"Don't look up"

I had no intention of watching this film until I noticed that the Alarmists assume that this film is a parable about politicians and the media ignoring the 'Climate Crisis'.

Having misunderstood* the whole premise, The Guardian gave it two stars, describing it as a "shrill, desperately unfunny climate change satire"**.

Duly heartened, I watched it yesterday and I must say, it is gruesome and splendid. It's basically Dr Strangelove, except with a giant meteor instead of a nuclear war.

* It's quite possible that they are right and the film is supposed to be a parable for the 'Climate Crisis'. If so, the film is an epic fail on its own terms, but succeeds nonetheless because you can watch it ironically.

** For more top-drawer Guardian hand-wringing, read this article.

The Guardian trolls its own readers.

From The Guardian:

Scientific research findings that are probably wrong gain far more attention than robust results, according to academics who suspect that the bar for publication may be lower for papers with grabbier conclusions.

Studies in top science, psychology and economics journals that fail to hold up when others repeat them are cited, on average, more than 100 times as often in follow-up papers than work that stands the test of time.

The finding – which is itself not exempt from the need for scrutiny – has led the authors to suspect that more interesting papers are waved through more easily by reviewers and journal editors and, once published, attract more attention.

Say the newspaper that will publish every single climate change scare story going (many of which were probably hoaxes), the scarier the better.

"Global heating pushes tropical regions towards limits of human livability"

I know we've done this sort of story before, but they are an easy target.

From The Guardian:

The climate crisis is pushing the planet’s tropical regions towards the limits of human livability, with rising heat and humidity threatening to plunge much of the world’s population into potentially lethal conditions, new research has found.

Should governments fail to curb global heating to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era, areas in the tropical band that stretches either side of the equator risk changing into a new environment that will hit “the limit of human adaptation”, the study warns...

“If this limit is breached, infrastructure like cool-air shelters are absolutely necessary for human survival,” said Sadegh, who was not involved in the research. “Given that much of the impacted area consists of low-income countries, providing the required infrastructure will be challenging. Theoretically no human can tolerate a wet bulb temperature of above 35C, no matter how much water they have to drink,” he added.

"Theoretically"? Maybe not. In practice, clearly we can.

Timeanddate.com shows that in Calcutta (the first hot, humid place that sprang to mind, I'm sure there are even hotter and more humid places) there are two months in which the average daytime high is over 36 degrees and for ten months of the year the average daytime high is 30 degrees or more. How often does the temperature go over 35 degrees with high relative humidity?

I have no idea, but I am sure the answer is "quite often" and they seem to manage just fine. Even London breached 35 degrees on a couple of days last year. Was it unpleasantly hot if you're not used to it? Yes. Did everything grind to a halt and Londoners start dropping like flies? Not that I recall. But there again, I am a climate denier, so maybe it did and we did and I have just suppressed that memory.

Well, yes and no.

From The Guardian:

It’s not true that Sweden offers an escape from the public health catastrophe.

Whether you count the March-April death spike as a 'public health catastrophe' or not is up to you, but whatever you call it, Sweden seems to be out of the woods and back to normal, with an average of about 3 covid-19 related deaths per day since the end of July, that's not even a bad 'flu season. What's done is done.

I only wish it did. But, and this is when conservative commentators, politicians and conspiracy theorists look away, Sweden offers an escape from the social catastrophe now engulfing us.

And why do we have a 'social catastrophe'? In the short term, it is because of the lock down, that's clearly an economic catastrophe, which has led to a social catastrophe.

You never hear the Telegraph or the Mail say that we need Swedish levels of sickness benefit to ensure that carriers stay at home and quarantine. Or Swedish levels of housing benefit to ensure that they aren’t evicted from those same homes.

The knights of the suburbs do not insist that the hundreds of thousands who will be thrown on the dole in the coming months need Swedish levels of unemployment benefit and an interventionist Scandinavian state to retrain them.

