etnobofin

Something to watch out for in 2010: Brèves de trottoirs is a new web-documentary project lead by journalist Olivier Lambert and photographer Thomas Salva. The objective is to bring together a collection of short documentaries focused on personalities met on the streets of Paris.

Their first subject was Elie, the famous “Papy Dance” who dances outside the Italie 2 shopping centre in the 13th arrondissement. His performances have made him an internet star, but his life story is far more poignant… (this video is subtitled in English)

Also recently released is the next short film, an interview with Violette, a florist on Place Monge in the 5th arrondissement.

Brèves de Trottoirs provides an interesting example of how journalism, film-making and internet are coming together to create new modes story-telling. It’ll be fascinating to watch the project develop during the year. You can follow their Twitter feed or their blog.

I commend this 4-minute soundbite to you – it’s journalist Bill McKibben putting our current climate change in the context of the history of human civilisation.

Source: Speaking of Faith (NPR)

Clive James points out this week that the exact science behind climate change theories might be up for debate (or perhaps has been scandalously misreported by the media).

However politicians and individuals have to make decisions based on the best evidence available at the time: right now, majority international scientific opinion tells us that the planet’s climate is changing, that it’s likely that human activity is causing it, atmospheric carbon levels are off the chart and if we do nothing, the consequences will be disastrous.

On this basis alone, postponing global action to change our would be highly irresponsible, and probably immoral. Maybe 10, 20, 100 years from now, our current climate science will be proved wrong. Maybe future generations will laugh at us, but at least they won’t be able to accuse us of inaction in the face of the science that we do have.

US Sea Level Trends, 1900-2000 (Data Source: NOAA/US EPA)

Elsewhere in the podcastsphere this week, George Kenney’s been talking to coastal geologist Professor Orrin Pilkey about sea level rise – an interesting hour’s conversation covering the scientific evidence for rising oceans and the policy challenges facing those who are trying to convince governments to tackle the problem.

In any case, moving away from a carbon-based economy promises enormous political and environmental benefits – decentralising power generation, reducing reliance for energy on politically unstable regions of the world, diversifying economies and offering new, cheaper energy technologies to developing countries. The meeting in Copenhagen this week is a great chance to start moving towards a low-carbon future. We’d be stupid not to grab it.

And if you’re a little jaded by all the political and science talk we’re hearing at the moment, check this out: a car that runs on compressed air.

Invented by a French engineer, the MDI engine produces ZERO pollution while running. The concept model may suffer a little from inimitably French design, but the underlying technology looks very promising. Tata has invested in the company, and there are plans to begin commercial production in 2010. The revolution is here, and it looks like a plastic snail.

David Mitchell is one of the funniest people in Britain today – and very smart with it. His TV projects (Peep Show, Mitchell and Webb) and his now-established role as default panellist for radio and TV panel games (HIGNFY, News Quiz, Would I Lie to You?) have helped to build a comic persona very English in its essentials: self-concious and awkward, but possessing a logic of argument that never fails to reveal the absurdity of whatever he’s dealing with.

Generally, Mitchell’s Observer column is just funny: occasionally it contains some much deeper insights. This week, his column describes why his records collection contains just two titles (Phil Collins But Seriously… and Susan Boyle’s new album), and he posits a piercing summation of why we buy things:

These purchases… aren’t about taste, they’re about identity. We flatter ourselves that we buy things based on our judgment of quality and price, but that’s a secondary factor. Fundamentally we buy the sort of things that feel appropriate, based on the class we come from, the groups we aspire to be part of, or the opinions we find attractive.

Our purchases are tribal, neo-religious signifiers.

And, for those who haven’t seen it, possibly the best Mitchell and Webb sketch, ever, which deals with tribal signifiers in its own way. (Warning: contains Nazis):

The French have a word, pharaonique, to describe any project that seems over-ambitious. National computer systems, networks of tramlines or new art galleries designed by Frank Gehry are all considered pharaonique, implying that they are likely impossible to accomplish, certainly over-visionary, and quite probably narcissistic.

