Thursday 30 May 2019

Accepting asylum seekers strengthens our borders

Borders mark a differentiation between two things - the edges where two things that are definable as different meet. Our skin marks the personal border of our physical bodies; our fences mark the borders of our homes; and borders bound our nation - but they do not define it. For borders are more than just physical markers, borders exist also of the mind, the soul, the psyche, and, if we move beyond the individual, borders mark the meeting points of cultures, ways of living, and ways of being.

The struggle for human rights has been about far more than solely our physical integrity, it has also been about our emotional and mental integrity, and greatest of all, the integrity of our soul.

And just as our personal integrity and essence has borders, so too does the morality, integrity and essence of our nation - the nation we see as, or wish to see as, noble, or "great", or influential.

Those moral borders set us apart, we hope, and mark us as being better than the places that, sometimes through no fault of that place, people are fleeing - seeking safety or a better life for themselves probably, but more often for their family and loved ones.

That border exists on the premise that our nation, the collective "we", is better than elsewhere - more easy going perhaps, the land of a "fair go", and we often pride ourselves on being more respectful of the rule of law.

But, just as a judge will take mitigating circumstances into account when setting a sentence, so too should we treat those who came here in hope but without meeting the legal definition of refugee with some forbearance - if nothing else, for the compliment they give us in thinking our nation is a better place to be. And refugees have, by law, rights of access.

When we do not accept the lawfulness of being a refugee, when we deny and abuse, or allow others to do so, those who come here seeking asylum, we make a mockery of our commitment to the rule of law, we rob others of the fair go we espouse so blithely and hypocritically, and we sacrifice our generosity on the pyre of mean-spiritedness - the same sort of mean-spiritedness that quite possibly led to them leaving their distant shores.

When we make the error of closing the borders of our hearts and our nation, we weaken our moral borders: we show the image of our culture as "better" to be a facade - a shallow and superficial lie. We lessen the difference between our supposedly "good" place of being, and the "bad" places that drive their people away.

And when we do that, I weep for my nation and its peoples.

On the other hand, when we accept asylum seekers in, and treat them with decency and respect, that does not weaken our borders: it strengthens the borders that matter.


PS - To be clear about the sort of difference I am talking of: many, if not most, of our refugees are coming from Syria, a totalitarian regime, burma, a partial democracy currently actively committing genocide, or Afghanistan, a nation struggling t form a stable democracy and showing signs falling back into a misogynistic theocracy. To be a genuine small-l liberal democracy respecting freedom and human rights, as compared to a totalitarian regime, a genocidal regime, or a misogynistic theocracy, is a difference I consider we should be seeking to make.



 * For those who are unfamiliar with this word, look up the phrase "beating the bounds" 
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Monday 27 May 2019

Tiny homes: a possible opportunity

To all residents of my home state of Victoria (in Australia): if you're interested in tiny homes or small, more appropriate homes, a review has commenced into regulations for "caravans and mobile homes" which may open an opportunity for advocacy.

I am currently preparing a submission - due by 23rd June, 2019, and urge others with a similar interest to consider doing so.

I will post a copy of my submission after 23rd June, as I consider others should write their thoughts, not mine.

One note of caution is that I have not finished reading all the details as yet, and thus there may be something which precludes my submission, in which case I will send it to the relevant Minister and regret the lost opportunity.

 The invitation is at https://engage.vic.gov.au/caravan-parks-regulations-sunset-review.

*****
 It's a few hours early, but in the end I went with a simple form entry rather than the more complex document I had started working on. My submission is below.


What do you think about caravan park registration requirements?
This can include length of registration period, documents required, suggested categories of registration. Feedback can relate to caravan parks as a whole, or different types of park.
No comment

What do you think about caravan park safety requirements?
This can include fire safety requirements and reports, emergency management plans, flood risks, safety of common areas. This can relate to caravan parks as a whole, or different types of park.
No comment

What do you think about the facilities that are/should be required in caravan parks?
This can include required number of toilet and shower units, standards for water quality, lighting, rubbish, or the maintenance of facilities. This can relate to caravan parks as a whole, or different types of park.
No comment

