A brief analysis, and a summary of proposed space tourism regulations. (As a completely uninformed reader) they sound pretty good. The cool one:

Weightlessness: It’s okay to take off your seatbelt to enjoy weightlessness, but the FAA wants to make sure you don’t interfere with the crew as you float around. It proposes separating the crew from the passenger compartment with a bulkhead for this reason.

Perhaps in this holiday season it is appropriate that I continue to post on alcohol and alcohol related issues.

Don Arthur has referenced an article on possibilities for hangover prevention, “Interventions for preventing or treating alcohol hangover: systematic review of randomised controlled trials” (HTML), a literature review, which ends with this ’sober’ note:

Our findings show that no compelling evidence exists to suggest that any complementary or conventional intervention is effective for treating or preventing the alcohol hangover.

Nevermind. The article references this intriguing statistic (from “Extent and costs of alcohol problems in employment: a review of British data”, Alcohol and Alcoholism 22, n4, 1987), that in 1987 it was variously estimated that alcoholism costs between Britian £60 million to £2 billion a year. In this US this could be as high as US$148 billion a year. Mind you, it pays to be quietly skeptical about statistics of this kind.

To throw this post in totally different direction, if I had more money, I’d be buying this book Russia Goes Dry : Alcohol, State and Society, an investigation of alcohol policy in the USSR, focusing on Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign of 1985, a campaign interestingly initiated the year before by his predecessor Chernenko, who promptly died of cirrhosis. If you can get it, a good alternative is ‘The success of a failure: Gorbachev’s alcohol policy, 1985-88′ (Europe Asia Studies, 45, n1, 1993) should be available via a uni subscription.

Some nice details from the article. Gorbachev’s alcohol policy was his first major policy innovation, for which he recieved the nickname, mineral’nyi sekretar’, the ‘Mineral-water Secretary’. Under the policy, which was to remain unmodified until 1988, alcohol was banned from public functions, prices were raised significantly, and it was banned from restaurants before 2pm, amongst other measures.

The Tsarist government experimented with a total prohibition of alcohol, which was only rescinded by the Soviet government in 1919, two years after the revolution, and not completely until 1925. Of course, this was for government-owned production only. (There was obviously massive illegal production in the entire period.) Alcohol production by government was viewed as largely a financial benefit, it was thought that by controlling the sale of liquour, and receiving the proceeds, you could fight inflation and stabilise the budget. All this was unpopular with the central committee and the Bolshevik rank-and-file. In 1925 Stalin told the XIV Congress that it was either the Vodka monopoly or slavery to Western European capitalists.

For a contemporary snapshot of the Russian alcohol problem, try ‘Alcohol Use in Northern Russia: the role of the social context’, (Alcohol and Alcoholism, 37, n3, 2002).

Anyway, have a wonderful New Years Eve regardless.

Hopefully I’ll have some further thoughts on the trip soon, but for now, this will have to suffice.

Moscow to the End of the Line, by Venedikt Erofeev, easily ranks up there with my other favourite book on perpetual drunkenness, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Part extended hallucination, and part drink-diary, the book includes productivity graphs, drink recipes that include ingredients like dandruff treatment and refined furniture polish:

I won’t remind you how to refine furniture polish-any child knows that. For some reason no one in Russia knows why Pushkin died, but how to refine furniture polish-everyone knows.

All this is detailed on a train ride to Petushki (paid for by regularly reciting Roman myths to a ticket inspector, rather than by alcohol like everybody else), where the protaganist is certain he will find his salvation and his joy.

Well, now I’m in Beijing, arriving back in Melbourne on friday. Unlike Hong Kong, where I enjoyed the blissful pleasures of the NGO IT centre and its broadband access complements the host government, here I am struggling to use any internet at all. The hotel’s ‘broadband’, which appears to be even looser defined than Telstra’s, is woeful. And for some reason the browser is crippled. I can’t even use gmail in the standard view.

This in a country which is supposedly laying down more broadband capacity than analyists can even contemplate. I’m sure one day this hotel will receive a terrabit connection, but until then (or friday, which ever comes first), my blogging will be barely existent.

While I am away: The latest IPA Review is available now, and you should be able to get a copy at most newsagents or just by contacting the IPA office.

