Utopia, you are standing in it!

On Twitter, folks have been supporting and piling on to a guy whose bottom line was that we are able to afford much less now than we could in 1990 (I won’t link to it because he’s not a public figure). The piling on has been by economist-like people and the support has been from… others?

Regardless, the claim can be analyzed in a variety of ways. I’m more intimate with the macro statistics, so here’s one of many valid stabs at addressing the claim. I’ll be using aggregates and averages from the BEA consumer spending accounts.

LNG vessels [image credit: offshoreenergytoday.com]
Who knew? Just as night follows day, replacing on-demand power generation with intermittent sources can and does cause reliability and other issues of varying severity. Preferring imported gas to domestic sources was another avoidable mistake, leading to far more of the supposedly fearsome CO2 emissions than necessary. The climate excuse is wearing thin.
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The UK will be scrambling for highly expensive gas imports to meet its energy needs this winter to stave off blackouts whenever the wind doesn’t blow, warned a leading energy expert.

Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, told City A.M. that the intermittent performance of domestic renewable power is proving costly for the West.

He argued the country lacks a reliable alternative base-load of power aside from highly expensive natural gas.

By Paul Homewood

It will likely be coming out of the mouth of an environmental activist.

Although it could also be coming from a European Union official looking for yet another angle via which tariffs and other restrictions can be placed on imported food from far-flung places like New Zealand, Australia and Asia.

You response should be as follows from this article, Eating local is still not a good way to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet:

Transport isjust 5%of food emissions.2Here we’re talking about emissions from ‘food miles’
…
The reason this number is so low is because most food that is transported internationally comes by boat. And, shipping isvery carbon-efficient. Per kilometre,it emits10 to 20 times less than trucks on the road. And around 50 times less than flying
…
Surprisingly,more than 80%of the CO₂ from food transport is produced…

One of the initial problems King Henry IV had to face after his usurpation of the throne from King Richard II was to manufacture the illusion that his coming to the throne was lawful and legitimate.

Adam of Usk was a medieval canonist, clergyman and historian of Welsh origin who used pro-Lancastrian propaganda with bias against Richard II to justify why the throne was empty in order to promote Henry as a legitimate ruler. Usk also used the elements of Biblical prophecy and rumour to further that legitimation.

Parliament was still in its early stages of development and this body was not seen as a means to legitimize Henry’s reign. After 1399 there is no clear sign that Henry IV thought that he owed his position to a Parliament that had cooperated in the downfall of King Richard II.

King Henry IV of England and Lord of Ireland

In…

Michael Munger explains at AIER (American Institute for Economic Research) in his article Green Energy is the Modern “Broken Window”.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

John Goodell studied literature at Berkeley, then got an M.F.A. at Columbia. He has edited Zyzzyva, a literary magazine in San Francisco, and been a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. Pretty impressive.

None of that qualifies him as a climate scientist or economist. So it’s surprising that web searches yield hundreds of solemn, even pious, invocations of Goodell’s economic wisdom:

“In reality, studies show that investments to spur renewable energy and boost energy efficiency generate far more jobs than oil and coal.”

I have not been able to find a source; the quote itself has become self-recommending, using authority by reference: “studies show…” My good friend Russ Roberts often inveighs against the “studies show” formulation, but I think we…

I’ve covered the topic of generational wealth before, and here’s the latest data on how each generation was doing at roughly the same age. The data is updated through the 3rd quarter of 2022.

The main takeaways:

• Millennials are roughly equal in wealth per capita to Baby Boomers and Gen X at the same age.
• Gen X is currently much wealthier than Boomers were at the same age: about $100,000 per capita or 18% greater
• Wealth has declined significantly in 2022, but the hasn’t affected Millennials very much since they have very little wealth in the stock market (real estate is by far their largest wealth category)

For just over six months now I’ve been on the trail of questionable appointments to the new Reserve Bank Board. Most of the Board members aren’t really fit for office in anything other than ornamental roles – this in the midst of the worst monetary policy failure in decades and the Board being responsible for key appointments and for holding the MPC to account. But my main focus has been on the appointment last October of Rodger Finlay, while he was chair of the majority owner of Kiwibank, with a lesser focus on Byron Pepper, appointed in June this year while also serving as a a director of an insurance company operating in New Zealand (the largest shareholder in which was another insurance company subject to prudential regulation by the Reserve Bank.

The Reserve Bank has spent months trying to avoid/delay answering questions about these appointments. For any first time…

While discovering electricity was part insight, superstition and serendipity, harnessing it for good came down to the laws of physics and sound engineering.

Exciting as it might be, feeling your hair stand up during an electrical storm was never going to alter the course of human affairs. Whereas the ability to generate and then deliver electrical power at a given frequency and voltage over time and on demand was an inevitable game changer.

Once thermal energy was used for that purpose, wind power was then and thereafter utterly redundant. Productive work could then be carried out at any time and without the need for a favourable weather forecast in advance.

The dismal history of early efforts to use windmills to generate electricity ought to have provided sufficient evidence to future generations attempting to do likewise. But, as they say, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

Parker Gallant…

Stardate: 5784.2 (2268)
Original Air Date: November 22, 1968
Writer: Meyer Dolinsky
Director: David Alexander

“Plato wanted truth and beauty and above all, justice.”

In response to “desperate distress calls from an unknown planet,” Enterprise crewmen Kirk, Spock, and Bones beams down to a planet rich in kironide deposits, a high-energy substance. Supposedly, the Enterprise scanners show no life forms on the planet. However, they find towering columns and statues a la ancient Greece and the crewmen are quickly greeted by a small-sized court jester named Alexander (Michael Dunn). He explains that there are beings on this planet. The sun near their home planet Sahndara went super-nova a millennia ago. They had instituted a a mass eugenics program focused on longevity (they are each over 2,000 years old). They transported themselves to ancient Greece on earth to study under Plato. After Plato died, they traveled to this new…

In a couple of weeks it will be 2023. And then in a couple of years it will be 2025.

Those with longish geeky memories may recall that there was once talk of closing the gap between New Zealand and Australian incomes/productivity by 2025. Without any great enthusiasm no doubt, the incoming National government led by John Key agreed to ACT’s request for a (time and resource-limited) official 2025 Taskforce that would offer some analysis and advice on what it would take to achieve such a goal. The Taskforce’s first report had been dismissed by the Prime Minister before it was even released and after the second report the Taskforce was quietly disbanded. I held the pen on the first report and had some input on the second one (itself written by the current chair of the Reserve Bank Board), and since the reports were written when my kids were…

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of
the American Century
by Beverly Gage
864 pages
Viking (Penguin Random House)
Published: Nov 2022

One of 2022’s most notable new biographies is Beverly Gage’s long-awaited “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” Gage is a professor of American history at Yale University and the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) is an intriguing biographical subject; he spent 48 years as Director of the FBI and was arguably the most powerful unelected public official in the country at the time.  But any survey of his career also provides unique insight into the lives of the public figures who operated within his sphere. And during his nearly half-century at the FBI he worked with every president from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon.

One might assume that Hoover’s life has been fully…