That's circular logic. If Sweden had done full lock down, they simply wouldn't have been able to afford their high levels of unemployment benefit and retraining programmes. They can only maintain this because so few people lost their jobs. The UK did full lock down, lost hundreds of billions in economic output, with related loss of tax revenues, put a million people out of work and wasted tens of billions in Furlough Scheme payments and other welfare payments. Conversely, if the UK had done a much softer Swedish style lock down, very few people would have lost their livelihood, so there would be little need for retraining programmes, and we could have afforded a more generous welfare system (like a UBI).
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It's also a diagonal comparison. It's the Guardian's job to slag off anything vaguely right-wing, fair enough, but what the nominally Conservative government is doing is pretty much the opposite of what the right-wing press are calling for. And the article doesn't bother addressing the actual topic in hand, whether Sweden was right to do a very soft lock down.

It's not a left-vs-right thing either, I commend Prof. Sunetra Gupta's article in The Evening Standard. She always looked at this from a scientific stand-point and said that lock downs were pointless back in April or May:

Professor Sunetra Gupta, who has been a leading critic of the cost of lockdown, says she welcomes the return of schools as children “if anything... would benefit from being exposed to this and other seasonal coronaviruses”.

Gupta, who is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, told The Londoner that alongside huge social and educational benefits, the “evidence is mounting that early exposure to these various coronaviruses is what enables people to survive them”.

She rejected being bracketed with libertarian lockdown sceptics, saying her opposition came from the left. “I personally think that only thinking along the lines of eliminating coronavirus, without giving heed to the consequences on the disadvantaged young and globally, is a dereliction of our duties as global citizens”.
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Finally, there's this:

By not locking down in the spring, Sweden had a more protracted outbreak with far more deaths per capita than its neighbours. Admittedly, its death rate was not as bad as Britain’s. But then no European country had a death rate as bad as Britain’s because no other European country put the village idiot in charge.

Yes, we have the village idiots in charge, but the UK does not have the worst death rate. We are third-worst behind Belgium and Spain and only slightly worse than Italy or Sweden (ignoring micro-states).

Zoë Williams gets it right on VAT

Well nearly, but she's done some proper homework. From The Guardian:

News of the government’s plans surfaced, as they always do these days, in a private briefing – that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, plans to slash VAT, in an emergency measure to stimulate spending and boost the post-Covid economy, from 20% to 17%.

Which is much to be welcomed, sales or turnover taxes are the worst kind of tax; VAT is very literally a tax on "value added" (wages and business' earned profits), not some harmless tax on "consumption".

The EU, over time, set a minimum level of 15%, except in special circumstances – which, considering sales tax was previously set at 10%, even by a Conservative administration in 1973, made the EU the driver of an essentially anti-progressive policy. It’s a useful, if tangential thing to remember, for the despairing remainer: the EU wasn’t perfect.

Which was one of the main reasons I voted Leave.

Yet in special circumstances, an individual nation could insist on a lower rate for VAT: Alistair Darling didn’t need to, following the financial crisis in 2008, since he just wanted to reduce the rate from 17.5% to the minimum 15%.

You really had to be there to remember the ridicule this generated. It was piecemeal, it was pathetic, yet at the same time it was crazily expensive and horrifyingly risky. It was the act of a chancellor who didn’t know how much trouble the nation was in, but also one who panicked and couldn’t keep his head.

I remember nothing of the sort. Darling said he'd reduce it for 13 months. I cheered at the time, and this was one of two tax-tweaks which softened the blow of the 2008-09 financial recession. The other was reducing the number and generosity of Business Rates exemptions for vacant premises. The Tories got in and increased the rate again after the 13 months were over (the idiots).

In 2009, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, among many others, judged [Darling's VAT cut] to have been a significant success..."

As well they might, because it was. With VAT you can hardly go wrong if you're reducing it.

The same people who ridiculed Darling will now be praising Sunak as a visionary.

And you, Zoë, are praising Darling while slagging off Sunak for doing a similar thing. That's what the media do. They're cheerleaders for one side or the other. It's about as enlightening as listening to football fans arguing about why they support different teams, which are basically all the same.

VAT in its early years was a manifest statement of political intent: Labour chancellors kept the base rate very low, then went wild with the luxury rate (Denis Healey at one point had the higher rate at 25%). Conservative chancellors would then come in and “harmonise”, and this was a classic framing triumph: who could possibly disagree with bringing harmony?

Yet, of course, it meant saddling the general population with a tax that was previously weighted for the broad-shouldered.

This is only correct if you assume that VAT is borne by the consumer, which it isn't (unless demand for something is price inelastic, like booze, fags, fuel). The real damage that VAT does is acting like a domestic tariff and hence a huge brake on the economy.

