What is a good person? + Nature/nurture debate

After a couple of interesting talks at the AAP conference this week, I stumbled across this BBC article on goodness of character and the nature/nurture debate, both subjects of which I attended talks about throughout the week.

Luke Russell first off talked about what made an evil person, deciding that our intuitions were a good basis for this, but that current models of evil weren't quite up to the task, and Paul Griffiths today talked about the nature/nurture debate, and how you can't really separate nurture from nature (his example from the animal kingdom was the development of rats and their gene expression based on how much grooming they received from their mother (among other examples)), and that the idea of "human nature" is not just explicable by our DNA (or by our environment).

Anyway I'm a little tipsy right now after the AAP conference dinner so I'll leave it at that for now, IMO the BBC is a little behind in the most recent thinking on these debates! ;)

Beer & politics post: Alcopop tax and the dumb dumb dumb

What on earth is Brendan Nelson smoking? I thought the Liberal party was supposed to be the economically conservative party. Reducing petrol costs by 5c/L is just dumb -- the market will just float around it and prices will still be high. Thanks for the shopping centre docket though? Getting rid of the alcopop tax is just gimmicky too. Doesn't stop your average salaried worker buying a premix drink, but stops kiddies on low pocket money incomes a lot more! And a tax on luxury cars is quite sensible, especially given that those are often the worst polluters...

Stop with the stupid gimmicks, Brendan. It's not helping your image in the slightest.

Poor pubs and clubs :~(

I read today with some annoyance the bitching of pubs and clubs about how smoking bans put in place last year have meant that they've lost millions of dollars from gambling revenue.

Club revenue from pokies fell from $295 million in March 2007 to $230 million in March 2008. Total turnover - the amount of money put through the machines - fell from $3.6 billion in March last year to $2.9 billion this March.

[...]

"There is growing evidence that the continuing drop in revenue is not related just to the indoor bans. With petrol prices up substantially this year and several more interest rate increases announced, households are clearly reducing how much they gamble." Some clubs would not survive, [chief executive of Clubs NSW, David Costello] said.

Poor pubs and clubs! Now some of them will have to close, because they can't get their hands on the easy no-need-to-actually-do-anything-but-buy-a-machine money from .... wait, what?! Come on guys, this is freaking fantastic news! Smoking bans, helping gamblers kick their (gambling) habit!

Of course on the second page they mention in one small paragraph that the CEO of AHA, Sally Fielke, said "some venues had reported a rise in food sales since the smoking ban". See, now, this is what I'm Tolkien about.

Put up or shut up, pubs and clubs of NSW/ACT, and find a way to decently earn your income, through, you know, actually providing services rather than leeching off the gambling and nicotine addicts.