Utopia, you are standing in it!

With the recently concluded recall election in California that resulted in a thumping win by Governor Newsom, I was intrigued to find an old book review that covered the aftermath of a previous recall election in the state in 2003 against Governor Gray Davis.

That election resulted in a loss for Davis and more importantly a win for the former actor and Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would go on to win election in his own right and was Governor for two consecutive terms (eight years), the maximum mandated. In 2012 he published a memoir of that time, Total Recall (the title of one his hit movies). In the same way, he titled himself The Governator, after his most famous movie role as The Terminator.

I’m less interested in the review itself or the book than some of the tidbits that fell out of it (and some that did not) regarding…

Even when accepting the flawed calculations of Ronald Brakels, it provided only a fragile win for the battery scenario. This prompted him to start a new calculation in order to justify the battery/solar setup. It involves a battery system that is currently being built: the Victorian Big Battery. His reasoning is that battery prices drop rapidly and he also proposes a way to set aside some the initial investment in order to replace the battery at the end of its economical life.

Let’s just jump right in. This is the information he gathered about the Victorian Big Battery:

• Capacity: 300 MW
• Storage capacity: 450 MWh
• Price: AU$180,000,000
  (again no justification for this price tag, just his hunch)

Then he repeats the flawed calculation by calculate the price:

There are many reasons to reject Joe Biden’s proposal for higher corporate tax rates, and I listed many of them when I narrated this nine-minute video.

This two-minute video from the Tax Foundation has a similar message.

The main message is that workers, consumers, and shareholders are the ones who actually pay when suffer when politicians impose higher taxes on business.

And the damage grows over time because higher corporate tax rates reduce investment, which inevitably leads to lower wages.

By the way, while a low tax rate is very important, there are many other policy choices that determine the overall damage of business taxation.

• Is there double taxation of dividends?
• Is there worldwide taxation?
• Is there deprecation or expensing?
• Is there equal treatment of debt and equity?

This is just a partial list. There are other policies – such as alternative minimum taxation,

The career of Michael Lee Aday aka Meat Loaf, has been a turbulent one, to used an understatement. It went from filling huge stadiums with adore fans, to barely getting people to see him perform in small community halls in Ireland, and back to stadiums.

His most iconic song though has to be “Paradise by the Dashboard light” written by Jim Steinman. It was released in 1977 and was taken from the album “Bat out of Hell”

“Paradise by the Dashboard Light” is one of the longest songs to be released uncut on one side of a 45 RPM record. The only difference between the single and album versions is that the single version fades out almost immediately after the final line is sung. Jim Steinman had stated that he wanted to write “the ultimate car/sex song in which everything goes horribly wrong in the end.” The album version of…

Comparing Michela Wrong and David van Reybrouck

David van Reybrouck’s account of Congo’s modern history is basically an orthodox chronological account and political analysis interspersed with interviews with the many veterans and eye witnesses he has tracked down and spoken with at length.

Wrong’s account feels completely different, less chronological or, indeed, logical, more thematic. Instead of historical analysis, she brilliantly conveys what it felt like to live in Zaire under Mobutu as she sets about systematically exploring and describing different aspects of Zaire society and culture. Her vividness of approach is demonstrated by the way the book opens with the fall of Mobutu in 1997, going light on political analysis and strong on vivid descriptions of what it felt like to live in a crumbling, corrupt third world country.

Chapter one dwells on the role played in so many African states by key international hotels in their capitals, in…

The government has introduced legislation which will allow the Minister of Health and the Director General to take over private companies doing COVID testing (further description is here). The likely target of this change is Rako, which has sought a commercial negotiation with the government for the last year. The amendment, which is before the Select Committee, will give the government the option of taking Rako’s property and unilaterally determine compensation.

So, what do officials see as the costs of de facto nationalisation of COVID testing?

Here is what the Ministry of Health has to say in its Fact Sheet 5: Regulating COVID-19 laboratory testing and managing testing supplies and capacity:

The proposed change will not have any direct impacts. Orders made under the new provision may impose obligations or restrictions on testing laboratories to ensure quality of testing, integration of test results with the public testing repository…

Traffic (2000) Director: Steven Soderbergh

★★★☆☆

Based on a 1989 British television show called Traffik, a masterpiece theater series that tracked the movement of heroin from Turkish fields to the streets of Europe, Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic explores the global dilemma of the international drug trade as it affects various people inside and outside the United States. The unique cinematography and editing in Traffic shows a remarkably bipolar world: the color tint in Mexico is yellow to convey a dusty desert akin to the wild west, whereas in the United States scenes are color-tinted blue to indicate cold, sterile, hopeless environs. Scenes in Mexico are portrayed as lawless and dangerous, whereas scenes in the U.S. are portrayed as calloused and unforgiving. Soderbergh won an Academy Award for Best Director for Traffic, and the film itself was nominated for Best Picture.

In the film we meet two Mexican…

Rain Man (1988) Director: Barry Levinson

“Of course when they bring the pancakes after the maple syrup it’ll be too late…”

★★★☆☆

Rain Man is a bittersweet comedy/drama that occurs mainly on the open road. It is about the troubled relationship between two brothers, Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman) a high-functioning autistic savant who lives at the Wallbrook Mental Institution and whose life is timed by a rigid series of schedules in order to maintain psychological stability; and a slick Los Angeles hotshot named Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) who is only interested in money. When Charlie Babbitt’s father dies he learns he has merely inherited a classic car and little else, and instead the bulk of his father’s fortune totaling $3M has been placed in a trust held by the Wallbrook Institution. Charlie travels across the country to the Wallbrook Institution where he discovers his previously unknown brother, Raymond.

When Charlie…