VAT puts (or keeps) businesses out of business and puts (or keeps) people out of work. The unemployed probably don't pay much VAT, but half of them are unemployed simply because of VAT.

"It never rains but it pours"

The Guardian appears to be taking this expression literally.

Guardian reader's letter, May 2019:

Weather forecasts are ignoring the drought in England

Paul Brown is spot-on in his criticism of how weather forecasts and presenters ignore the continuing drought (Weatherwatch, 28 May). It is as if they are in a parallel universe where the climate emergency does not exist. Wildlife, gardeners, farmers and all who care about the environment are desperate for proper rainfall, especially in central and southern England.

Linda Lennard, St Albans

Guardian article, Feb 2020:

With every flood, public anger over the climate crisis is surging

Sometimes it has felt as if the rain might never stop. These storms have gone beyond the point of simply being storms now, each blurring into the next to create a strangely end-of-days feeling. Everything is freakishly sodden and swollen, and while the rural flood plain on which I live fortunately hasn’t flooded anything like as badly as some, the rivers are rising alarmingly.

Yet still the lashing winds and biblical downpours keep coming. Suddenly the 40 Days of Action campaign that Extinction Rebellion (XR) will launch on Ash Wednesday (26 February), encouraging people to reflect on the environmental consequences of their actions in a kind of green Lent, feels ominously well named.

So what is it chaps, wetter or drier? (Or would you always have this impression if you compare a month in Spring with one in Winter?)

Oh, surprise surprise, it's neither.

Paul Holmewood summarised rainfall charts for England and Wales 1766 to 2016, and there is no discernible trend, annual rainfall in most years was between 800mm and 1,000 mm:



If you really squint at the ten-year running average, there appears to be a slight upwards trend from the early 1900s (about 850mm) to the 2010s (about 950mm), but most years stayed within the 800mm - 1,000mm range.

As he says himself:

By far the wettest month was October 1903, when 218mm fell. The wettest month in recent years was November 2009, with 192mm.

Again, I can see no evidence of anything unusual occurring in the last decade or so. There is a suggestion, though, that very wet months were not as common prior to the 20thC. This can be better seen by looking at the number of months >150mm per decade. The latest ten years is shown for comparison:


On average, it is fair to say that it is a little bit wetter now than it used to be in the early 19thC. But above all it is the year to year variability which dominates the record, just as it always has.

As to actual 'floods', the chances are these are down to deforestation and dredging/straightening of watercourses upstream; and more urbanisation (building over large contiguous areas, especially in areas prone to flooding) and not enough dredging/straightening of rivers downstream.

More wildlife fun with The Guardian

As a follow up to Bayard's beaver post (see below), I'll up the ante...

From The Guardian:

The study by University of Sussex researchers raises fears that bees and other flying pollinators may struggle in the higher and more frequent winds caused by global heating.

The bees, which usually feed on wild flowers after leaving their hives in the campus gardens, were lured into the shed with sugar water feeders. Only one bee was allowed in at a time, and their visits to artificial flowers were videoed and timed under different fan speeds, which mimicked calm and windy days.

With no wind, the bees on average took nectar from 5.45 flowers during their 90-second time trial. When wind speeds were increased, this fell to an average of 3.73 flowers. Over the course of a day, a bee’s capacity to supply its colony with food would be significantly curtailed.

Yes, bee and insect numbers have plummeted over the past few decades, as anybody who can remember scraping dead flies off the car windscreen (or in my case, watching my Dad do it, I'm not that old) will confirm. This is perhaps something we should be worried about, and maybe we could slow or reverse this trend.

But...

a. Bees evolved quite a while ago, I'm sure they know how to handle a stiff breeze or two.

b. There's no reason to assume that 'global warming' will increase wind speeds. Wind speeds and turbulent events like tornadoes are caused by temperature differences between regions, or cold air meeting hot air, and not absolute temperature.

We are told that 'global warming' is reducing temperature differences - from Wiki: Presently, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

In contrast, it's bloody hot in the Sahara in the day time, but it's not subject to gale force winds from sunrise to sunset. On average, winds are stronger in Antarctica, even though it's much colder (the opposite of the claim in the article).