What do you think about movable dwellings standards?
This can include construction, installation, and compliance requirements. 'Unregisterable movable dwellings' includes cabins and dwellings in residential villages, but does not include caravans.
The following comments are based on owner-built (and for those people, it would be extremely beneficial for a single and readily accessible document detailing all applicable requirements in an understandable way for the lay person, as the construction document is the first time I have been able to find these) or built-for-an-owner tiny home.
This should include tiny homes, however tiny homes can be transported by truck / trailer, so they do NOT necessarily have to be registerable.
Tiny homes have been designed by architects, so they are capable of being built to most building requirements EXCEPT size. However, if building to higher standards is made COMPULSORY, the low cost advantages of tiny homes is lost, and they become useless as a means to prevent or address homelessness. Also, the tiny home market could potentially be used to help cater for downturns in the larger house market - provided they are affordable. (It is unlikely that this will become a major portion of the market, as the number of people who wish to live this way is a small, but unknown percentage of the total housing market.)
What SHOULD be made compulsory is means of securing them in high wind, and (unless they will only be use in a park with adequate facilities), for wastewater, a composting toilet / onboard WwTP (e.g., small MBR) / holding tank - the latter of which should also include grey water. In addition, tiny homes can be constructed to be fire resistant - see, for instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2FyCO9FJ-s
With regard to environmental standards, the main benefit is their small size, and thus more stringent requirements for insulation may be counter-productive as they will result in fewer people being able to pursue this option. Similarly, minimum sizes would be counterproductive (and, frankly, absurd, as the small size is one of the key attractions - and those advocating for imposition of a minimum size should be careful they are not trying to impose their preferences and comfort zones on a small percentage of people who are genuinely OK not living in a semi-palace).
Expert inspection during construction would be useful if inspectors had the attitude of trying to enable / aid those building tiny homes - but it is vital that flexibility be allowed (e.g., GRP construction / steel frames may be used at some stage, if not already).
For the tiny homes in this category, universal design should no more be imposed than for private larger, fixed dwellings. However, if the tiny home is publicly owned (e.g., as part of a homelessness project), universal design would be appropriate.

Do you have any other feedback on how the current regulations are working, or suggested changes?
If you have any other feedback, or are unsure where to include your feedback, please provide it here.
As has been shown in some overseas cities, allowing people to have tiny homes in their backyards can be a quick way to address homelessness and aid those at risk of homelessness. This also allow homeowners to gain a source of income by renting space, with minimal cost (connection to sewer, and possibly water and power).
The developments of tiny homes also shows it is possible to live comfortably in much smaller places than the current range of palaces on offer in most areas, and some houses have been built using tiny home principles - for instance, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPBDPcqfCwA Smaller houses would result in an IMMEDIATE reduction of both construction and operating GHG emissions (and costs), so ALL area requirements should be reviewed with the intention of reducing the area requirements to around half of what they are now.
It would also be useful if all surveys on the size of dwellings desired by people included guidance on likely costs, so that such surveys don't show unrealistic pipe dreams.
For those who cannot build their own tiny home, ways of encouraging the market to move into this in a reasonable way (especially during downturns for conventional houses) would be beneficial.

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Tuesday 21 May 2019

An aging world and other myths

When I came back to Victoria in the mid-1980s, the water industry had an infrastructure replacement fund - in the jargon of today's world, where people give an old concept a new world so they can pretend it's new (like calling "Whole of Catchment Plan" an "Integrated Water Management Plan"), that would probably be called "asset replacement fund". It was a certain amount of money put aside each year so that when an asset reached the end of its life, you had money to replace or, at the very least, repair it.

Ignoring inflation for the moment, say a pipe was going to last 50 years; you would save 2% of the cost of the pipe each year so that when it was about to fail significantly, you had the money to replace it, or do enough repairs to keep it going.

In the field of public infrastructure, it makes good sense - if the world had followed that practice, we wouldn't now be facing an "infrastructure cliff" (not my term) of assets built for the baby boomer era that are now all going to fail, while we don't have enough (any?) money to deal with the problem.

You could consider it, in a sense, a retirement scheme for pipes, roads and other public infrastructure, except that it is unemotional replacement, not impractical retirement of an object meant to provide an active service for the public good.

Retirement . . . that also raises another matter: that of our proportionally aging population - that is, we proportionally have more older people. In the arena of economic thought, where money is supposed to be "active", pensions are supposed to be paid by the rest of the population, rather than out of money set aside for a known, coming expense. Governments seem to have a habit of wanting that money to come from other sources, rather than the government equivalent of the everyday person's practice of setting aside money for a rainy day, and for clearly known coming expenses.