Burj Dubai nears its completion (Image: Joi, Creative Commons)

The news this week that Dubai’s main state-controlled investment vehicle, Dubai World, is near collapse, really should not have suprised anyone. Back in 2006, I started paying attention to Dubai because it fell into my region of responsibility at work. After the stories I heard from salesmen in the region, and what I read online, it made instinctive sense that the Emirate’s vast property-based gold rush was unsustainable.

My amateur analysis was not based on a calculation of debt ratios. It was simply the halo of exuberant optimism that orbited Dubai that provided a warning. In Dubai, everything was going to be bigger, taller, better than the rest of the world. Real estate prices would never fall, and the Pharoah’s thrusting vision for his kingdom was infallible.

Dubai’s apparent bankruptcy provides no pleasure. But like the current world financial crisis, the fable of Dubai should make us cautious of  predictions of endless prosperity. It’s not that ambition should be discouraged: without it we wouldn’t have landed men on the moon, given the vote to women, or discovered penicillin. But the development of a scepticism gene might be a very healthy thing.

(Image: Monica R., Creative Commons)

Which brings me tangentially to the Oasis of the Seas, a piece of engineering which seems to fully embody the folly of us all: an energy-munching mobile shopping mall designed to shuttle between America and a few developing nations in the tropics while stripping its passengers of as much money as possible. It’s the perfect realisation of insulated hedonism. A floating Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

The allure of cruise ships escapes me. I can’t understand how anyone would want to spend precious free time in a Ritz-upon-Sea which offers little except good weather and a plasticised, hyper-controlled “guest experience”. I’d rather holiday in Invercargill.

It’s a pity that there are unlikely to be any icebergs floating near Florida in the near future.  If it sank, at least the Oasis of the Seas would provide a powerful poetic metaphor for our time, as well as a screenplay for another film by James Cameron or Michael Bay.

Sometimes I get the impression that all of us are (figuratively, of course) floating around in an air-conditioned bubble of ignorant bliss, zapping zombies on our Xbox while the planet collapses around us. Drinking champagne in anticipation of the big fireworks display at the end of time. I just hope their are enough lifeboats for everyone.

[*EDIT: thanks to klari for correcting my spelling of "pharaonique" ]

Today, we headed up to the Arc de Triomphe today for the Armistice ceremony.

It was the first 11th November since 1918 that German soldiers and the German Chancellor were present on the Champs Elysées.

Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy AND Carla were there…

…the French got to wear silly hats (these are students of the Ecole Polytechnique)…

…and the Germans got to stand in long, organised rows, in order of height…

…so, all in all, a rather satisfying celebration of Franco-German cooperation!

Today, there’s plenty being written elsewhere about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’ll leave all that for better-informed and better writers to get busy with, and just stick to some of my own memories.

Potsdamerplatz, Berlin

In April 1989, when my family booked tickets to fly to England and Europe the following November, we had no idea that we would arrive in time to celebrate the fall of communism. My English grandfather had just had a stroke, and the long NZ summer holidays of December/January offered the last chance that the family could travel to visit him while I was still a child airfare.

My sister and I, who had never been overseas before, spent an excited few months preparing for the trip: reading up about the sights of London, learning little phrases in German and poring over Mum’s Collins University Atlas, tracing train routes that would take us through unknown countries called France, Holland and Switzerland.

After Christmas in England, we crossed the Channel in the dead of winter and by way of Oostend and Amsterdam, found ourselves in Germany to visit Mum’s old friends in the Ruhr valley. The Wall had been down less than two months at that point, but the ripples of the fall seemed evident everywhere we went: the trains were stuffed full of East Germans, perhaps visiting family or simply enjoying spending Christmas in the West for the first time.

