John le Carré and Neil Gaiman join writers warning Brexit is 'choosing to lose'

Read this article about Brexit from a different point of view.


The Guardian_ Brexit and writers

Abandoned at sea

Abandoned at sea: the cargo crew adrift without wages, fuel or supplies

Listen to this podcast and learn about this amazing and apparently common way to avoid paying wages. How can human beings be so cruel!

Click here: Abandoned at sea

The Guardian, 20th May 2019

Climate crisis: flooding threat ‘may force UK towns to be abandoned’

Environment Agency calls for urgent action to protect country from river and coastal floods

Entire communities might need to be moved away from coasts and rivers as the UK takes urgent action to prepare for an average global temperature rise of 4C, the Environment Agency warned.

The agency said on Thursday that difficult decisions would have to be taken in the coming years to make sure the UK was resilient amid flooding that would not be held back by higher land defences.

Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the agency, set out the regulator’s long-term strategy for tackling flooding and coastal change, which, she said, was a preparation for a 4C rise in global temperatures. The rise is far in excess of the target of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels set in the legally binding Paris Agreement of 2015.

“The coastline has never stayed in the same place and there have always been floods, but climate change is increasing and accelerating these threats,” said Howard Boyd. “We can’t win a war against water by building away climate change with infinitely high flood defences. We need to develop consistent standards for flood and coastal resilience in England that help communities better understand their risk and give them more control about how to adapt and respond.”

The strategy text says the approach to flood protection a

“Resilience includes accepting that in some places we can’t eliminate all flooding and coastal change, and so we need to be better at adapting to living with the consequences – for example, by designing homes that can be restored quickly after they’ve been inundated with water, or potentially moving communities out of harm’s way.”

It is already thought unbeneficial to protect or adapt about 114 miles of coastline because of flooding, and more than 1,000 miles of coast are at risk of erosion.

A recent report from the government’s advisory panel the Committee on Climate Change said that by the 2080s up to 1.5m properties in England could be in areas of significant levels of flood risk.

In the Humber estuary rising sea levels and river flooding are putting 55,000 homes at risk. In 2013 a tidal surge hit the east coast, forcing thousands of people to abandon homes as areas of the North Sea rose to higher levels than had happened in the floods of 1953. In Devon, in 2014, people were forced from their homes and a key stretch of the railway link to the rest of the UK was destroyed in storms and flooding.

nd assessing risk had to change. “We need to act now without delay … we need to apply a different philosophy.”

Instead of acting once a flood had happened the country needed to build “climate resilient” communities, homes and businesses, and simply building bigger and bigger walls as defences was not the solution, the document says.

The policy calls for natural barriers and flood relief systems, but also for an increase in the resilience of homes and businesses against the inevitable flooding with such structures as flood doors and stone floors.

The strategy also makes clear that some areas of the UK and some homes and businesses cannot be protected. “Despite our collective best efforts, we will not always be able to prevent flooding and coastal change happening.” The priority in these areas will be to keep people safe, minimise damage and aid quick recovery. Ultimately it may also mean supporting individuals and communities in a move from an affected area.

More homes would be at risk in the future as the number of properties built on floodplains was likely to double over the next 50 years, the agency warns.

The agency set out a target, for up to 2050, for the UK to become resilient to flood and coastal risks, and for a policy of “resilience for places”, referring to the ability of communities to cope with, and recover from, all sources of flooding or coastal change.

The agency says an average outlay of £1bn a year will be needed to build traditional flood and coastal defences and allow for natural flood management.

“Flooding of any kind is horrendous,” the report says. “Erosion destroys. [Floods] are dirty, invasive, damaging, and can kill. They can force people to leave their homes and their businesses, cause prolonged mental ill health, and destroy livelihoods, natural habitats and other valued places. At best flooding and coastal change can be inconvenient and disruptive.”

Lord Deben, chair of the Committee on Climate Change, last week called for the British government to immediately set a legally binding target to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. He said the UK urgently needed to stay ahead of worsening impacts by adapting. “The Environment Agency is doing just that by setting out their flood strategy, but we won’t be able to keep up with the pace of change if we don’t reduce emissions to zero,” he said.

Mike Childs, head of science at Friends of the Earth, said smarter adaptation and building resilience to flooding was undeniably important but that the focus should be first and foremost on slashing emissions to avoid the worst consequences of climate chaos.

“With its relentless pursuit of fracking, airport expansion and road building, and barely tepid support for renewable energy, our government is failing with this regard,” Childs said.

The environment minister, Thérèse Coffey, said the government was already providing £2.6bn over six years, delivering more than 1,500 projects to better protect 300,000 homes. “But the threat of climate change will mean an increasing risk, and preparing the country is a priority for the government, and the nation as a whole,” she said, adding that the government would be launching a call for evidence to inform action on flood and coastal erosion risks.

The Guardian, 9 May 2019

An interesting TED talk about generosity and happiness

Click here to listen to this really interesting TED Talk:

TED Talk

UK high streets 'in downward spiral' with one in 10 shops empty

National town centre vacancy rate at highest level since April 2015, shows BRC monitor

One in 10 shops in UK town centres are lying empty, according to figures that underline the scale of the high street crisis.

