Correlation between education and voting in the USA

Here's an interesting little rabbit hole to go down. Based on US census data, the best-educated American states are:

1. Massachusetts
2. Colorado
3. Vermont 
4. Marylamd
5. New Jersey 
6. Virginia
7. Connecticut
8. New Hampshire
9. New York
10. Washington

The least-educated states are;

1. West Virginia
2. Mississippi
3. Arkansas
4. Louisiana
5. Kentucky
6. Nevada
7. Oklahoma
8. Alabama
9. Indiana
10. New Mexico

Well, maybe you could have guessed most of those. But what's interesting is the correlation of these results with election results.

ALL of the top ten educated states vote Democrat. And ALL of the top ten least educated states voted Republican.

Of course, it could just be coincidence.

China's immovable smoking addiction

By all accounts, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave up an atrocious smoking habit some fifteen years ago. His country, though, is making zero - or rather negative - progress on his attempts to reduce China's awful addiction to smoking.

Over the last twenty years, smoking in the rest of the world has fallen by a respectable 26%; in China, over that period, it increased by 39%. China now accounts for nearly half of the global total of cigarettes smoked, some 2.4 trillion every year. While the percentage of smokers in China has fallen a bit, as fewer young people take up the habit, overall cigarette sales have continued an inexorable rise.

Part of the problem is that cigarettes are ridiculously cheap in China - at around $3 a pack on average, they are about a third of the price of smokes in the USA and Canada. China ratified WHO's tobacco control treaty in 2005, but has never really implemented its strictest provisions. Unlike the graphic health warnings on North American and European cigarettes, Chinese cigarettes have a simple, unobtrusive text warning, all but lost among the patriotic symbols that adorn the cigarette packs produced by the China National Tobacco Corp (CNTC), a vast state-owned monopoly and the world's largest producer of cigarettes. 

Indeed, the CNTC is the main problem. Generating annual profits of $244 billion last year, the CNTC alone contributes an eye-popping 7% of China's tax income each year, about the same as what it spends on defence. (Roughly half of the sales revenue of each cigarette flows into government coffers.) The company has also been called on to help out with specific strategic priorities, like financially shoring up one of China's biggest banks, funding national semi-conductor investment, etc. In short, it has made itself economically indispensable, and accumulated a lot of political influence in the process. 

It's also alarmingly corrupt: seven former top administrators of the CNTC have been arrested on corruption charges in the last seven years. It has successfully blocked a concerted national push for an indoor smoking ban, and even official studies have concluded that the state monopoly has actively interfered in national and local attempts to rein in smoking. It's influence is, obviously, even more marked in tobacco-growing regions like Kunming and Changde, where tobacco taxes can account for more than half of the city's budget. 

There are local "tobacco bureaus" that actively work to water down even modest anti-smoking initiatives. In one city, the local health commission proposed a system of smoke-free public areas, but the local tobacco bureau managed to ensure it did not apply to restaurants and bars, and even tried to limit the smoke-free designation in schools to elementary and middle schools only.

We think of President Xi as ruling China with a rod of iron, but even his attempts to reduce the country's smoking addiction have met with the immovable object of the powerful smoking lobby.

Is Mark Carney's extended honeymoon period starting to sour?

Mark Carney has been granted a generous, even unprecedented, honeymoon period as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and as Prime Minister of the country. This is partly - mainly - due to the singular circumstances he has inherited (basically, Donald Trump and the chaos that inevitably follows him around). But, either way, Carney is currently basking in an enviable 67% approval rate, something most other world leaders can only dream of right now, and a comfortable +8% approval of the direction he is taking the country in. After a year in government, Mr. Carney is more popular than when he was elected, and his party now has a small majority, rather than the large minority it was elected with.

This all sounds exceptional, and certainly, compared to the likes of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer, it is. But, in fact, it's not dissimilar to Justin Trudeau's popularity rating a year into his tenure a decade ago, and look how he turned out! The big test of leaders often comes after about 15 months, sometimes referred to as the "15 Month Itch".

After the events of the last few weeks, you have to wonder whether that itch is starting to be felt. At the end of April, fourteen (unspecified) members of the Liberal caucus published a letter bemoaning the government's anti-environmental trajectory. Because it's undeniable the Carney has indeed presided over a wholesale roll-back and deliberate weakening of the environmental initiatives of his predecessor. Among other things, he has repealed the consumer carbon tax, eliminated the EV sales mandate, ended the oil and gas emissions cap, and called a halt to plans to end fossil fuel subsidies. Improbably, Carney maintains he is still an ardent environmentalist and climate change leader, and that he is just being practical and pragmatic, but his actions belie that. To call it a "pivot" hardly does it justice.

Then, just this week, after Mr. Carney followed though on his disastrous pipeline agreement with Alberta, the prominent MP, environmentalist and Liberal Quebec "lieutenant" Steven Guilbeault tendered his resignation, first from his position in the Cabinet and then as a Member of Parliament, on the grounds that he cannot in good conscience watch the Liberal Party abandon its environmental stance. As environment minister, Mr. Guilbeault was the architect of many of the Trudeau-era environmental policies, which he has watched being comprehensively dismantled by Carney. As a man of conscience and principle, it is all he can do to walk away.

