Episode 0014: Bad faith

Bad faith http://www.skepticsfieldguide.net/2013/01/bad-faith.html  Dr Oz Dr Oz was forced to face a senate hearing into dietary supplements. Audio from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and somewhere else on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA0wKeokWUU   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS-Qpp5asSE   Defending Jo Hockey (sort of, not really) http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-13/shorten-seizes-on-hockeys-poor-people-dont-have-cars-comment/5668468  A careful and better analysis is looking at fuel expense as a proportion of income.  And in a June 2014 submission to the Senate Economics Committee inquiry into the proposed excise rise, the Australian Automobile Association stated that: "Research indicates that the people who use their cars most frequently are in the outer metropolitan areas and  rural and regional areas where there are lower incomes, less jobs, and little or no access to public transport" To back this the treasurer produced Treasury figures showing that absolute spending on petrol is higher in high-income households, and showing that high-income households tend to have more cars. The same figures, expressed as a percentage of income, which is the obvious and accepted way of measuring the relative impact of a household cost, shows that households in the highest quintile spent 1.37% of their income on petrol and those in the lowest quintile spent 4.54%. In other words petrol eats up more than three times as much of an average poor household’s income than a rich household’s, because the rich household has 11 times the income from which to pay its petrol bill. So whatever its other merits, an increase in petrol excise will have a bigger impact on the poor household’s budget than the rich household’s, not the other way around. Which was already pretty obvious, really. Chiropractors and Simon Singh:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx8uPX-UAQA  Other mentions Oatmeal and Ted Cruz on Net Neutrality http://theoatmeal.com/blog/net_neutrality Rumsfeld http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns Direct download https://archive.org/download/HH101/HH101e0014.mp3 The Second (eBook) Edition of Humbug! is available for about US$3.99 from: Amazon (Kindle) Google Play  Apple iBooks LULU (DRM free ePub)