I have the editorial in it, on Hammurabi (read it here), and an article on anti-spam, anti-spyware, and anti-zombie legislation, called “Vi@gr@ $old h^r^: Is your annoyance our problem?”. I’ll pop up a copy here when I can. But the whole issue is good: an essential addition to your intellectual life, and needs to be read by all thinking Australians.

UPDATE: Here it is, in PDF, “Vi@gr@ $old h^r^: Is your annoyance our problem?” .

The NGO centre at the WTO Ministerial is two enormous rooms, partitioned into a few smaller ones to hold meetings, press conferences and the like, as well as a fantastic NGO ICT room, full of free access to computers, faxes, printers, phones etc.

Apart from the ICT room (where I am right now), today and yesterday the NGO centre has pretty much been empty. The regular NGO briefings held are small, attended by only a few journalists and interested parties. All very wonky, not much doing.

So, diligently, yesterday afternoon we went outside to watch the demonstrations which were featured in the media. (Photos will be up shortly) Here too, a disappointment. The professionals (activists who have flown in from the US, UK, etc.) were inside the hall itself, staging a quiet protest that consisted pretty much of waving A4 pieces of paper. That left the South Korean rice farmers - who are pretty damn aggressive for rice farmers, which I had earlier presumed was a rather passive, calm career choice - and assorted local interest groups in the main protest outside.

We had a wander through the protest before it started moving, watched the rice farmers paddle in the water (Life-jackets? Where’s the dedication? It isn’t a real floating protest unless you are treading water), and then, when we realised they were going to try to get to the convention centre, we circled round the block and got behing the police.

There were an enormous amount of cops, armed with big roman-style shields, little hoplite-style shields, and big computer-game-style shotguns. And, apparently, pepper spray. But none of it mattered, because, apart from the intimidatory tactics by the Hong Kong police, nothing happened. The police drew a line just off the beach, about 1km from the convention centre itself, and the protest was unable to pass that line. While the media I have seen has reported a few skirmishes, it has massively overplayed the extent of the violence. Nothing happened.

Its funny watching the protest following media in action. The front line of any protest would be 1/3rd protesters, 2/3rds cameramen. Its easy to tell whenever something happens - a sea of cameras rise above the crowd. This creates most of the drama - flash-bulbs, rather than pepper-spray. Oh, and the incessant drums played by the protesters provide an fantastically ominious soundtrack, taunting you with the possibility of action.

But, after a while, everybody got tired, the drums stopped, the ambulences left, and everybody just went shopping. Like me. I picked up a tailor-made jacket I had ordered on Sunday evening in Kowloon.

Very quick comments on Hong Kong:

I’m a novice in this ’scene’, and at the moment I haven’t had a chance to discuss my impressions with anybody more knowledgable, so you will have to forgive me if any of this is excruciatingly obvious.

It is an odd fact that the protests, or at least the formal ones, have been organised from last friday (9 Dec) till about wednesday, given that the meeting itself begins on Tuesday. In fact, the tepid protest seen today (3,000 protesters, mostly migrant Filipinos and Korean activists, peppered with professional Europeans) is supposed to be one of the major ones. Certainly it was being treated as significant by the police, and by a media edgily anticipating some exciting copy. But, lets face it. 3000? In Melbourne, the Socialist Alternative can probably pull a bigger number to retrospectively protest the Spanish-American War.

This Stratfor article holds true: Where have all the activists gone? Read the whole thing, as they say. Its a good overview of the activists’ problems.

Of course, I haven’t really done anything work related yet, apart from watch the protest. I’ve been getting used to this city they call Hong Kong. And in a decision I may live to regret, brought a tailored suit.

(Oh, yeah, sorry to Peakah, whose comment I realise just now that I accidently deleted. Time to review my comment management system, and probably make a comments policy [I won’t delete any comments unless they look like spam, or are so crude that they may as well be.])

Fair warning: I’m going to Hong Kong for the World Trade Organisation Ministerial meeting and then onto Beijing for a few weeks, so blogging activity will be patchy, if anything.

But I’m sure you’ll be able to see me on the BBC World Service receiving a tear gas canister to the face. Tune in, nightly.

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