I was at the urinal next to Bob Costas once. It was at the 2010 Winter Olympics, just before the Closing Ceremony, during which Canada said goodbye to the world with a nightmarish glowing dreamscape of giant beavers and plaid-wearing lumberjacks and dancing Mounties and flying moose and looming table hockey players and William Shatner, among others. Pretty sure we, as a country, were drunk.
But Bob Costas was not drunk, because Costas is a sober and professional man who disapproves of you and your shenanigans, probably. Costas is among the great broadcasters of his generation, as witnessed most recently by his stellar on-camera interview with accused Penn State pedophile Jerry Sandusky. And despite some creases in his face, and perhaps a whisper of greying hair, Costas remains youthful, even boyish.
Like just about everything in television, however, that is at least partly a facade, as Costas’ monologue on Football Night in America on Sunday last week demonstrated. As if channeling Andy Rooney in 1978, Costas inferred that touchdown celebrations are basically ruining the minds of our children, with their iPhones and their pornography and their touchdown dances. If life is a football field, it is time to leave Bob Costas’s lawn.
Bruce Arthur, “NFL Picks, Week 13: NFL players can dance if they want to”, National Post, 2011-12-02
December 2, 2011
QotD: “Pretty sure we, as a country, were drunk”
October 27, 2011
Postponing retirement: late Boomers and Gen X’ers face reality
Jonathan Chevreau shows that those of us getting a bit closer to retirement will have to wait longer than the previous generation before retiring:
The “double whammy” of falling stock prices and low interest rates has impacted members of DC pensions and RRSPs, who must cover the deficit through reduced personal spending and/or deferred retirement.
Towers Watson has issued its first quarterly DC Retirement Age Index, which it describes as a pension freedom tracker. It tracks the performance of a balanced portfolio of a DC plan member who has contributed to the plan from age 40 to 60. At that point, an annuity would be purchased but its value and monthly payout would depend on the performance of the plan over those 20 years.
[. . .]
With recession threatening, ongoing market volatility and falling interest rates, Towers Watson expects the Pension Freedom Age could move up to 67, or two years after the traditional retirement age (when Old Age Security and full Canada Pension Plan benefits commence).
October 11, 2011
August 15, 2011
Terry Pratchett’s views on assisted suicide
Terry Pratchett is considering the option of assisted suicide as his own early-onset Alzheimer’s is starting to degrade his ability to write:
“I believe everyone should have a good death,” he tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.”
Pratchett has become an advocate for legalized assisted suicide in Britain, making him one of many voices in a global debate. Many oppose the practice for religious reasons or because they fear a slippery slope to involuntary euthanasia; but Pratchett has turned the legalization of assisted suicide into something of a personal crusade.
“I prefer not to use the word ‘suicide’ because suicide is an irrational thing whereas I think that for some people asking for an assisted death is a very rational thing,” he says. “People who I have met who have opted for it are very rational in their thinking. And indeed so are their families, quite often, because they know they are in the grip of a terrible disease for which there is no cure and they do not want to spend any more time than necessary in the jaws of the beast.”
Pratchett says that’s why he’s considering assisted death — even though his diagnosis could make it hard to recognize the right time to go.
“[It’s] always a problem for someone with Alzheimer’s,” he says. “Regrettably, quite a few people go earlier than they might need to, to make certain that they are totally coherent when they are asked various questions and fill in the various forms that they have to fill in.”
June 10, 2011
With extended lifespans . . . will come later retirement dates
For all of us who’ve spent our working lives assuming that 65 was the age of retirement (or 55 for those of you who paid closer attention to retirement planning 20 years earlier than the rest of us), you won’t like this:
Americans better get used to working longer, even until they are 80 years old, according to a study by the Employee Research Benefit Institute (via Robert Powell at MarketWatch).
Naturally, those with lower incomes will need to work longer.
Here’s how it breaks down (via MarketWatch):
- If you make around $11,700 dollars a year you have to work to age 84 to have a 50% chance of affording retirement.
- If you make between $11,700-$31,200 a year you have to work to age 76 to have a 50% chance affording retirement
- If you make between $31,200-$72,500 a year you have to work to age 72 to have a 50% chance of affording retirement.
- If you make $72,500 or more a year you have to work to age 65 to have a 50% chance of affording retirement.
This study does point out one bright spot for those working past 65 though. If you are putting your money into some kind of retirement fund, your chances of saving enough increase substantially.
May 26, 2011
May 13, 2011
May 11, 2011
QotD: The instinctive reaction to progress
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
Douglas Adams, “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”, Sunday Times, 1999-08-29
April 27, 2011
The xkcd Guide to Making People Feel Old
Original here.
