Chris Packham

Apparently Chris Packham is launching a judicial review of HS2, saying it does not take carbon emission targets into account.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51722251

Which I found slightly odd, because a little blip in my memory recalled something. So I look on his website, and find nothing under the 'travel' link:
https://www.chrispackham.co.uk/category/travel-with-chris-packham

However the wonderful Wayback machine shows the following:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191214183301/https://www.chrispackham.co.uk/category/travel-with-chris-packham

So Chris Packham feels it's perfectly fine to make money out of taking adoring fans on trips to Alaska, Antarctica, the Gambia, Kenya etc - which of course involve environmentally-harmful flights  to and from the ships or locations - but does not want the hoi polloi in the UK to be able to travel.

He also says 'Bakotu Hotel – the base for my first tour – is my second home.' How nice it must be for him to have a second home in the Gambia. I bet he walks there ...

Money

The rather excellent XKCD has a brilliant depiction of the American and world economy at http://xkcd.com/980/

Double-click on the image and start exploring how the dollars add up to thousands, millions, billions and then finally trillions. I only wish that I fitted on the right-hand side of the page rather than the left...

The size of the US economy

There has been much talk recently about the threat the US economy is under from the Chinese dragon. Much of this talk has been sensible and based on facts and figures, whilst much has been vitriolic and even racist in nature.

Therefore it is sometimes beneficial to retreat and look at the core assumptions. This figure in a recent Economist gave me pause for thought. It shows a map of the USA, with each state's GDP compared to that of an entire country. For instance, California's GDP lies between that of Italy and Brazil (with the usual caveats about exchange rates). Texas's GDP is only slightly less than that of Russia. It is an amazing and thought-provoking diagram.


According to the IMF (via Wikipedia...), China's GDP is 5,745,133 million dollars, compared to America's 14,624,184 and the combined EU's 16,106,896. California's GDP alone is nearly a third that of China's.


Of course, China's economy is currently growing at an exceptional rate whilst those of the EU and the US are largely static. China's success story has been amazing (as has, incidentally, Brazil's), but that does not mean that it will continue to grow at the same rate. China's structural instabilities will grow with its economy, and the Chinese leaders will need to perform deft management of the population to stop severe growing pains. 


America will remain the world's pre-eminent economy for at least a decade, possibly two. It has time to look into the factors that are making segments of its economy uncompetitive and fix those problems. But they do need to look and fix; complaining about the amazing rise of the Chinese dragon will not help them.

The Irish Economy

The bail-out of the Irish economy is to be welcomed, at least for the moment. However, there are worries to be had over the way the bail-out will effect the other Euro-zone countries that have problems, in particular Portugal and Spain.

It is vital to remember the root cause of the Irish problem. The excellent ghostestates.com displays the half-built and unsold residential and industrial complexes on a Google map. You can click on one of the sites and use Google Streetview to drive around the abandoned developments. In some cases they make quite eerie spectacles.

Cuilin on the west coast is a case in point - half-built bare-block houses in a beautiful, remote location, yet with none of the ephemera of building around them - no scaffolding, diggers, cabins, supplies or people makes it appear a curiously apocalyptical world. In some, you see brand-new houses right alongside others that have been half-built and abandoned, the two separated by small wooden fences and a gulf of time and money. Sometimes the complete houses are obviously empty and unloved.

Someone had to pay for these developments, and it was the banks. The reason the developments were started was because everyone thought that they would make vast amounts of money from them as house prices rose unsustainably.

Greed mucked up the Irish economy. It is a salutatory lesson.