And apparently, there is barely any wind on the surface of Venus, which has fallen victim to 'runaway climate change' (in truth, it's that hot because atmospheric pressure at the surface is ninety-three times higher than on Earth).

Me in The Guardian

From The Guardian:

Mark Wadsworth, the head of the Campaign for Land Value Taxation, said: “The minority with a vested interest in high land values will no doubt celebrate higher values, saying that is shows the importance of land to the UK economy.

“In truth, land values are not a net addition to national wealth, they merely represent the benefits that accrue to landowners because of government spending on public services funded out of general taxation; land values are actually just a measure of ongoing transfers of wealth from taxpayers to landowners and a zero-sum game.”

It's nice to have a journalist contact you for a quote and then publish it verbatim, unlike my experience with The Telegraph who twisted everything on its head (not that I didn't expect it from them, but all publicity is good publicity).

"Thailand cave rescue: water pumps failed just after last ladyboy escaped"

From The Guardian:

The rescue operation to free the last of the 12 ladyboys and their football coach from a Thailand cave could have been a disaster, divers have revealed, with water pumps draining the area failing just hours after the last ladyboy had been evacuated.

Divers and rescue workers were still more than 1.5km inside the cave clearing up equipment when the main pump failed, leading water levels to rapidly increase, three Australian divers involved in the operation told the Guardian on Wednesday, in the first detailed account of the mission to be published...

The remaining 100 workers inside the cave frantically rushed to the exit and were out less than an hour later, including the last three Thai navy Seals and medic who had spent much of the past week keeping vigil with the trapped ladyboys.

The Guardian inadvertently argues FOR Brexit

From The Guardian:

Households face increases of up to £930 in their annual shopping bills if Britain walks away from Brexit talks without a trade deal, according to new research that reveals a disproportionate impact on poorer families and the unemployed.

Meat, vegetables, dairy products, clothing and footwear would be subject to the largest consumer price rises under a “no-deal” scenario, according to a study published in the authoritative National Institute Economic Review*, adding to inflationary pressures that have already forced the first interest rate rise in a decade this week.

Stalled negotiations resume next week in Brussels, but the government is also about to publish a trade bill that would result in Britain being required to apply swingeing new tariffs on European imports if it falls back on World Trade Organisation rules.

Since WTO tariffs are highest for fresh food – reaching 45% for dairy products and 37% for meat – and much of this is currently imported from Europe, the team of economists predict an inflationary surge that could match that already inflicted by the falling pound.

This would impact most on those least able to afford it, as poorer households typically spend a much higher proportion of their income on food and other essentials. For the 2m worst-affected households, the study predicts their weekly expenditure will rise by 2-4.7%, equivalent to £400-930 extra a year.

OK. Most would agree that higher food prices are A Bad Thing (unless you believe there is an Obesity Epidemic).

In the absence of a trade deal with the EU, the UK government will be free to set its own import tariffs. The UK is (arguably) a member of the WTO, so is bound by WTO rules. WTO rules do not stipulate minimum tariffs, or even standard tariffs, they stipulate maximum tariffs. All they say is that a country should have one set of tariffs which apply without discrimination to all other countries.

As the WTO themselves explain:

Tariffs: more bindings and closer to zero

The bulkiest results of Uruguay Round are the 22,500 pages listing individual countries’ commitments on specific categories of goods and services. These include commitments to cut and “bind” their customs duty rates on imports of goods. In some cases, tariffs are being cut to zero. There is also a significant increase in the number of “bound” tariffs — duty rates that are committed in the WTO and are difficult to raise.

There's another WTO rule that says a country can't offer preferential tariffs to some countries but not others unless they are a member of a customs union, like the EU. Which sort of contradicts Rule One, but hey.

To sum up, having left the EU, the UK could easily set zero tariffs on imported food. The EU imposes fairly high tariffs on food imported from most third countries. Therefore, food could just as well become cheaper. Which is an argument FOR Brexit, not AGAINST it.

NB, this presupposes that the UK does the decent thing and imposes zero tariffs, or lower tariffs than those which the EU imposes, it is unfortunately not certain that they have the brains to do so. Tim Worstall and Physiocrat have already pointed this out in the comments at the NIESR link above.

* Actually, the organisation is called the "National Institute of Economic and Social Research".
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There's another bald claim making the rounds on Twitter today, that "After Brexit, the UK will lose access to 759 international trade deals negotiated by the EU".