GDR-era Mural, Federal Finance Building

The Silvesternacht we spent in Germany was one I’ll never forget… we kids were allowed to let off fireworks across the cul-de-sac, drink sekt and participate in the inexplicably German tradition of Bleigießen. At midnight we gathered around the television, watching crowds of East and West Germans celebrating together at the Brandenburg Gate.

A piece of history arrived, quite literally, a couple of days later: a package arrived at the door, containing lumps of asbestos-laden concrete. The brother of Mum’s German friend was in Berlin, and had hacked off enough pieces of the wall so that we New Zealanders would have something to take home with us.

The Reichstag Dome

That trip to Europe happened at an impressionable age, and probably sparked my ongoing interest and love of that continent. We played in the snow on the Jungfrau; I chased my sister around borderstones on the frontier of France and Switzerland; and when on a cold January morning 1990 we stared up into the mist on the Champs de Mars to try and spy the top of the Eiffel Tower that was missing in the gloom, I had little idea that twenty years later I would be able to speak French and live in Paris.

In their wisdom, our parents made me and my sister write a diary during our trip. So I can still read what I thought at the time (I was mostly interested in playing with Lego and running around borderstones). And I still have that piece of the Berlin Wall, although it’s currently sitting in storage in Birmingham.

So, just like Nicolas Sarkozy, I was not in Berlin on the 9th of November, 1989. But as a young kid, I did manage to be in Europe right at the end of the 1980s. Ride on Time by Black Box was top of the pops, and it felt like the wheel of history was turning.

Coke ad in East Berlin

(All photos in this post were taken during my March 2008 trip to Berlin)

14th September 2009 – remember this date. It’s the day that the Stiglitz Commission presented its report on improved GDP measurement to the French government. If the report has the impact that Nicolas Sarkozy hopes, it could eventually change the way politics and economics are done throughout the world.

Joseph Stiglitz arrives at the Sorbonne to deliver his report

The report, which runs to 291 pages in English, 324 pages in French, argues that current methodogy for measuring GDP, and therefore the performance of an economy, is inadequate because it doesn’t measure quality-of-life and ecological impacts.

Essentially, what these economists are saying is that we need to evaluate economies in terms of how they serves their society and environment, rather than measuring the economy purely in terms of the quantity of stuff produced. Changing GDP measurements would shift the goalposts for policy-making: the implications for countries everywhere could be wide-ranging.

The Commission started work in January 2008, before the financial crisis really hit, but the ensuing year of chaos has made its work even more relevant. The Commission argues that a more balanced GDP measurement could have assisted in blunting or preventing global banking collapse of September 2008:

“[Some of the members of the commission believe that] one of the reasons why the crisis took many by surprise is that our measurement system failed us and/or market participants and government officials were not focusing on the right set of statistical indicators. In their view, neither the private nor the public accounting systems were able to deliver an early warning, and did not alert us that the seemingly bright growth performance of the world economy between 2004 and 2007 may have been achieved at the expense of future growth. It is also clear that some of the performance was a “mirage”, profits that were based on prices that had been inflated by a bubble.”
Report of the Commission, Executive Summary pages 8-9

Will anyone pay attention? Will the recommendations be implemented? Perhaps the weight of old habits and vested interest will prevent change. But the timing of the report is masterly – the first anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse and just days before the G20 meet in Pittsburgh to discuss reform of the world financial system.

So this report will certainly be read and debated. Some will argue that the Commission’s membership was too “French” for the report to be more widely applicable. But as a statement of intent, endorsed by the government of one of world’s largest industrialised economies, the document is powerful in itself.

The Commission was convened at the insistance of Nicolas Sarkozy. Like all French Presidents, he’s a controversial figure – loved by some here in France for his energy and his will to change things, loathed by others for his autocratic style, his hardline stance on immigrants and his “bling bling” lifestyle.

If the findings of his Commission are indeed adopted widely, it could be ironic that Sarkozy, a right-wing president, and professed fan of free markets and liberal economics, could go down in history as the leader who initiated one of the most important advances in social and environmental progress in a century.