The national town centre vacancy rate climbed to a four-year high of 10.2% last month, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC) vacancies monitor. The vacancy rate has risen in each of the last four quarters to give the highest reading since April 2015, up from 9.9% three months ago.

The BRC’s chief executive, Helen Dickinson, said some struggling high streets were trapped in a downward spiral: “Empty shopfronts, particularly for larger stores, can deter shoppers from an area. This effect can be cyclical, with the long-term decline in footfall pushing up vacancy rates, particularly in poorer areas.”

One in 10 shops in UK town centres are lying empty, according to figures that underline the scale of the high street crisis.

The national town centre vacancy rate climbed to a four-year high of 10.2% last month, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC) vacancies monitor. The vacancy rate has risen in each of the last four quarters to give the highest reading since April 2015, up from 9.9% three months ago.

The BRC’s chief executive, Helen Dickinson, said some struggling high streets were trapped in a downward spiral: “Empty shopfronts, particularly for larger stores, can deter shoppers from an area. This effect can be cyclical, with thvae long-term decline in footfall pushing up vacancy rates, particularly in poorer areas.”

The Guardian 13th May 2019

Unfortunately we have been suffering the same problem in Spain for a long time now. They don't mention the causes for this high vacancy rate, but probably it'll be due to ever-increading online shopping, among other causes, don't you think so?

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The power of music: Vicky McClure's dementia choir

A million people in the UK are expected to be living with dementia by 2025. While there is no cure, there's growing evidence that music can help ameliorate symptoms such as depression and agitation, writes Kelly Oakes - and also bring these people and their families some much-needed moments of joy.

Read this interesting article from the BBC News about how to overcome dementia.

BBC news

The privacy paradox: why do people keep using tech firms that abuse their data?

Despite privacy scandals, Facebook is more profitable than ever – journalists must use the tools of tech to understand why

A dark shadow looms over our networked world. It’s called the “privacy paradox”. The main commercial engine of this world involves erosion of, and intrusions upon, our privacy. Whenever researchers, opinion pollsters and other busybodies ask people if they value their privacy, they invariably respond with a resounding “yes”. The paradox arises from the fact that they nevertheless continue to use the services that undermine their beloved privacy.

If you want confirmation, then look no further than Facebook. In privacy-scandal terms, 2018 was an annus horribilis for the company. Yet the resultsshow that by almost every measure that matters to Wall Street, it has had a bumper year. The number of daily active users everywhere is up; average revenue per user is up 19% on last year, while overall revenue for the last quarter of 2018 is 30.4% up on the same quarter in 2017. In privacy terms, the company should be a pariah. At least some of its users must be aware of this. But it apparently makes no difference to their behaviour.

For a long time, people attributed the privacy paradox to the fact that most users of Facebook didn’t actually understand the ways their personal information was being appropriated and used. And maybe that is indeed the case for many of them, for example, new Facebook users in poor countries for whom the Facebook app represents their entry point into the networked world. But that surely cannot be the case for users in western countries. Can it?

A few months ago, journalists on the New York Times embarked on an interesting experiment to see whether internet users really understand the comprehensiveness and granularity of the data-harvesting techniques that underpin surveillance capitalism. Last week, they unveiled the details of the experiment. The reporters picked 16 categories, such as “registered Democrats” or “people trying to lose weight”, and targeted ads at people in those categories. But instead of trying to sell cars or prescription drugs, they used the ads to reveal the invisible information itself. So targeted users would receive ads saying things like this: “This ad thinks that you’re trying to lose weight and still love bakeries. You’re being watched. Are you OK with that?” Or: “This ad thinks you’re female, a registered Democrat and are likely to vote for the sitting president”. Each ad was annotated to indicate the source of each of the inferences it contained.

The point of the experiment, one imagines, was to prompt the question: “How do they know this?” in the target’s mind. The aim, one supposes, was to illuminate the privacy paradox by exploring the cognitive dissonance – the psychological stress experienced by a person who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values – the ads triggered in those who received them.

It’s an ingenious stratagem, but unfortunately the NYT doesn’t report whether the ads had this effect. It’s conceivable that the researchers did follow up with the targets and that a subsequent report is forthcoming. But at the moment, we’re left in the dark about the crucial question of whether knowledge really does change people’s behaviour.

Still, it’s a start. We need more experiments such as this, because until we have a comprehensive explanation for the privacy paradox, we will remain in the dark about how best to tackle the menace of targeted advertising. At the moment, the most persuasive explanation of it is what psychologists call “privacy calculus”, the idea that social media users understand the tradeoff between losing privacy and the benefits they get from using services that undermine it and regard the latter as outweighing the former. It seems that demographic variables play a minor role and only gender has been found by researchers to weakly predict privacy behaviour.

The NYT experiment has lessons for journalism too. In an algorithmically curated world, reporters need to tool up if they are to have any hope of holding tech companies to account. And here and there are promising stirrings in the media undergrowth. In this context, ProPublica, a nonprofit organisation based in New York, has been doing great work developing algorithms and bots to explore what Facebook and Amazon are up to.

The time is coming when at least some investigative reporters will have to be not only tech-savvy, but able to use data analytics software as well. For too long, the companies have been able to pull the wool over the eyes of regulators and media organisations that were overawed and intimidated by the complexity of digital capitalism. As the old adage puts it: when the going gets tough, then the tough have to get going.

The Guardian 5 May 2019