Again, this is simply not true.

As the EU Referendum blog has explained, there is a general rule (or tradition, or convention of whatever you want to call it) of international law that if a country leaves a bloc or a single country splits up into successor countries, existing treaties between third countries and the bloc or predecessor country continue as between those third countries and the leaving country or the successor countries.

So the UK will more or less automatically enter into treaties with all those other countries on the same terms and conditions as those which apply to it as a Member State of the EU.
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Sorted.

Nobody move or the fry-up gets it!

The Guardian makes itself look stupid.

Not sure even George Osborne's Evening Standard would stoop that low.

The Guardian on top form

From The Guardian:

Damning government report shows depth of public sector pay cuts

The new report found a 3% drop in median hourly earnings between 2005 and 2015 for workers in 32 public sector occupations whose salaries are set by the government on the advice of independent pay review bodies.

It found median hourly pay fell by an even greater amount – 6% – during that period for workers across the board, as the recession of 2008 hit wages hardest in the private sector.

Guardian making itself look a bit silly (as per usual).

My radio-alarm clock is set to Radio 4, which I listen to as I drift back into consciousness. This morning, they quoted from a Guardian editorial, which seemed so far-fetched that I wasn't sure I hadn't imagined it.

Nope.They actually said this about a possible second Scottish indyref:

The choice facing voters in an independence referendum can be framed as one between the certain economic catastrophe of crashing out of the EU and the uncertain consequences of leaving the UK.

As is well known, Scotland's economic links with the rest of the UK outweigh Scotland's links with the rest of the EU by about four-to-one. By economic links I mean, cross-border investment, imports-exports, jobs and so on,

So whatever the disruption is when* the UK leaves the EU, it would be four times as bad for Scotland if they left the UK and tried to rejoin the EU.

* It's a great feeling finally being able to say "when" instead of "if".

Guardian missing the point most gloriously as per usual.

From The Guardian:

To understand why, despite the recent funeral orations, liberalism is very much alive, you have to go back to the 1860s and the abolition of slavery in two key countries. To be precise, 1863, when – in one of the great coincidences of history – the proclamations of liberty for the American slaves and the Russian serfs came just five weeks apart*.

Both liberations were great victories for anti-slavery campaigners, more than half a century after the first successes of the campaign against the slave trade. But they were also great disappointments for radicals. Because, in both cases, the slaves and the serfs were catapulted from bondage into poverty.

In the US, slavery was replaced by peonage and debt bondage. In Russia, the land was valued at three and a half times its market value, and the impoverished serfs had to pay this to their former owners over a period of 49 years. It became clear that it wasn’t enough to release the slaves – you had to release them from debt, monopoly and the economic tyranny that replaced it...

All fine so far, if TPTB 'release' slaves/serfs but allow private 'land ownership' to continue and then collect most of their earnings from them in rent, the former slaves/serfs are no little or better off.

It is as simple as that. And that is pretty much where we are today. Anybody who has to hand over a large part of his earnings to private landlords/mortgage banks is in the same position as a newly freed slave/serf, who in turn is little or no better of than an actual slave/serf.

He then drifts off into a criticism of free trade, which is called 'neo liberalism' nowadays.

Why? What he refers to as free trade is in many cases no such thing, what he is talking about is corporatism, regulatory capture, government granted monopolies and protections, rigging the tax system to favour large businesses etc. Those things are the antithesis of free trade. And in terms of importance, these things are nowhere near as important as private landownership, end of.

* One of my favourite coincidences of history, along with FDR and Hitler coming to power and dying within a few weeks of each other.

No Pleasing Some People

from The Guardian

To African Americans, Harriet Tubman was our Moses, guiding the enslaved to freedom by faith and the light of the North Star. Why cheapen her by putting her on the face on the 20 dollar bill – the very symbol of the racialized capitalism she was fleeing?

When I first heard about Women on $20s, the unofficial contest to get a woman’s face on a $20 bill, I thought it sounded great: dudes have occupied greenbacks for centuries in the US. The female visages of Sacagawea and Susan B Anthony have been relegated to dollar coins no one gives two cents about.