Thus, we have had superannuation schemes introduced to attempt to ensure that retirees have enough money to live on comfortably (they often don't, partly because of fallacious assumptions about home ownership, but that is another matter) without taxes on younger people that may reach a level that causes the younger people to vote for someone else - sorry, that are "unsustainable".

Now, effectively, the saving is being pushed from the public sector to the private sector. There are efficiencies in that, as the public sector quite rightly is obliged to focus on rules of accountability to ensure there is no waste, corruption, etc, but this would result in a reduced rate of return of saved money, whereas the private (superannuation) sector focuses on rates of return . . . and loses a lot of money when things like the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 occur . . .

I'm not quite sure why the government fund couldn't be invested in a superannuation fund or similar, or even used to provide funding for public projects (there are often what are called "internal rates of return", which are effectively what most people would consider interest rates).

Another aspect of public finances is that of opportunity income - things like what was covered by the "mineral resource rent tax" introduced by the Gillard government. That tax was, in my opinion, a completely reasonable thing - to choose an equivalent from an everyday person's life, it is like winning lotto, and setting a side a portion to make sure you can spend the rest of your life living comfortably, before you go wild with travel and parties, etc (incidentally, most lotto winners lose all their winnings within two years).

To continue the analogies with everyday life for a moment, the infrastructure replacement fund would be the equivalent of making sure you had enough money set aside to cover replacing fridges etc when they reach the end of their life without having to get a loan (and credit cards are loans). 

There are a few other points I'd like to make here, in passing:
  • until the Andrews government, decades of governments have been reducing spending on infrastructure because (a) they thought there would be votes in reduced taxes, (b) for ideological reasons, as with the neoliberals - including the neoliberals who seem to infest world financial organisations and infect the ideologies of same, or (c) both the preceding; 
  • in the 1980s, it was accepted that governments would take out loans to pay for infrastructure. This was shot down by the infesting ideologues of the neoliberal movement, but it also did (while it existed) create a true, intergenerational version of "user pays". The neoliberals I was working for back then prattled on about "user pays", but what they really meant was "current users pay for all now".
A lot of battles have been lost - then, and since, on the provision of infrastructure, and the management of public money. If I could, I would love to reinstitute the practice of saving to replace infrastructure, but that does seem to put a burden on the current generation to pay for future generations' infrastructure, except it doesn't really, as it only provides money to replace the current infrastructure: at the time it is replaced, there will need to be additional expenditure to expand the infrastructure for population growth, and the demands of new working conditions (e.g., replacing a pipe in an open area costs a certain amount, but replacing it after that area subsequently becomes developed costs a lot more).

Perhaps more importantly, as we move into the climate crisis, is ensuring we spend sufficient money to maintain assets properly. I've done some work in my day job on this, and proper maintenance was one of the main aspects of ensuring infrastructure resilience. Personally, I would like to see every grant for an asset such as a country road include an ongoing allowance for maintenance (or an amount set aside for that purpose in the grant), but the ideologues often work on the basis that "we'll pay to build it, but you must pay to maintain it", which often ignores the arguments of broader social benefit that underlay the construction grant in the first place.

In terms of how we change from the current situation, I consider that Norway has the best approach: they outsourced responsibility for thinking about such matters to a philosopher. Either the Norwegian government or the state oil company (they won't answer any emails, so I can't find details other than passing references in the media) hired a philosopher to advise on how to achieve the greatest good with income from their oil revenue, and the philosopher advised them to start . . . setting some money aside.

Here's to our Chief Scientist, Chief Veterinarian and Chief Medical Officer being joined by our Chief Philosopher :)



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Monday 20 May 2019

Humans, Humanity, and Human Rights - Chapter 1 (F)

This project commenced with a conceptual outline, published on Saturday 1st December, 2018, at: https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2018/12/humans-humanity-and-human-rights.html
I’ve decided I’ll post each chapter in its first, raw state, and you, Dear Reader, can see if my later research (probably long after I've finished this first version, in my retirement, should I be fortunate enough to actually get to retire) led to any change. (You can also think about the points I am making.) 
I've come up with an initial structure of the book (no guarantees it won't change), and will add the links to each chapter in the latest installment as they are published. Owing to the size of each chapter, I will have to publish this using the sub-chapters. Links below, and also here.