In talking about American healthcare reform, I’m tilting at a rather irrelevant windmill – I’m not American and I don’t live in the United States. But I have friends there, and I’m disgusted by the way certain opposition groups have been representing Obama’s proposed reform package, however ill-conceived it might be.

I’ve also spent seven and a half years working as a supplier to the healthcare industry in countries around the world – including the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Canada. This doesn’t make me an expert, but I’d like to think I know some of the basics about healthcare delivery models. So…  I’m going to dive in anyway.

First of all – Campaigns currently running in the US describing the failings of the British NHS are misleading and not helpful to informed debate. Obama is not currently proposing an NHS-style single-payer plan, even though Obama has voiced personal preference for it in the past.

The overly complex bill before Congress is introducing the concept of a publicly-funded option available to all, alongside existing provision. While some are saying that this is a slippery slope to universal single-payer, I can’t see this happening given the immense vested interests who’ll ensure any such future law would be defeated.

Secondly – no health care plan is perfect. Yes, there are waiting lists in Beveridge-style health systems (eg. in the NHS and New Zealand). And yes there is “rationing” too – in the UK, decisions on treatment guidelines occur through NICE, generally considered one of the most rigorous branches of government, which makes decisions based on clinical evidence.

But in the current American system rationing occurs through a different, crueler mechanism – by denying care to those who can’t pay, while over-treating those who can. In the richest country on Earth, 18% of the adult population are uninsured. Scenes of people queuing overnight for charity-provided healthcare should’ve brought policy makers to their senses a lot earlier.

Thirdly – complaints that government-provided care is bureaucratic and inefficient are ill-founded. On average, Medicare (which is, by the way, a socialised healthcare system), costs substantially less (2-16%) to administer than private insurance (up to 25% according to some studies). With healthcare consuming upwards of 15% of US GDP, this means that around 4% of US GDP is accounted for simply in administering private insurance programmes.

Fourthly – socialised medicine doesn’t necessarily restrict patient choice.  The people most concerned about choice are those who are rich enough to go outside the public system anyway. In NZ and the UK, people can choose to pay for private insurance and “go private” for elective surgery if they wish.

In France, often cited as the best healthcare system in the world, healthcare is largely paid for by your national insurance contributions, with a small co-payment by the patient at the point of care. Most French people buy additional insurance to cover this co-payment. For me, this additional cover costs 24EUR (34USD) a month – not an excessive burden for peace of mind.

So some kind of reform in America is necessary. I wish it would be either single-payer (like in the UK or Spain) or a non-profit multi-payer system (like in Germany).  But it’s most likely to come in the form of a public insurance option available to all (take a deep breath guys, it’s not creeping socialism. Insurers, HMOs and pharmaceutical companies will still make enormous profits).

I hope Obama’s bill, with all its weaknesses, passes in a workable format. But mostly I wish that the healthcare debate in America was centred around rational facts rather than cynical scare-mongering.

Hey, we’re just actors. Don’t ask us about healthcare reform.

Florida as a whole doesn’t hold a lot of appeal for me: a vast flat strip-mall full of beaches, theme parks, swamps and cops in pastel polo shirts driving Ferraris. But there is one place amidst this general tawdriness that geniuinely impressed and inspired: Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

A Saturn V is immodest in size, brutally functional in its design and arrogant in intent. Seen up close at KSC, it’s a completely wonderful machine, the engineering backbone of the single most impressive technical feat in the history of our species.

Here’s me standing next to one of the Rocketdyne F-1 first stage motors. A Saturn V had FIVE of these puppies, each one of them developing more thrust than an entire space shuttle:

On the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, there’s been debate about whether humans should go back to the Moon, or further. A counter-argument often used is that manned spaceflight is a waste of money, and that we should be focusing our attention, resources and energy on solving problems on Earth first.