Now, not everyone is as principled as Steven Guilbeault. Most of the 67% that still support Mark Carney (including a good proportion of Conservatives) clearly believe, as Carney himself does, that, at this particular moment in time, economic imperatives outweigh the nice-to-have option of environmental initiatives. Even though the consequences of climate change and other environmental deteriorations may be much more important in the long run, it's hard for people to see past the short-term challenges of inflation, job losses, housing shortages, etc. In times of economic fragility, it's always "the economy, stupid", and I get that.

But I wonder whether the growing schism in the Liberal Party between what you might call the "Economy First" and the "Environment First" factions is an important one? 14 out of 174 Liberal MPs is not a huge number, after all, but I do wonder if it might be the start of a fissure, the start of a 15 Month Itch. My guess, though, is not: pragmatism will win out over principle. Stupid.

Potential investors in Spacex should be very wary

The IPO for Elon Musk's SpaceX is expected to be the biggest ever, and will convert it into an almost $2 trillion enterprise. However, potential investors might want to have a good look at the way the company is set up, and particularly how Musk is paid and how his share holdings work.

An IPO (Initial Public Offering) is the way that a private company transforms into a publicly traded company, and is the way that companies raise capital for expansion. It allows institutional and retail investors to get a piece of what they think will be an exciting and profitable venture. SpaceX may well be exciting - space! rockets! Mars! - although the profitability piece is much less certain.

And concerning Musk's position, investors should be pretty wary about investing in a company that has been expressly constructed around him in order to maximize his income and his control. The shares that will become available for ordinary investors at next month's IPO will be Class A shares that confer one vote each. What Mr. Musk has are Class B "super-voting" shares that carry 10 votes a share. Musk has 5.5 billion of these B shares, giving him around 85% of all votes. And he has those votes even though he doesn't technically have the shares in his hands until the company achieves some increasingly-unlikely targets, such as establishing a colony on Mars with a million inhabitants, launching high-powered data centres into space, etc. 

This set-up allows Musk almost complete control over the company, including an ability to appoint insiders to its board, to set his own compensation package, to insulate himself from shareholder lawsuits, etc. Investment experts say they have never seen anything like it, calling it "insane" and that the governance structure "freaks me out".

Caveat emptor, caveat emptor, caveat emptor!

The other disease outbreak that no-one is talking about

With all the attention on hantavirus and ebola outbreaks, the devastating measles outbreak in Bangladesh has gone all but unnoticed. What measles outbreak, you ask? Well, precisely.

In just two short months, since mid-March, Bangladesh has seen 60,000 suspected measles cases and 528 suspected measles-related deaths, the vast majority of them children under 5 years old. Yikes!

The irony is that, under disgraced ex-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed, Bangladesh was making good progress on completely eliminating measles in the country, with a robust community-led vaccination campaign. After the July Uprising of 2024, though, the interim government dropped the ball, the vaccination supply was disrupted, and immunization campaigns postponed. The whole thing was made worse by hospital staffing shortages caused by, among other things, foreign aid cuts, principally by the Trump administration in the USA.

And here we see the consequences. UNICEF and the WHO have watched it happening and issued stern warnings, but nothing has changed. This is now the largest measles outbreak in Bangladesh in decades and hospitals are already overwhelmed, with no end in sight.

US crusade against Cuba makes no sense

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's usual function in the US government is to try to settle things down after yet another wild outburst from his boss, Donald Trump, who, as we know, has anger management and impulse control issues (among many other issues).

On one brief, though, Rubio is probably even more hawkish than Trump, and that issue is Cuba. After all, there is no good reason why Trump should care that much about Cuba: it has little in the way of economic or strategic importance, which is what usually exercises Trump's twisted mind. He appears to be guided by Rubio on this one.

Because Rubio DOES have skin in that game, or at least he seems to think he does. Rubio was actually born and raised in Florida, but his parents were Cuban, and he seems to share the acute sense of grievance that so many Cuban-Americans feel. Despite living the good life in the Sunshine State, many ex-Cubans and their descendants are desperate for retribution against the Castros for pushing them out, as they see it, from their island paradise. 

These are not working-class ex-Cubans (which the Castro revolution actually helped raise up from penury and almost medieval serfdom under the pre-revolution Washington-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista); these are the old wealthy landowners and middle-class professionals. Pre-revolutionary Cuba was not a pleasant place for the poor, but a near-utopia for the wealthy. Being displaced from that is what really rankles for many Florida Cubans (and their descendants), and they want revenge.

But here's the thing: very few Cuban-Americans living in Florida today have any first-hand experience of the Cuban Revolution 67 years ago, or of the supposed paradise that preceded it (actually a brutal dictatorship, defined by rampant corruption, censorship and ties to the American mafia). Most of their rancour and sense of grievance is based more on family lore and race memory, warped and overblown throughout the decades, a kind of foundational myth with little base in reality. This is also Mr. Rubio's background.

