Utopia, you are standing in it!

When party management at Westminster was still being developed the only means of ensuring good attendance at parliamentary debates was to ‘call the House’, an event described in 1855 as ‘one of the most interesting and exciting scenes’ the Commons ever witnessed. At a time when MPs’ attendance at debates was often poor, the practice was employed when important questions required the full attention of the House.

The earliest authenticated call of the House took place in 1549, although the procedure is thought to have originated in a statute of Richard II. Usually MPs were given at least one week’s notice that a call was to take place, although the interval could vary between one day and six weeks. On the day appointed the order might be discharged (i.e. dropped), but if proceeded with the Members’ names were called over according to their counties, which were arranged alphabetically, the English…

Because every MW of wind power capacity is matched with a MW of reliable coal, gas or nuclear power, the ‘case’ for subsidised wind will never add up

Generating electricity 30% of the time – albeit that wind power outfits can never tell you in advance which 30% of the time that might be – the cost of ‘backing up’ intermittent wind power becomes astronomical. These days reliable generation is referred to euphemistically as ‘firming capacity’ – conjuring up the notion of some kind of Viagra for putting a little stiffness in the grid.

Duplicating a reliable generation system with an unreliable one, not only duplicates the capital cost it also increases the cost of running the former, as coal and gas generators are forced to ramp up and down, according to the weather. All of which results in monumental waste and astronomical costs.

Jay Lehr takes a look at…

If you’re a policy wonk, you’ll enjoy this history of how government regulation has hindered the development of telecommunications technology.

I want to focus on the part of the video, beginning about 30:00, which discusses “net neutrality.” The interview with Professor Hazlett took place in 2017, at a time when there was lots of fighting over this issue.

The pro-regulation crowd claimed that net neutrality was needed to protect consumers from slow and expensive service. And they made all sorts of ridiculous claims about the Trump Administration’s plans to get rid of the Obama-era regulation.

At the time, this tweet from the Democratic members of the U.S. Senate got a lot of attention.

So what actually happened after net neutrality was repealed?

I suppose the first question to answer is:

Did..

…the…

…Internet…

…slow…

…to…

…a…

…crawl?

Not exactly. Robby Soave gives us the details in a…

A portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation [image credit: R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution @ Wikipedia]
This article starts off confident that the researchers are right – ‘we now know’ etc. – but later retreats and says ‘the cooling appears to have’ etc. But as the Little Ice Age is an interesting topic it’s worth a look.
– – –
New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age?

The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming, says Phys.org.

The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, a period of cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.

This cold spell, whose precise timeline scholars debate, but which seems to have set in…

Despite the now well-established academic interest in homicide, criminal justice historians have paid relatively little attention to a sub-group of murderers with whom the media has long been obsessed: the so-called serial killers. Whilst there remains a debate about how many victims a killer must claim before the ‘serial killer’ label is applied,[1] and a distinction should be made between spree and serial killers,[2] for our purposes it is more important to note that the term is now used mainly to describe male sex killers of the type personified by the infamous Jack the Ripper of 1888.[3] Those who kill successive victims for purely financial reasons tend to inspire less enduring fascination. However, they too are serial murderers and, as such, offer historians valuable insights on the investigative and legal tactics used to identify and convict uniquely dangerous repeat offenders. In Britain, poisoners were among the earliest…

Insanity is doing that same thing over and over again and expecting different results, which is why STT raises an eyebrow (or two) at Boris Johnson’s persistent love affair with heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind power. His belief that taking it all offshore will make a difference, only confirms that this man has a tenuous grip on reality. Indeed, the belief that a modern, industrialised economy can rely upon a stone-age power source is positively bonkers.

Boris and his fellow travellers have now had the benefit of Europe’s Big Calm – a period when winds slackened across Western Europe and the UK – leaving thousands of these things completely idle. And yet, the amorous obsession remains.

Then there’s the astronomical cost of trying to generate occasional electricity tens and even hundreds of kilometres offshore and returning it to terra firma using cables prone to failure, and difficult and costly…

I don’t have too much to say about yesterday’s HYEFU, but two things caught my eye.

The first was a bit of attention on the $6 billion “operating allowance” the government has given itself to increase spending (or, I suppose, cut taxes) at next year’s Budget. It is a big number, but it doesn’t mean a great deal. In principle, the operating allowance covers things where the government has some discretion (whereas, by legislation, tax revenue tends to rise each year as nominal GDP does, and welfare benefits rise each year as inflation/wages do, and without new legislation the government of the day has no choice in the matter).

But governments tend to care about purchasing/delivering real goods and services, and they need actual people to work for them. And when there is inflation, the dollar cost of purchasing goods, services, and labour tends to rise. Governments don’t have to…

The rampant slaughter of millions of birds and bats, including America’s iconic bald and golden eagles, is met with a shrug by wind power acolytes, everywhere. When confronted, the wind industry simply resorts to lies and obfuscation and – when the corpses can no longer be hidden and the lying fails – issue court proceedings in an effort to literally bury those facts (see our post here).

Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill Eagles – like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but 60m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350Kph routinely smash them out of existence.

For concentrated carnage, though, California’s Altamont Pass takes the cake. With thousands of turbines slicing and dicing dozens of golden eagles, owls, hawks, and kites every day, it’s more like an abattoir than a power generation facility.

Finally, America’s Audubon Society has lawyered up in an effort to…

First thing this morning the Reserve Bank fronted up at Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee for their Annual Review hearing.

The Governor kicked off with some introductory remarks that were celebratory (the focus of the hearing was notionally on the last financial year) but superficial. In some cases barely even honest. He was “very proud” of all the Bank had achieved, talked up monetary policy as having been “highly effective in preventing deflation”, claimed (wrongly) to have been one of the first central banks to have raised policy interest rates again, and ended with a paean to “diversity and inclusion” talking of having “many plans” and “much action” on that front. There was no mention, for example, of the $5 billion of taxpayers’ money they had lost, or of the continuing churn at the top of the organisation.

Last evening they had had to announce that two more senior managers…

George VI (Albert Frederick Arthur George; December 14, 1895 – February 6, 1952) was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from December 11, 1936 until his death in 1952. He was concurrently the last Emperor of India until August 1947, when the British Raj was dissolved. King George VI was the father of the United Kingdom’s current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

The future George VI was born at York Cottage, on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk during the reign of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria. His father was Prince George, Duke of York (later King George V), the second and eldest surviving son of the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra).

His mother, the Duchess of York (later Queen Mary), was the eldest child and only daughter of Francis, Duke of Teck, and Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, Duchess of…

In my Labor Economics class, I do a lecture on empirical work and the minimum wage, starting with Card & Kreuger (1993). I’m going to quickly tack on the new working paper by Clemens & Strain “The Heterogeneous Effects of Large and Small Minimum Wage Changes: Evidence over the Short and Medium Run Using a Pre-Analysis Plan”.

The results, as summarized in the second half of their abstract are:

relatively large minimum wage increases reduced employment rates among low-skilled individuals by just over 2.5 percentage points. Our estimates of the effects of relatively small minimum wage increases vary across data sets and specifications but are, on average, both economically and statistically indistinguishable from zero. We estimate that medium-run effects exceed short-run effects and that the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage is substantially more negative for large minimum wage increases than for small increases.

The variation in…