Leaving Trieste

Trieste, for those who don't know the city, is a little pearl of a place on the edge of the Adriatic, far closer to the Former Yugoslavia than to most of Italy, and quite apart from them both.

It's a city of German buildings painted in Italian colors, the Adria profoundly flat, its old docks perfectly empty but with the elegance of a crumbling stately home.

It was Austro-hungarian all its prosperous days, and its prejudices still lean that way among the older families.

Its always been a mix, a Babel, where James Joyce wrote Ulysses, and where blonde ethnic Slovenes with their long shins and freckles make easy strides up impossible hills, cobbled in the overlapping rays of a Roman road.

There is no new money here, no young wealth. On the beach, fat older men display with their trophy wives, with a look of pride and anxiety.

The biggest Synagogue in Europe sits resplendent in the heart of a city mostly without Jews. They stayed on here during the war, feeling secure in their long residence, though thousands fleeing fascism left through this very port, including Albert Einstein.

But in the end, Mussolini went and the Nazis proper came, and the Jews of Trieste were gone.

It's streets are lovely, its people also; like kletzmer music, the sadness of the past is there, but the joy of the moment is too, and it's this that stays with you when the music stops.

A girl in bad, 80's stone-wash jeans and worn ballet flats looks up at me as I pass, with the face of a Renaissance angel and a Czech beer, beside her fat friend on the front step of an old building. I have to turn my shoulder to let past a bald 40 year old riding past on a rusted women's fixie. He passes tourists in Gucci, and patricians of his own city, politely swerving with a look of benevolent Imperium, and precisely half a smile. 

I have come to believe that the mental habits acquired from thinking along the lines of Theology and the Critical Dialectic are among the major barriers that presently exist to thinking well about subjects for which our intuition is not a reliable guide.

I refer, of course, to statistical methods, quantitative analysis, and the scientific method generally. In particular, the interaction between these and public policy.

We are not doing a very good job of this.

There are so many laws and policies that just don't add up quantitatively, and so many arguments put about in defence of them that show those making them have absolutely no respect for reason or evidence.

Drug laws are an excellent example. In Australia, I am reliably informed, close to 10,000 people die each year because of adverse reactions to legal pharmaceuticals, either alone or in combination with each other. This is viewed as quite normal. In contrast, deaths directly attributable to Cannabis are extremely few, and, in spite of lots of assertions to the contrary, the prevalence of schizophrenia has remained steady through the decades, even as cannabis users' numbers have climbed from nearly zero to about eight million Australians presently. If cannabis caused it to any detectable extent, there should be more of it now than 1955. But we don't see that.

Genes, and influenza infection during gestation do seem to play a part. Low IQ, and being the child of an older father all seem to increase the risk somewhat. But let's not confuse the issue with facts and science and rubbish. Lets make a "dialectic", not a "mechanistic" argument.

Legalizing cannabis would send a bad message to our children.

I have to restrain myself from profane incivility when I hear arguments like this.

The Criminal Justice System is not there to send messages to children. It is society's last line of defence against criminal behaviour. One does not put a seven year old into an iron cage with a violent offender to teach him about his parents' preferences for recreational drugs (Nicotine and Ethanol good, Cannabis and Peyote bad).

 One does it when a person poses such a risk to the community that we cannot let him walk the streets and need to protect society from him. Thats fucking it, people. That's what it is, thats what it's for.

Similarly statistics and crime, immigration and culture, gay rights and Jesus, end up in the most absurd arguments. Its because we do not often call the unreasonable, the deceptive, and the ideologically hallucinating to account for their frequent departures from evidence based reasoning.

I am bloody tired of it. Especially I am sick of cowardly, precious little groups who pile into their stinking  foxholes, and reassure one another that they are the keepers of a noble truth, invulnerable to understanding by the evil, linear, rationalizing, newtonian science bigots.

They 'debunk' true things that they never do disprove, and one suspects often do not even really understand, because they explain the world through untestable assumptions, that they defend instead of examining.

This goes for the religious right and the illiberal left in equal measure. It is the same bad conduct, with different mythologies and prejudices.

We need statistical measures in order to know what the fuck is going on with large populations. We need genetics to understand disease. We need Evolutionary psychology to understand human behaviour, including crime. We need history and accurate reporting to understand geopolitics. And we need science to inform policy at the highest levels.

 And now would be a good time.

I am feeling acutely aware of the pressures on my time these days.

There are SO many things that I want to build, and everywhere I look there are opportunities for technology to do things better. Especially in our use of Energy in industry and HVAC.

The little load switch we built is growing legs and turning into a real business before my eyes, but looks like it will occupy a vast amount of my time as well.

Life truly needs to be a cooperative effort. I cannot do this alone. But now, I believe in money more than ever before. Not in some absolute sense, but because it allows us to keep track of who does what for whom  accurately, if not always fairly.

Honestly, I have tried all the informal, bartering,  mates-and-family helping-each-other-out kind of thing, and I hate it.

I tell you what: some skills are valuable. Construction, electrical trades, auto mechanics, the ability to move heavy objects, and the ability to do complex logistical tasks: the demand for these massively outstrips the supply in a normal community.

If you are swapping hour for hour, then anyone with these skills ends up with a broken back and almost nothing of value in exchange for it.

People can always think up random ways of chewing up your time, in ways that are important to them. Not productive endeavors that lead to greater welfare for the whole community, just prettying up their patch.

I'm over it. Let people pay their way. Lets have fair exchange, equitable wages, and use money to keep track of who is pulling their weight and who is having a lend.

Of course, this breaks down when you have absurd salaries and government spending making a mockery out of people's wages. That distorts the shit out the whole arrangement, and makes mooching after governments and corporate types into substitute for actual industry. It needs to stop.