Actually, Marco Rubio's parents left Cuba in 1956, over two years BEFORE the revolution, so arguably they were not even displaced by the revolution (although maybe they saw the writing on the wall). That makes Rubio an American born of Cuban parents who voluntarily left before the revolution. So, how much skin can he really be said to have in it? He is, though, the designated representative of many other displaced Cubans in Miami (or, mainly these days, their descendants), hence his apparent ardour on the subject.

Either way, one gets the impression that it is Rubio that is driving this latest crackdown by America. Trump probably doesn't care that much, other than about the Cuban-American vote. Rubio often claims the Cuban government is a severe national security threat to the US, although pretty much everyone knows that is not true.

The United States has long maintained a debilitating embargo on Cuba, an embargo that Trump recently made much, much worse by denying the country its essential imports of oil, which used to come mainly from Venezuela (which is now effectively controlled by the US). This has led to devastating power cuts, food shortages, transportation standstill, and a general  disabling of its entire economy. Most recently, Trump's DoJ has announced the indictment of 94-year old Raúl Castro (Fidel's brother) on "Trumped-up" charges relating to events back in 1996. It's even possible that another Maduro-style kidnapping is in the pipeline. How is arresting and trying a doddering old man going to help anything?

So, all this vitriol is directed against a small island in the Caribbean which is hard-pressed to keep its own population alive and in order, let alone present a threat to the mighty USA. It's hard to credit. This crusade against Cuba makes no real sense, not even for Marco Rubio. But then, why are we still looking for sense with this administration?

Remember COVID? It's still with us

I happened to read a letter in the newspaper that gave some rather striking statistics about the death rates from COVID-19 in various countries. Turns out they were true.

According to Wikipedia/Our World In Data, Canada's death rate from COVID to date has been 1,424 per million; the USA's has been 3,624 per million, and for the EU as a whole it was 2,831 per million. I'd say that was a statistically significant difference! Countries that observed even tighter controls than Canada showed even better (lower) death rates: New Zealand (884 per million), Japan (597 per million), Singapore (358 per million), etc. Next time someone complains about government overreach during the pandemic, throw that in their face! Vaccinations and public health controls save lives! Surprise!

I haven't thought too much about COVID in a while, except to get our biannual vaccination, which I did just last week. It wasn't easy to find a vaccination - what a change from the good old bad old days! - but I did eventually track down a Moderna jab. This was not my first preference: I have always had a much worse reaction to Moderna than to Pfizer, but beggars can't be choosers. 

Several of the pharmacies I spoke to said that the government either didn't send them any stocks of the new vaccine, or sent so few that they ran out in a couple of days. That's just how it is these days, they griped. It seems ridiculous that we had to jump through so many hoops to get hold of a vaccine that should be part of our regular routine, like the flu jab.

That said, though, it does seem like, at the moment anyway, in the slow period of the year as we now are, there are very few reported/diagnosed/confirmed cases of COVID in our neck of the woods. 

The important part there, though, is "reported/diagnosed/confirmed". Most people do not report it or have it checked out these days unless they actually end up in hospital; many just assume it was a mild flu or some other infection. I've only had COVID once, about three years ago, but it was pretty nasty, and I'd prefer to avoid it if possible.

A new stream of reliable renewable energy: osmotic power

Renewable energy is still enjoying a period of robust expansion, despite the best efforts of Donald Trump (or, arguably, because of them).

But a relatively new and little-known source of renewable power is starting to come of age: osmotic power. While it might sound like a fictitious concept, or something the Power Rangers might invoke, the idea of the power of osmosis has been around for decades. Norway may be credited with the proof of concept of a practical power plant employing the notion, and Denmark opened the first fully-functioning osmotic power plant in 2023. But it is only with the recent commissioning of a full-scale, efficient, commercial plant at Fukuoka, Japan, that the real potential of the idea has become clear.

Osmosis is the movement of water from areas of low salt concentration to areas of high salt concentration through a membrane of some sort. It is the same principle that allows plants to draw water from the soil, and that keeps our own cells hydrated. In the context of power generation, as at Fukuoka, the difference in saltiness of seawater and freshwater is used to pull water across a membrane, increasing the pressure on the saltwater side. This pressure gradient can then be used to drive a turbine, thereby generating electricity.

In the case of Fukuoka, the saltwater is super-concentrated by using the brine left over from the operation of a nearby desalination plant, making the whole process much more efficient. The electricity generated is then fed back into the power-hungry desalination plant, as well as to supply a few hundred local homes. The power it generates is equivalent to about two soccer fields of solar panels, and it runs day and night, regardless of the weather. It produces zero carbon dioxide and no other harmful by-products.

The trick is to produce enough power to outweigh the energy cost of pumping the two streams of water into the power station, and the frictional loss across the membrane, which is what the Fukuoka plant has achieved. The idea is gathering steam [sic], and pilot projects are springing up in Norway, South Korea, Spain, Qatar and Australia. 

Right now, the modality is still in its infancy but, as technical challenges are gradually overcome and the concept comes of age, researchers say that it could eventually meet up to 15% of global energy demand by 2050 - not to be sniffed at. This prediction sounds overly optimistic, but it certainly represents yet another string to the essential bow of renewable energy.