April 25, 2011
Grameen Bank cleared of “irregularities”, but Yunus will not be re-instated
The Bangladeshi government has completed their investigation into financial irregularities at microfinance specialist Grameen Bank, but the founder, Muhammad Yunus, will not be brought back:
Yunus, 70, was dismissed by a central bank order — upheld by the high court and supreme court — on the grounds that he had overstayed in his position and refused requests to quit.
Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel peace prize, set up Grameen, which means village in Bengali, and had been the bank’s managing director since 2000.
Lauded at home and abroad by politicians and financiers as the “banker to the poor”, he has been under attack by the government since late last year, after a Norwegian documentary alleged the bank was dodging taxes.
Yunus denied any wrongdoing and a Norwegian government investigation later also cleared him of any malpractice.
April 13, 2011
April 7, 2011
Health clubs’ real goal is “helping us to lose weight around the middle of our wallets”
I’ve never really been able to get into the idea of joining a health club — the few times I’ve tried, the interest hasn’t gone beyond the “free trial” period. I find exercise for the sake of exercise to be not just boring but actively repellant. What little exercise I get, outside the minimal physical efforts required of a modern technical writer are on the badminton court once or twice a week, or doing SCA rapier fencing. Those are both interesting enough to keep me coming back (in spite of my admitted lack of expertise in either).
I’m not alone in this, as Daniel Duane helps to illustrate:
Not that I haven’t wasted time at the gym like everybody else, sweating dutifully three times a week, “working my core,” throwing in the odd after-work jog. A few years ago, newly neck-deep in what Anthony Quinn describes in Zorba the Greek as “Wife, children, house…the full catastrophe,” I signed a 10-page membership contract at a corporate-franchise gym, hired my first personal trainer, and became yet another sucker for all the half-baked, largely spurious non-advice cobbled together from doctors, newspapers, magazines, infomercials, websites, government health agencies, and, especially, from the organs of our wonderful $19 billion fitness industry, whose real knack lies in helping us to lose weight around the middle of our wallets. Not that all of these people are lying, but here’s what I’ve learned: Their goals are only marginally related to real fitness — goals like reducing the statistical incidence of heart disease across the entire American population, or keeping you moving through the gym so you won’t crowd the gear, or limiting the likelihood that you’ll get hurt and sue.
We’re not innocent. Too many of us drift into health clubs with only the vaguest of notions about why we’re actually there — notions like maybe losing a little weight, somehow looking like the young Brad Pitt in Fight Club, or just heeding a doctor’s orders. Vague goals beget vague methods; the unfocused mind is the vulnerable mind, deeply susceptible to bullshit. So we sign our sorry names on the elliptical-machine waiting list — starting with a little “cardio,” like somebody said you’re supposed to — and then spend our allotted 30 minutes in front of a TV mounted a regulation seven to 10 feet away, because lawyers have told gym owners that seven to 10 feet minimizes the likelihood that we’ll crane our necks, lose our balance, and face-plant on the apparatus. After that, if we’ve got any remaining willpower, we lie flat on the floor, contract a few stomach muscles with tragic optimism, and then we “work each body part” before hitting the shower.
Even in my minimal-exercise routine, I’ve often been told to start with some stretches. Uh, no, apparently I shouldn’t do that:
How many times have you been told to start with a little stretching? Yet multiple studies of pre-workout stretching demonstrate that it actually raises your likelihood of injury and lowers your subsequent performance. Turns out muscles that aren’t warmed up don’t really stretch anyway, and tugging on them just firms up their resistance to a wider range of motion. In fact, limbering up even has a slackening effect on your muscles, reducing their stability and the amount of power and strength they’ll generate.
On the economic incentives of health club owners:
Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense. Fitness fanatics work out too much, making every potential new member think, Nah, this place looks too crowded for me. The winning marketing strategy, according to Recreation Management Magazine, a health club–industry trade rag, focuses strictly on luring in the “out-of-shape public,” meaning all of those people whose doctors have told them, “About 20 minutes three times a week,” who won’t come often if ever, and who definitely won’t join unless everything looks easy, available, and safe. The entire gym, from soup to nuts, has been designed around getting suckers to sign up, and then getting them mildly, vaguely exercised every once in a long while, and then getting them out the door.
March 21, 2011
Japan’s bifurcated power grid
Charles Stross points out something I was completely unaware of:
Western Japan and Eastern Japan do not share an electricity grid; because of an historical accident, in the 1890s when they were first getting electric lighting, Osaka, in the west, chose to run at 60Hz and Tokyo, in the east, picked 50Hz. Consequently there’s no grid interconnect between the two halves of the Japanese electricity supply system.