*****

Chapter One – Introduction to Concepts, and On Early Humans

F.  Our genetic neighbours, gatherer-hunters, and being humane


OK, so I have mentioned “moving out of Africa”.
J.C. Peters writes, in “History that Changed the World” (pub. Odyssea Publishing, 2017, ISBN 978-90-825063-5-8 [Amazon] [1] ):
“Around 70,000 years ago, humans began to spreads outside of Africa, to Europe, Asia and beyond.
There they encountered other hominins, who had evolved from the Homo erectus that had left Africa some 1.5 million years earlier.”
In the context of this book, I am not interested in the arguments/”discussions” about when this happened, nor by which route it happened, as the mechanics around its commencement.
To set the scene for this a little, a high school teacher began a lesson by showing a photo of several species of herbivores (I think zebras and a horned critter- possibly impala?) peacefully grazing together . . . and then commented that the species we could see we in competition for resources, and that eventually one of the species would “drive the other out” (or some similar phrasing).
It was quite incongruent with the peacefulness of the scene, but, more to the point now, illustrated that academic language does not necessarily mesh well with common understanding of terms (which is a failing of the academic world now being - partly – addressed by projects such as “The Conversation” newspaper [2] . . . a dash of common sense and some swallowing of intellectual hubris/arrogance wouldn’t hurt either, but that also applies to many other areas of life, including a wide range of professions such as the one I work in J ).
Thus, the various pressures that drove early modern humans out of Africa were not necessarily physically violent – and, when such physical confrontations did occur, it is quite likely that they were based on bluff and intimidation, rather than just going straight into causing as much harm as is possible.
On that, keep in mind:
·         the Guardian article I referred to in the previous sub-chapter, that leadership was about “more than bullying” [3] ;
·         that there is quite a bit of evidence that humans are hard wired against causing actual harm – militaries spend a great deal of effort overcoming this, as is discussed by Paul K Chappell [4] (e.g., pp 63 – 65 AND PP. 168 – 178 of “The Cosmic Ocean” [5] )and is fairly well summarised in an online video by “Lindybeige” (Nikolas Lloyd) called “Shooting to kill - how many men can do this?” [6] ; and
·         the term “ritualised aggression” [7] .
So, even if physical harm did not occur, it is quite possible (actually, I would go as far as “quite likely”) that some harm did occur – we understand quite well these days that fear and trauma cause harm, and even dedicate a significant amount of resources to finding a ”cure” [8] .
From Paul K. Chappell’s section on fear of human aggression (pp. 210 – 217) in “The Cosmic Ocean”:
“. . . around 98% of people have a phobia of human aggression. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman calls this the universal human phobia.”
“What is more psychologically traumatizing, falling off you bike and breaking your leg, or a group of attackers holding you down and breaking your leg with a baseball bat?”
(I’ve often thought that, when we hear people advocating toughness, including carrying weapons, we’re not hearing that person as such, we’re actually hearing their trauma speak through them.)
So, considering that pressures are not necessarily physically violent, but that we’re also likely to try to avoid aggression, what could have been at play when humans started moving out of Africa?
Well, that could – speculatively – have included:
1.       simple human curiosity –what is over that next hill?;
2.       increased contact and possibly a perception of pressure;
3.       a quest for more land / resources; or
4.       an individual’s / small group’s quest for more power.
On that second point, an article on aggression in chimpanzees noted that “attacks were more common at sites with many males and high population densities” [9] . The effect of overpopulation / crowding is, in my opinion, one of the most seriously under-acknowledged issues in the modern world.
The cluelessness – that’s both my word and my opinion – that I’ve seen on this includes:
·         town planner’s blithely advocating for increased urban densities with no consideration or even awareness of the problems that perceived lack of personal space / privacy can occur – especially when trying to import views on this from one culture to another;
·         misattribution of causation to other secondary effects of crowding / overpopulation [10] ;
·         a false and pervasive assumption that overcrowding has to be extreme (e.g., at those levels found in institutions [11] ) before it causes problems;
·         a false equivalence between public and private open space (i.e., parks vs. one’s own backyard); and
·         a simple lack of research because academics are, on this issue – and I’m letting my frustration run rampant here, a pack of idiots.
Despite that last dot point, there is some work that can be drawn on [12]. As an example, the following excerpt from student essay (“The Real Root of All Evil? Overpopulation!”) is from https://www.deltacollege.edu/student-life/student-media/delta-winds/1999-table-contents/real-root-all-evil-overpopulation:
“The harmful psychological effects of overcrowding due to overpopulation were made clear to me in a biology class. I read about an experiment where two rats were put into a cage and allowed to reproduce freely. At first they got along fine. That soon changed. The number of rats multiplied but they remained in the original cage. As their numbers increased, they started to exhibit anti-social behavior. The outcome of overcrowding is the same with humans. The less space people have to live in, the harder it is for them to get along. As people compete, not only for space but also for food, water and air, the more hostile their behavior becomes. Crime, and a lack of respect for other people, becomes more common as personal space is reduced. Violence is more prevalent in highly populated areas, as are other forms of criminal behavior. This is probably due to aggression and anxiety brought on by a lack of personal space.”
On a similar note, and similarly from an “informal” source, from an article titled “What's the Psychological Impact of Overpopulation? Here's a Horrific Experiment”:
“In 1972, eight mice were placed in a utopia. Full of food, water, bedding, and space for 3000 mice. Within three years there were no survivors.”
The stages described are particularly interesting, and the articles points towards the work in the 1940s and 1960s of Dr John B. Calhoun [13] , who coined the term “behavioural sink” [14] (“Calhoun's work became used as an animal model of societal collapse, and his study has become a touchstone of urban sociology and psychology in general”), and whose work contributed to “the development of Edward T. Hall’s [15] 1966 proxemics [16] theories”.
This is, to me, self-evident: people need adequate personal space for psychological health and wellbeing [17] – they also need intimacy from trusted people, but anyone making that response to this point is raising an irrelevancy, and should be chastised for detracting from the point.
The need for personal space is not only physical, it is psychological – hence the right to freedom of thought.
Every child arguing with their sibling over this issue knows it too, and, although they struggled to cater for this, Victorian era town planners did what they could with public green spaces [18] .
Conscious awareness of the need for adequate space is not a modern issue. From a “Science Abbey” series article titled “Overpopulation: The World’s Most Serious Problem – Part I” [19] :
“Urban overcrowding was an issue as far back as the sixth century BCE. In ancient China the revered philosopher Confucius advised the government to control the balance between land and the rural population with forced migration.”
So . . . hoping off my soap box (another Victorian era reference [20] J ) and going back to the bright, shiny, just-out-of-the-evolution-box humans, well, let me remind you of the possible causes for drifting out of Africa that I was speculating about:
1.       simple human curiosity –what is over that next hill?;
2.       increased contact and possibly a perception of pressure;
3.       a quest for more land / resources; or
4.       an individual’s / small group’s quest for more power.
I have the impression that the second point, and to a lesser extent the third, are generally considered to be the main reasons for this gradual move by most people. To refine that a little, the concept of “fission-fusion” dynamics and aggression [21] (i.e., groups splintering into smaller groups, which then make different combinations) refines this a little, but as a whole it is still similar to the interconnected characteristics of a gas that we describe as temperature and pressure: as the molecules of the gas vibrate faster they bump into each other more, and also as the pressure increases the molecules bump into each other more. If the molecules of gas had their way, the collisions would drive them further apart.
This is a little simplistic, though.
One of the aspects I liked about Jean M Auel’s Earth’s Children series is that it – to some extent - illustrates the role that simple human curiosity had in the spread of humanity.
The other aspect is the quest for power – the prelude to building empires, not fully manifested yet as ways of supporting large groups had not been developed, but still there in a nascent sense. At this stage of our evolution, I consider this fourth point effectively a race between the majority of humans working out the benefits of rejecting aggressive leaders and choosing collaboration / cooperation and the minority of humans working out how to effectively dominate other people.
We could have benefitted from a time machine dropping an explanation of economic, social and cultural rights into the laps of those early people perhaps (assuming it could be translated, of course), or the skills to manage increased population. As an example of that, consider the following from https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2007-07-01-voa12/343044.html
“ . . . the stability of populous countries like the United States and Japan serves to show that overpopulation can be successfully managed. . . .  Whether instability is worsened by overpopulation or uneven distribution of natural resources, most experts warn that countries with high population growth and not enough resources to provide for their people are likely to breed unrest locally and export it abroad.”
Better alternatives existed, but we had not developed that knowledge at that time, and probably needed to undergo additional development ourselves before we could. We were gatherer-hunters, and could recognise when resources were being overloaded: the choice was move elsewhere, or fight and possibly lose some of our most valuable resources – people.
So the various pressures from bumping into each other and from uncontrolled aggression led to us expanding out of Africa.


[2] See https://theconversation.com/au, which is the original site.
[5] Pub. Prospecta Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-63226-009-3
[12] There has been some, flawed thought it is  - for example, see http://theipti.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/covariance.pdf, which does not clearly allow for poverty, personal living space, etc.




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