But now that Harriet Tubman has won the unofficial vote for which woman should replace Andrew Jackson, I am less thrilled. I don’t want to see an abolitionist icon as the face of American money. I am quite content with my mental image of her conducting the Underground Railroad, that secret antebellum network of other former slaves and abolitionists who risked their lives to smuggle slaves out of the United States and into Canada.

We had weeks, or was it months of #OscarsSoWhite. The Guardian will give Lenny Henry every opportunity to talk about how underrepresented black people are at the BBC (he might have a point, but I'd like less Lenny Henry). And here it is, a black woman gets put on a bank note, and well deserved in the case of Harriet Tubman, replacing some very historic white dudes and now the Graun can't just find the good in it. It's like they just like being pissed off and have to find a way to be so.

Wankers.

Highly unusual to see these three sources saying much the same thing on the same day.

From City AM, normally a huge supporter of the rent seekers and the practices referred to in The Guardian article below:

The government is making its case for stepping up the Sino-British relationship by announcing £30bn worth of new trade and investment deals, despite escalating concerns that the UK steel industry is crumbling at the hands of Chinese manufacturers.

The Prime Minister announced the business deals, which the government says will create more than 3,900 jobs across the UK, one day after reports that [British steelmakers are to cut over 5,000 jobs in the face of Chinese steel dumping].

From The Guardian, actually hitting the spot for once:

Osborne is all for renationalisation – so long as the nation isn’t Britain

To secure EDF as a builder, Cameron guaranteed a fixed price for electricity from Hinkley of £92.50 per megawatt hour. That is around double the going rate for electricity on the wholesale markets, a price so high that equity analysts term it “financial insanity”.

Change your supplier as often as you like, you and everyone else in Britain will be paying for that de facto subsidy in your electricity bills for decades to come. Britons will in effect be paying more for their energy so that French households can pay less. Indeed, so generous are the terms of this deal that the government of Austria is currently taking Britain to court on the grounds that it’s handing out state aid to EDF.

Yes, you read that last sentence right: the UK stands accused of dispensing state aid – to another state. How many times have you read about some age-old manufacturer and thousands of jobs going down the swanee, while ministers wrung their hands over European state aid rules? Now we know that such rules can be tested – provided the recipient is headquartered not in Port Talbot, but Paris.

And finally, from The Daily Mash:

As thousands of redundancies in Redcar are followed by hundreds more in Scunthorpe, the business secretary said he wishes there was something he could do.

Sajid Javid continued: “Tragically, the industry has been hit by a perfect storm of being in the provinces, traditionally supporting Labour and not being financial services. Add that to us not wanting to do anything that might offend our new Chinese friends, and there’s absolutely nothing we are prepared to do.

“If only these plants manufactured something useful, like insurance derivatives supported by credit default swaps, then we’d gladly go billions into debt for them. But steel? What’s that even for?”

"Mass immigration is due to climate change"

Over at Comedy Is Free.

Glorious, just glorious.

Fun Online Polls: Neo-liberalism & abroad

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

When writing an article for The Guardian, how often should you use the word 'neo-liberal'?
About once every sentence - 70%
Less often - 12%
More often - 18%

This week: abroad. It all looks very grim and very tricky to me.

Take part here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Bankers & The Guardian

The results to last weeks poll are as follows:

Compared to taking sweets from a baby, how hard is it for bankers to take money from the government?

Easier - 86%
About the same - 13%
Harder - 1%

This week's poll, again suggested by Ralph Musgrave:

"When writing an article for The Guardian, how often should you use the word 'neo-liberal?'

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

What the hell?

Re this video at the Guardian.

There's a really odd moment in that video where a woman talks about the death of Pride, how it's no longer and revolutionary thing, and well, I'm wondering what it is she wants.

As far as I'm aware, we have equal rights for homosexuals as heterosexuals. If you want to get married, adopt kids, you can. Gay marriage means you get all the same benefits as straight marriage. We take this as far as telling private businesses that they can't discriminate, and there's no doubt that you'll get prosecuted for not doing so. The war was won completely and at that point, it's time to put the weapons down and get on with something else.

As for the "corporate sell-out" angle. This chart tells you everything.



Back in the 80s, when most people thought that gay sex was "always wrong", of course companies weren't interested. When most people share the view I've always held, that 2 consenting adults can do what they like to each other, and homophobia is very much out of favour, of course companies are going to join in with that.