Utopia, you are standing in it!

Over the past few months, I’ve written a 7-part series on Bidenomics, reviewing the president’s record on issues such as subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, red tape, and employment.

Regarding the last item, a big problem is that the share of the population with jobs (measured by either the labor-force participation rate or the employment-population ratio) has not recovered.

It hasn’t recovered to where it was before the pandemic and it hasn’t recovered to where it was before Obama took office.

That’s bad news. Our economy’s output (and our national income) depends on the quantity and quality of both labor and capital.

This does not reflect well on Biden.

But not everyone agrees. Paul Krugman has leapt to the President’s defense. He even claims that American workers are enjoying a “Biden boom.”

President Biden has presided over a huge employment…

Electricity is one of those things that is only fully appreciated when a hopeful user is deprived of it. Across Europe, the cultlike fixation on wind and solar has provided precisely the environment in which households and businesses are coming to sense just how important having power as and when they need it, really is.

Germany set the tone by squandering billions of euros on subsidies to wind and solar, trashing their forests and rural heartland, as well as their hitherto reliable and affordable power supply. What could possibly go wrong?

Power prices are rocketing into the stratosphere and, even before winter drives up demand, are being deprived of energy in a way that was unthinkable barely a decade ago. But such is life when you attempt to run on sunshine and breezes.

Here are a couple of reports on the inevitable renewable energy transition from the frontline.

Energy Shortages…

Following her appointment as Prime Minister yesterday, Liz Truss has become the third Prime Minister in a row to take office directly as a result of a party leadership election. Ben Worthy explains that taking office in the middle of a parliament has historically not gone well for the incoming Prime Minister, with none of the last three ‘takeover Prime Ministers’ able to complete a full parliamentary term in office.

There are two routes to becoming Prime Minister in the UK. You can either win a general election or triumph in a party leadership election to become head of the largest parliamentary party when a predecessor leaves. As section 2.18 of the Cabinet Manual puts it:

Where a Prime Minister chooses to resign from his or her individual position at a time when his or her administration has an overall majority in the House of Commons, it is for the…

Chilean lithium deposits [image credit: travelandleisure.com]
By a big majority, the people said no – that’s it. Ideology overload?
– – –
Chile rejected a new constitution on Sunday which, if accepted, would have significantly expanded environmental rights and recognised the urgency of climate action, says Climate Home News.

In a referendum, the South American nation rejected the proposed constitution by 62% to 38% in favour. Voting was mandatory.

As home to the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a key component of batteries for electric vehicles, Chile is of strategic importance in the global clean energy transition. This comes with social and environmental tradeoffs.

Last week, I shared some great information from Superabundance, a new book that shows how economic liberty has made us much better off, as measured by how much more we can buy per hour worked.

Today, let’s look at a related benefit of capitalism, which is that we don’t have to work nearly as many hours to achieve high living standards.

Here’s a tweet from Chris Freiman, a professor of philosophy at William & Mary University. As you can see, people in market-oriented nations work far fewer hours than they did 150 years ago. In some cases, hours worked per year have dropped by more than 50 percent.

When economists study these issues, they generally say the willingness of people to supply labor (whether to work and how much to work) depends on compensation. In other words, people give up leisure because they want money so they can consume.

Untold $billions are being squandered to connect unreliable, intermittent and diffuse, wind and solar to power grids; grids that were working just fine before the unreliables turned up.

The wind and solar industries spear turbines and plaster panels way beyond the back of beyond. Increasingly remote locations for wind and solar generators require serious upgrades to transmission infrastructure, adding hundreds of $millions to transmission costs, that would have otherwise been avoided, had Australia simply stuck with conventional generators and not squandered $60,000,000,000 in subsidies to intermittent wind and solar.

As any first-year physics student will tell you, transmitting electricity over distances results in a mathematically predictable loss of the power transmitted, over any given distance. The greater the distance, the greater the absolute loss.

Just like the value of prime real estate, the most beneficial situation for generating capacity is all about location, location, location.

In the main, conventional…

Alaska had it’s first election with a new voting rule and Tom Cotton is pissed.

I want very badly to be snarky here and make fun of the Senator for being so nakedly Trumpian in an effort to discredit any democratic institution the instant it doesn’t produce exactly the result he prefers. Fun aside, snark at Senator’s expense misses the bigger and more important mechanisms that are in play. I think the current instantiation of the Republican party is afraid of ranked choice voting. The Senator, in his angry little tweet, only lends greater credence to the theory. More broadly, its often worth unpacking when incumbents get upset about legitimate institutions, particularly when that anger is asymmetric across parties and coalitions.

What is ranked choice voting?

Quickly, ranked choice voting is any system where voters…

The communist in this case being the last leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died a few days ago at the age of 91.

I actually liked the guy for his basic decency and smarts, although that decency did not stop him sending in KGB agents to Eastern block countries to do their usual job of killing “agitators”, until he realised it would also take tanks and troops, as in East Germany in ’53, Hungary in ’56, and Czechoslovakia in ’68, and decided he couldn’t follow in the footsteps of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. So yes, I’ll give him credit for not doing the worst he could have – but that’s pretty weak sauce even if it does testify to some basic human decency.

That decency was also attested to here by John Hinderaker at Powerline, based on dealing with him at a US event in 2000:

I am always intrigued in the history of how things come to be. Like who was the first to discover could be turned into a hot beverage. However, as the title suggest this is not a blog about coffee but about my other guilty pleasure, Chocolate.

The history of chocolate is a bit more mysterious then that of coffee.

From Latin America to the modern day, chocolate has come a long way to get to the shops and eventually to you. From where did chocolate originate to how it became the indulgence we cherish and enjoy today.

The history of chocolate began in Mesoamerica. Fermented beverages made from chocolate date back to 1500 BC. The Mexica believed that cacao seeds were the gift of Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom, and the seeds once had so much value that they were used as a form of currency. Originally prepared only as…

With Europe’s renewable energy disaster laid bare for all to see, the focus is now on “real energy” – power that’s available 24 x 7, irrespective of the weather and where the Sun sits in the sky.

For fairly obvious reasons, the Small Modular Reactor has captured the imagination of power-starved Europeans, with two key contenders vying for a slice of what will be a very healthy market.

Britain’s Rolls-Royce is well ahead of the curve, with a 470MW unit almost ready to roll.

In the US, NuScale, based in Oregon, has cleared all of the regulatory hurdles and is ready to deliver 924MW reactors to those with the wit and temerity to acquire them.

The wind and solar cult run the line that SMRs are a pipe dream, cooked up by conservative reactionaries, which menas they’re bound to ignore the 200 small nuclear reactors presently powering 160 ships and…

Mornidine advertisement, 1959.
Canadian Medical Association Journal, Vol. 81, No. 1, p. 59.

Now she can cook breakfast again
… when you prescribe new MORNIDINE (brand of pipamazine)
A new drug with specific effectiveness in nausea and vomiting of pregnancy, Mornidine eliminates the ordeal of morning sickness.
With its selective action on the vomiting center, or the medullary chemoreceptor “trigger zone,” Mornidine possesses the advantages of the phenothiazine drugs without unwanted tranquilizing activity.
Doses of 5 to 10 mg., repeated at intervals of six to eight hours, provide excellent relief all day. In patients who are unable to retain oral medication when first seen, Mornidine may be administered intramuscularly in doses of 5 mg. (1 cc.).
Mornidine is supplied as tablets of 5 mg. and as ampuls of 5 mg. (1 cc.).
G. D. Searle & Co. of Canada Ltd. 247 Queen St., E., Brampton, Ont.

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  Historical footnote: