas will be hard to achieve, but possibly easier to achieve than a concrete CO2 minimisation strategy, and should have more immediate and concrete impacts on the environment.
• AM Glass Box. 11:46am on 24 Nov 2009 Mac (8): One big problem with nationalising everything - how would the country make money? IIRC, nationalised industries have historically had a habit of being loss-making, because the amount of expenditure needed to maintain a decent service far outweighs the income generated. Pension funds, for example, rely on investments increasing in value over time in order to pay out more money than you put in to them. Many are already running out of money because (a) not enough money was put into them in the first place, (b) the investments have not returned as much money as predicted, (c) the cost of living has risen sharply over the past few decades and (d) people are living longer than in previous decades.
  
  Therein lies one of the few fundamental policy shifts between the two main parties - Labour believe in investing heavily in the public sector, but even through (much documented) tax rises can't raise as much money as they'd like, so resort to borrowing. The Conservatives believe in minimal investment - it was a standing joke during their last administration that their favourite party game was "I privatise". They apparently still believe that minimal investment in the public sector and minimal regulation of the private sector will result in healthy competition that will keep standards high and prices low. Shame it hasn't really worked with either transport or utilities...
  
  In previous generations, UK PLC relied on manufacturing industry to sustain investments. However, in the past few decades manufacturing has undergone a sharp decline, as a combination of lower wages, lower cost of living and lower regulation has made it significantly cheaper to manufacture items elsewhere in the world and transport them to the UK than to produce them 'in-house'. So investments switched to the finance industry, which was already quite strong. However, hardly anyone in the finance industry (or, indeed, in most Western governments) realised that continued dependence on derivatives and derivatives of derivatives couldn't last forever. We got hit particularly bad, both due to the government falling into the same trap as the financiers and expecting returns on investments to eventually plug the national debt, and the UK being one of the leading financial sectors in the world.
  
  We still don't have significant manufacturing capacity, but evidently despite the huge problems in the finance industry, the government presumably believes that it's the sector most likely to bounce back. Presumably there must be alternative industry sectors that could be invested in, but apart from the discredited financial services sector, what other industry sectors are growing?
• Who deserves a New Year's Honour? 12:53pm on 23 Nov 2009 A fairly obvious one to get the ball rolling:
  
  A certain E. Mair for services to broadcasting.
  
  See, I told you it was obvious :)
• AM Glass Box. 11:55am on 23 Nov 2009 Of all the interesting and unusual topics I've seen in Glass Boxes over the past year or so, I never expected to see analysis of politicans haircuts!
  
  Then again, I can think of at least one politican who's perpetually in need of a haircut (plus clothes styling advice, PR advice, "How not to annoy Liverpudlians" advice and possibly even "Sensible policy advice" [e.g. "Don't build a new runway at Heathrow - build an entirely new airport instead!" - not very sensible and not likely to win many votes either!])
• Psssst. 11:41am on 23 Nov 2009 It's fairly obvious the global climate is changing, with a higher proportion of "extreme weather events" being recorded in more recent years than in previous years.
  
  However, what's not certain is the cause. Anthropogenic global warming is a prime suspect, but others include natural global warming, sunspot activity, natural random variation, and even the positioning of earth, moon, sun etc.
  
  In all likelihood, it's a combination of factors - so just isolating one and proclaiming it the sole cause is a bit simplistic. As is the suggestion that if we wave a magic wand and drastically reduce CO2 emissions, climate change will miraculously and suddenly stop and everything will be fine. CFCs for example hang around in the atmosphere for several decades, so what we sprayed up there before the ban is probably still doing damage. Besides which, the ban isn't global - there are still many countries using CFCs in aerosols.
  
  A far more sensible approach would be to predict what's likely to happen, and devise workarounds / methods of compensating - whilst also examining the potential side effects. For example, demountable flood defences may work well at protecting a town from flooding, but in creating a pocket of land divorced from the flood plain, it may increase the risk of flooding downstream. And invariably in areas prone to storm drain overflow, there'll have to be extensive roadworks to improve the capacity of the storm sewers.
  
  -oOo-
  
  Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia's now got an article on the hack. Reading around, it's worth bearing in mind that the documents released are not just a dump of all climate-related emails sent over the past 10+ years, but a carefully edited selection. So while there's mention of applying "Mike's Trick", there's no information on what the trick is or exactly why it's being used etc.
  
  Apparently the suspicions of a cover-up aren't helped when numerous FoI requests have had to be turned down, because due to the collaborative nature of the work, they can't secure permission to release from all the copyright holders (generally, because they do a lot of work on behalf of other organisations, those organisations 'own' the data, not the CRU).

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