Eastern Japan has had 15 nuclear reactors scrammed by an an earthquake. Some of them may be checked out and approved to start delivering base load again over the coming months, but they all need a thorough inspection at this point — and we know for sure that at least three of them will never work again (not after they’ve had seawater pumped through their primary coolant circuit).
We are now heading into summer. And Tokyo doesn’t have enough electricity to maintain power everywhere even in spring.
Summer in Tokyo is savage: temperatures routinely top 35 celsius with 100% humidity. In a heat wave, it can top 40 degrees for days on end. Back when I visited in late August of 2008, the heat wave had broken and daytime temperatures were down under 37 degrees again — the week before it had been over 42, and joggers had been dropping dead in the street.
Greater Tokyo also has 30-million-odd people, of whom a large proportion — maybe 20% — are 75 years or older.
Elderly folks do not handle heat waves well; they get dehydrated easily and if they don’t have air conditioning they die in droves. Normally it’s not a problem in Tokyo because 80% of households have air conditioning, but with rolling blackouts and insufficient power it’s another matter.
It was bad in France, but the death toll among the elderly in Japan may be much higher.
September 29, 2010
Austin Bay summarizes the demographic problems China is facing
This is all old hat if you’ve been reading the blog for a while, but it’s always good to see a good summary of key points, like this list by Austin Bay:
Internal Disorder: China’s primary threat is not the United States, or any other foreign power, but internal disorder. There are more angry people in China every day, and the government knows that this could blossom into widespread uprisings. It has happened so many times before in Chinese history. Protesting factory workers are an indicator.
Corruption: Corruption is the biggest complaint among China’s discontented; government officials, who are more interested in enriching themselves than in taking care of “the people” are particular targets. Many of the demonstrations and labor disruptions are the result of corruption among local officials, including the police.
The Communications Dilemma: In 2007, Chinese Internet use grew to over 210 million users. Cell phones are also increasingly available. China is the world’s largest cell phone market. The Internet is an economic and educational tool. However, it also undermines an authoritarian government’s ability to control (deny and spin) information. China’s 2010 “war with Google.com” illustrated this dilemma.
Ethnic Minorities and Language: China has a population of 1.4 billion. Han Chinese (“ethnic Han”) constitute approximately 92 percent of China’s population. China also has 55 “minority nationalities,” however, amounting to 100 million people. The 2009 Uighur riots in Xinjiang province (western China) and resistance in Tibet are symptomatic of the problem. They are resisting “Hanicization.”
Pollution and Water: In early 2008, China began shutting down “high pollution” factories. The reason? To clear the air for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The growing wealth of the Chinese people is causing enormous pollution problems and water shortages. Effective pollution controls mean more expensive production methods. That makes Chinese goods less competitive.
The Marriage Gap: China’s “one child” policy crimped population growth, all right. More boys were born than girls; Chinese culture “favors” sons. As a result, there is a serious imbalance between men and women. In some places, there are 120 men per 100 women. Marriageable daughters are, reportedly, going largely to the upper social groups within each village or district. The sons of the poorest families are, to an extent, not finding wives. This is an indicator of future social trouble.
As I’ve said several times before, I’m not anti-Chinese: China has accomplished economic marvels in amazingly short time spans . . . but not without serious costs. Urban and coastal dwellers have benefitted disproportionally from the growth: rural and inland Chinese have suffered to provide the means for that growth. China is still not a free economy, and still represses dissent, imprisons critics, and controls far too much of the country’s economy both directly and indirectly. Corruption is rife, despite the savage punishment meted out to (some of) the (accused) perpetrators.
China’s miracle can’t continue for much longer unless the government starts to address these problems with the same kind of single-mindedness that they’ve brought to other problems. Introducing the rule of law would be an excellent first step, but it would directly challenge too many powerful men, some of whom (literally) have armies.
September 10, 2010
Japan now admits it can’t find over 230,000 elderly citizens
Remember that post from a while back about some Japanese families concealing the death of elderly relatives to scam their pensions? It appears to be a much more widespread problem than they first thought:
More than 230,000 elderly people in Japan who are listed as being aged 100 or over are unaccounted for, officials said following a nationwide inquiry.
An audit of family registries was launched last month after the remains of the man thought to be Tokyo’s oldest were found at his family home.
Relatives are accused of fraudulently receiving his pension for decades.
Officials have found that hundreds of the missing would be at least 150 years old if still alive.
