Utopia, you are standing in it!

Solar panels were meant to be all sunshine and lollipops, with nothing but tingly virtuous feelings for their subsidised owners. With an effective economic lifespan of little more than a decade – after 12 years in service their output is nothing like their original capacity and at the 15-year mark, it becomes a pointless fraction, especially if they’re not cleaned on a very regular basis. Which is the reason why millions of panels are already being crushed and dumped in landfills, with millions more to follow.

Got a landfill in your neighbourhood? Well it’s probably time to do some homework and what is being dumped there.

Solar panels are a veritable toxic cocktail of gallium arsenide, tellurium, silver, crystalline silicon, lead, cadmium and other heavy metals. Ground up and dumped in their millions into landfills, it’s not difficult to imagine the effect on water supplies, the environment and human health…

The Kingdom of Greece was established in 1832 and was the successor state to the First Hellenic Republic. It was internationally recognised by the Treaty of Constantinople, where Greece also secured its full independence from the Ottoman Empire after nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule.

Background

The Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantine Empire, which ruled most of the Eastern Mediterranean region for over 1100 years, had been fatally weakened since the sacking of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders in 1204.

The Ottomans captured Constantinople with ease in 1453 and advanced southwards into the Balkan peninsula capturing Athens in 1458. The Greeks held out in the Peloponnese until 1460, and the Venetians and Genoese clung to some of the islands, but by 1500 most of the plains and islands of Greece were in Ottoman hands. While in contrast, the mountains and highlands of Greece were largely untouched, and…

There’s sometimes a stereotype that in poor countries with low car ownership, alternatives to the car are flourishing. I saw a post on Mastodon making this premise, and pointed out already in comments that this is not really true. This is a more detailed version of what I said in 500 characters. In short, in most of the third world, non-car transportation is bad, and nearly all ridership (on jitneys and buses) is out of poverty, as is most walking. While car ownership is low, the elites who do own cars dominate local affairs, and therefore cities are car-dominated and not at all walkable, even as 90%+ of the population does not own a car.

What’s more, the developing countries that do manage to build good public transportation don’t stay developing for long. The same development model of Japan, the East Asian Tigers, and now China has built both…

Exhibit A is provided by Zachary Faria writing at Washington Examiner Sports media throw a tantrum over hockey player’s pride night slight.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The most important story in the hockey world, according to sports media, is that one player decided not to wear a gay pride jersey, and they are deeply upset about it.

Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov did not take part in the team’s warm-up for “LGBTQ+ Pride Night,” with the rest of the team wearing pride-themed warm-up jerseys and wrapping rainbow tape around their hockey sticks. Provorov opted not to participate “to stay true to myself and my religion.”

This means he should have been benched, if not outright fired, according to sports media.

One reporter asked coach John Tortorella after the game if he considered benching Provorov for not wearing the jersey. Steph Driver, the NHL editorial manager for…

Some of America’s biggest planned offshore wind projects have recently been axed, with more to follow. Deemed ‘uneconomic’, potential investors and financiers are running a mile from what portend to be enormous white elephants.

Where the true cost of onshore wind power is phenomenal, the cost of the offshore stuff is astronomical.

Going offshore brings with it exorbitant maintenance costs (think operating any metal-based machinery in a salt-laden marine environment), as well as the repair and maintenance of hundreds of kilometres of undersea cable, the cost of which often runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars for each operating project, over time.

Let’s face it, apart from the subsidies it attracts, there is no economic basis for wind power, anytime, anywhere, ever.

As Warren Buffet put it: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They…

Checks and balances are fundamental elements of constitutional democracy that prevent the unconstrained exercise of power, improve the quality of decision-making and ensure that mechanisms exist for preventing or penalising unethical behaviour.Lisa James, Alan Renwick and Meg Russell argue that they therefore play a vital role in maintaining public confidence in the political system and the government has a particular responsibility to uphold them.

Background

The importance of checks and balances is often cited in debates about the health of democracy, and their erosion is widely considered a sign of democratic backsliding. But what are they, and why are they important?

Checks and balances are the mechanisms which distribute power throughout a political system – preventing any one institution or individual from exercising total control. The words ‘checks’ and ‘balances’ are typically used together, but can be thought of as referring to subtly different (though overlapping) things…