Interesting Links for 24-06-2021

[andrewducker]

Roaming charges to return for travellers to EU in Brexit blow, leading operator announces

(tags:UK Europe phones )

Fact-checking the debate over low rape prosecution levels in England and Wales

(tags:rape law UK )

Scotland gets a surge of Covid cases because of football

(tags:football pandemic )

The Nordic Model of dealing with sex work is terrible.

(tags:sexwork nordic Sweden OhForFucksSake )

Brexit: The Biggest Claims From The Remain And Leave Campaigns That Never Happened

(tags:uk europe )

Large-scale CO2 removal facility set for Scotland

(tags:scotland co2 )

Almost 40% of Covid sufferers still experiencing persistent symptoms after 12 weeks

(tags:pandemic doom )

How the Covid vaccine really works (with cats!)

(tags:cats vaccine animation ViaDrCross )

Brexit: Collapse in British exports hands Irish Republic a trade surplus (cross-border trade between the Republic and Northern Ireland also massively up)

(tags:uk europe ireland trade )

Comments

Covid aftereffects

[channelpenguin]

"Researchers at Imperial College London said the prevalence of long-lasting symptoms was higher in women than men and that the risk increased with age."

Marvellous. So we can look forward to it being ignored, denied and dismissed. :-(

[casimirian]

I was wondering if they were going to produce vaccines for cats.

[andrewducker]

Alas, I suspect not.

[casimirian]

/o\

Oof. Sorry, misread the title by not reading the article.

CO2 Storage

[danieldwilliam]

I wonder if you could just dump the calcium carbonate in the middle of the ocean and avoid the heating to 900 degrees and pumping costs?

In any event, perhaps the best use for any surplus renewable electricity generated in an Overbuild and Reduce Storage type grid strategy.

Re: CO2 Storage

[danieldwilliam]

A former employer of mine is planning to connect to the North West Hydrogen Network and blend hydrogen gas in to their standard natural gas fuel

https://www.newpower.info/2021/06/intergen-plans-to-convert-rocksavage-to-blend-hydrogen-and-eventually-move-to-100-hydrogen-burn/

https://hynet.co.uk/

Re: CO2 Storage

[andrewducker]

Calcium Carbonate dissolves in water. I'm not sure if that would have a big effect on the sea around it. Or what the energy costs are of taking the calcium carbonate out to the middle of the ocean versus getting the CO2 out of it and pumping it out.

Re: CO2 Storage

[danieldwilliam]

So it does.

Then perhaps the question is how long the carbon would stay locked up in calcium carbonate if dumped in the ocean. If 10 years, it's not use, if 1,000 years then that might be useful.

Re: CO2 Storage

[andrewducker]

True - medium-term solutions definitely have their place!

Nordic Model

[danieldwilliam]

The Nordic Model is almost exactly 100% wrong I think.

Re: Nordic Model

[andrewducker]

That's my understanding, certainly.

Re: Nordic Model

[alithea]

Yes, all the evidence suggests it makes women less safe. So while the principle of making it illegal to buy access to someone's body sounds like a Right thing, in this imperfect reality, it just drives the issue underground, and surprise, surprise it's the vulnerable women who end up suffering rather than the costumers it was supposedly aimed at.

Re: Nordic Model

[danieldwilliam]

The fact that the evidence base for it reducing harm is very very poor is a pretty telling point against it.

And I note that as a society we are totally onboard with people paying money to buy access to other people's bodies in many other situations. Professional sports, coal-mining, acting are all seen as near heroic occupations. Waiting table, cleaning homes and offices and gardening less herioc but just as physical. Heck, part of my salary depends on the use of my hands.

I think if you want to regulate a market you need to make it legal, with painful consequences for not complying with the regulations. If you want to ban something then you either need near universal popular support for the ban or be willing to spend double-digit proportions of your GDP on enforcing the ban. The Nordic Model just seems to shift the locus of the ban from one group of participants to another group.

It doesn't do a great job of articulating the harm it is trying to prevent.

Re: Nordic Model

[alithea]

Aye, I think we have unhealthy attitudes towards sex in general and that definitely comes into play when deciding what physical labour is acceptable. I get that some sex workers are very vulnerable and not really doing it by choice, but surely the solution to that is UBI and support services, and then leaving the ones who are doing it by choice to run a legal business with the same protections as any other business, whether we personally find it distasteful or not. There are frankly, more distasteful ways of making a living that are perfectly legal.

Re: Nordic Model

[danieldwilliam]

For me the Nordic Model seems to be built around an assumption that a transaction that explicitly trades money for sex is intrinsically harmful.

Re: Nordic Model

[alithea]

It is. And that's a view I have a great deal of sympathy for. But it's also a view which is great in theory and awful in practice. I don't believe we'll ever convince everyone that that is the case and therefore we need to deploy strategies which minimise that harm for the most vulnerable. As we see with drugs policy, making things criminal does not do this.

Re: Nordic Model

[adrian_turtle]

But it's also a view which is great in theory and awful in practice.

The theory makes a lot of sense to me. Just like the theory that drug abuse is bad, but addicts are are mostly victims of it. Decriminalizing possession of small amounts of pot has been pretty good social policy--we know this experimentally. (It hasn't fixed everything we'd like it to fix. But it helps a little.

What bothers me so much about the nordic laws against sex work is how the experimental evidence is ignored. Why can't anyone say, "Whoops! This new policy isn't working, let's change it."

Re: Nordic Model

[alithea]

Fundamentally, I think the experimental evidence is ignored because people find it very easy to dehumanise sex workers. It's just like all the actual evidence shows that if we actually want to fix the drug problem, we should decriminalise all drug use, legalise softer drugs and treat heroine addicts in the healthcare system including by prescribing them actual morphine rather than methadone, which is ruddy awful stuff. But that would involve having a system that didn't punish poor people for being addicts, so it's not going to happen any time soon :(