Such reasoning is flawed. The opportunity cost of not going back to the Moon or to Mars is NOT prolonged starvation, war or global warming. Cancelling the $100 billion ISS would never result in that $100 billion being spent instead on AIDS research or education in African countries.  And aerospace engineers wouldn’t suddenly turn their enthusiasms towards creating new forms of clean energy.

But there is a pot of money and a set of expertise that could profitably be turned to space exploration: defense spending. 

A 20% cut in the US defence budget ($515 billion in 2009) would fund current NASA activities ($18.7 billion) six times over.  And most of the contractors who might lose business through defence cuts (firms like Lockheed, Boeing and BAE) would be exactly the firms with the technology and skills to bid for work in an expanded space programme.

This is not just an American effort, however. The same level defence cuts applied across Europe, Japan, Russia and China, and the subsequent redeployment of brain power and manpower could be transformative for the world economy.

By rights, a space programme should be a politician’s wet dream. High-value jobs. New technologies. Adding to the knowledge economy. And it’s not just jobs for scientists and pilots…there’s thousands of factory floor jobs involved in stitching spacesuits and running wiring through space capsules. The French for fiscal stimulus package is “plan de relance“. Relance – re-launch.

Like Robyn Gallagher, I’d love to see men and women walk on the Moon or Mars during my lifetime. A Mars programme will certainly have to be an international project. The Americans did it on their own with a Saturn V, some chewing gum and a pocket calculator in 1969. In the 21st century it’ll be even better, because we’ll all be along for the ride. To infinity and beyond!

Apollo 17 photos from NASA / Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

Here’s a little story about why Twitter is great. It all happened over the weekend during our round trip from Montpellier to Antibes for the Keith Jarrett gig (the gig was fantastic, I’ve already posted about that below.)

After the gig, we left Antibes around midnight, and headed back onto the autoroute. As the lights of the city faded, Régine, who was driving, said to me “our headlights aren’t working properly.” And indeed, they weren’t – the sidelights were fine, high-beam was OK, but switching to low-beam plunged the road ahead into a disconcerting blackness.

(Image: Lezarderose)

Within a kilometre we saw an aire de repos with a Total station. So we pulled in, grabbed a coffee and a sandwich, and set about trying to fix the headlights. It seemed unlikely to be a bulb problem – both low-beam bulbs failing at the same time was just improbable. The most likely scenario was a blown fuse.

Régine, smart lady, had a set of spare fuses in the glovebox, and although I barely class myself as mechanically literate, I do know how to change car fuses (too many years driving second-hand Toyotas in NZ, where the engines last forever, but the electrics – mirrors, aircon, stereo – are well dodgy).  So far, so good.

But we couldn’t find the fusebox. The Skoda designers had hidden it well. We emptied the car looking for it. Behind the glovebox. Under the dashboard. In the door cavities. We even looked in the spare wheel compartment and under the bonnet. No joy. We had no maintenance manual, and the guys at the service station had no idea either.

Not wanting to be stuck at a service station outside Cannes until sunrise, I turned to technology. Figuring that at least a few of my Twitter followers somewhere in the world would be online, I tweeted via text:

Within five minutes a reply came back:

Now THAT’s why Twitter is cool. Of course, if I’d had a phone with internet access, I could have done a web search myself, but in the absence of that, a text and a network of Twitter followers worked just as effectively.

On reflection, the real benefit of Twitter in this instance is not the technology itself, it’s the type of user it attracts: high-frequency internet mavens. I knew when I texted my request that somebody among my followers, somewhere in the world, would be online and would do the internet search for me.  That wouldn’t happen with my Facebook friends (sorry guys).

So, thanks to Twitter and @paulie in England, @etnobofin (standing on the side of a motorway in Southern France) was able to find the hidden panel on the side of the dashboard of a Skoda Fabia, lever it off and expose the fusebox. Within fifteen minutes we’d replaced the fuses, got the headlights working again, and were on the road back to Montpellier.

I love living in this century.