Utopia, you are standing in it!

During the debate about the Trump tax plan, proponents made three main arguments in favor of reducing the federal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

1. A lower rate would be good for workers, consumers, and shareholders.
2. A lower rate would boost American competitiveness.
3. A lower rate would produce some revenue feedback for the IRS.

The last item involves the “Laffer Curve,” which is a graphical representation of the non-linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenue.

Put in simple terms, entrepreneurs, investors, and business owners have more incentive to earn money when tax rates are modest.

High tax rates, by contrast, discourage productive behavior while also giving people a bigger incentive to find loopholes and other ways of avoiding tax.

This does not mean that lower tax rates produce more revenue, though that sometimes happens.

The main takeaway is the most…

…tastes like wine from a can. Stick to bottles, “Bev.” And maybe hard seltzer or some such.

When they’re not bursting into toxic fireballs, the contribution made by giant lithium-ion batteries remains utterly trivial. They are, after all, electricity storage devices and don’t add a lick to electricity generation capacity, anywhere.

The cost of battery storage, at scale, is out of all proportion to the benefits returned and we wouldn’t be having this discussion were it not for the hopeless intermittency of wind and solar. No one talked about electricity storage when we allowed nuclear, coal-fired and gas-fired plants to deliver power, 24 x 7, whatever the weather.

At best, battery storage provides additional frequency control at the margins, but it’s the chaotic delivery of wind and solar that increased demand for that as a “service” which grid managers pay a premium for.

But that’s not the pitch put forward by the wind and solar acolytes, who tell us that by adding more and larger lithium-ion batteries…

It has been all over the financial news that Elon Musk made an offer last week to buy out Twitter for $54.20 per share, which is well above its recent stock price. And also, that the board quickly stiff-armed Musk by adopting a “poison pill” provision. What are poison pills, are they a good thing, and how does this particular one work?

Major decisions for a corporation are made by its board of directors. In theory, they are supposed to direct operations for the benefit of the company’s shareholders, who are considered the actual owners of the corporation. The members of the board are elected by the shareholders in annual meetings.

In practice, the board largely does what it wants, and has an outsized influence on who gets elected. The board sets the agenda of the annual meetings, and proposes successor directors. In theory, shareholders can propose resolutions and alternative…

Original Air Date: October 13, 1966
Stardate: 1329.8
Writer: Stephen Kandel and Gene Roddenberry
Director: Harvey Hart

“But men will always be men no matter where they are.“

In “Mudd’s Women” we find the USS Enterprise chasing an unregistered Class J cargo ship which ventures into a dangerous asteroid belt (with a “three-five Shiller rating”) and the engines suddenly begin to overheat. A distress signal is received from the cargo ship so Kirk decides to extend the Enterprise’s deflector shields in order to beam aboard anyone from the cargo ship –a risky act which unfortunately expends several valuable Lithium crystals. Just moments before the rogue cargo ship collides with an asteroid and explodes, Scotty manages to beam aboard one man and three women.

This strange man is none other than a comical but shifty Irishman named “Leo Francis Walsh” and he arrives with three…

Picked this up in a charity shop for £2. I’d like to read a more up-to-date history of the period, for example The End of the Roman Republic 146 to 44 BC: Conquest and Crisis by Catherine Steel, part of the multi-volume Edinburgh History of Ancient Rome – but I can’t afford to fork out £20 on new books and it’s not in my local library system to borrow.

But then a little research revealed that Scullard’s text is a classic account of the period, has been a staple of A-level and undergraduate Classic courses for over 60 years and has gone through numerous editions. The publishers proudly display glowing reviews:

‘Still the best introduction to Roman history.’
– Miriam Griffin, University of Oxford

‘The fundamental modern work of reference for teachers, sixth-formers and university students still … the best and most reliable modern account of the period.’
– Tim…

Despite overblown promises, offshore wind power is as meaningless as its onshore cousin. Centuries of sailing the high seas provided the clue: when the wind stops blowing, the boat ain’t going.

So, if seafarers had nothing but curses for their days in the doldrums, why would offshore wind power be any different?

Not only is offshore wind power just as fickle as the onshore kind, it is insanely expensive. Not least due to the exponential increase in operations and maintenance costs, thanks to the salt-laden marine environment in which these things operate offshore.

But, as the pitch goes, the insane cost is purportedly offset by “wind that is always blowing out at sea”.

Paul Homewood tackles that grand mistruth below.

How Volatile Is Offshore Wind?
Not a Lot of People Know That
Paul Homewood
17 March 2022

It is commonly claimed that the wind is much more constant and…

Frost fair
Natural climate variation has always been, and still is, a fact of life, regardless of minor changes to trace gases in the atmosphere.
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Extreme weather not just a modern phenomenon as study reveals how British towns experienced drastic climate during ‘Little Ice Age’
* * *
Extreme weather caused by global warming is one of the biggest threats facing the world today, claims the Daily Telegraph.

However, a research project has thrown light on the catastrophic climate shift endured by England just a few centuries ago, which brought snowstorms that lasted weeks, flooding which washed away entire villages and winds that sank flotillas of ships.

From the 1500s to the 1700s, England went through an unusually cold and stormy period, nicknamed the Little Ice Age, which was possibly caused either by reduced activity from the sun, volcanic eruptions or atmospheric changes.

One of the solutions that our Minister of Energy proposes for the energy transition is interconnectivity. In the webinar she gave at the end of 2020 (see previous post) she was pleased that Belgium got connected to the German grid and therefor could start to take advantage of the electricity produced by solar and wind in Germany. I am less optimistic about that. As I found in some previous posts like for example here, here and here, Belgium and Germany are neighbor countries and therefor have similar patterns of solar and wind production.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that no gains could be made by this interconnection. There will be times when Belgium could use the solar/wind overproduction of Germany, but when Germany has a excellent intermittent production, then generally Belgium does too. The same when Germany has only little intermittent production, then Belgium generally experience the same. The…

The climate/RE cult’s latest mantra “net-zero”, apparently means wind and solar connected to batteries or pumped hydro. The notion has it that wind and solar’s hopeless intermittency can be overcome by a few TWh’s worth of giant lithium-ion batteries or, where geography and hydrology permit, pumped hydro systems.

The latter model involves using wind and solar to pump water uphill into turkey’s nest dams so that, when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, hydro power will merrily fill the inevitable daily gaps in wind/solar power production and keep the grid up and running.

Well, that’s the story, anyway.

The wind/pumped hydro model is at the heart of the “net-zero” energy generation systems being pumped by politicians and rent seekers, alike.

In a cooking show, ‘here’s one we prepared earlier moment’, a large-scale wind and pumped hydro experiment has been playing out on an island in the Atlantic, El…

Industrial wind turbines create at least 2 critical dangers for flyers: 1) wake turbulence; 2) collision with blades and towers. The air turbulence generated by hundreds of 50-60m blades with their outer tips travelling at around 350km/h (wake turbulence) messes with the pilot’s ability to control their aircraft (see our post here). Slamming into them, often in bad weather, ends with reasonably predictable results.

Results such as the 4 killed in South Dakota, when the plane depicted above slammed into a turbine in foggy conditions.

Here’s another example of the deadly threat wake turbulence poses to pilots, their aircraft and passengers.

Plane crash blamed on ‘turbulence’ from wind farm
BBC
10 March 2022

A pilot injured in a crash landing has claimed a “violent” gust which caused him to lose control of his plane may have been caused by a nearby windfarm.

The 66-year-old man crashed off the…