Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Pei Gao (NYU Shanghai) & Eric B. Schneider (LSE)

The full article from this blog is forthcoming in the Economic History Review and is currently available on Early View.

HMS Indefatigable with HMS Diadem (1898) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence 1901. Available at Wikimedia Commons.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the average height of adult British men increased by 11 centimetres. This increase in final height reflects improvements in living standards and health, and provides insights on the growth pattern of children which has been comparatively neglected. Child growth is very sensitive to economic and social conditions: children with limited nutrition or who suffer from chronic disease, grow more slowly than healthy children. Thus, to achieve such a large increase in adult height, health conditions must have improved dramatically for children since the mid-nineteenth century.

Our paper seeks to understand how child growth changed over time…

Last week and with another hat of mine on I was engaged on some case work for the Ministry of Social Development. The departmental officials I was working with were bemoaning the dearth of private rental accommodation in Northland. They said there was an increasing trend that saw private landlords selling up and exiting the market.

And then over at Kiwiblog today a guest post on the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill being pushed through parliament this week under urgency so I decided to have a look at the Bill. You can access it at http://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2020/0218/latest/LMS294929.html Two observations …

Clause 36 amends Section 51 of the principal Act and provides that a landlord may only seek to terminate a tenancy if the tenant has been in at least five working days in arrears the rent over three separate occasions in a period of 90 days.

Clause 37 inserts a new Section…

Having lost the un-loseable election in May last year, an angry rump of Labor backbenchers is keen to ditch the party’s suicidal renewable energy policies, with a view to recovering the ground they lost trying to win the sandalista vote in the inner city goat’s cheese circle.

Australia’s economic future depends, in no small part, on getting the ALP to decouple itself from the lunatic fringes of the hard-green left, and to start thinking about reliable and affordable power, of the kind that fuels industry growth and jobs.

Whatever policies are directed at recovering from the coronavirus lockdown, without reliable and affordable power Australia’s energy hungry businesses are doomed. With rocketing power prices, and an intermittent supply, mineral processors and manufacturers are terminal, and have been for years.

Politicians and academic boffins have been giving lip service to improving Australia’s “resilience” and “self-sufficiency”, resulting in the renaissance of Australian…

There are some remarkable stories of the private sector showing initiative when governments fail to maintain infrastructure.

• In response to dithering by government, residents and businesses in Hawaii put up $4 million to fix an important community road.
• Smugglers in Russia repaired a road to facilitate untaxed trade between Russian and Belarus.
• I also wrote about a guy in England who was fed up with the slow pace of road repairs and built a private toll road.

Regarding the final example, here’s a video on his project.

I’m particularly amused that this example of practical libertarianism (I’m guessing without the cost overruns that are inevitable with government) was made possible because zoning laws (normally an obstacle to sensible land use) basically allowed the organizer to ask for forgiveness afterward rather than permission beforehand.

To be sure, these isolated examples are hardly a sign that infrastructure is going to be…

By Anton Lang ~

This Post details the daily wind power generation data for the AEMO coverage area in Australia. For the background information, refer to the Introductory Post at this link.

Each image is shown here at a smaller size to fit on the page alongside the data for that day. If you click on each image, it will open on a new page and at a larger size so you can better see the detail.

Note also that on some days, there will be a scale change for the main wind power image, and that even though images may look similar in shape for the power generation black line on the graph when compared to other days, that scale (the total power shown on the left hand vertical axis) has been changed to show the graph at a larger size to better fit the image for that…

Adolf can’t stop laughing.

I’ve just read the list of super draconian measures announced for the poor bastards who live in Melbourne.

Among other things only one person from each household may go shopping each day and only to a supermarket within five kilometres distance from home.

But get this!

“Exemptions include visiting a person with whom you are in an intimate personal relationship, including outside metropolitan Melbourne.”

I kid you not.

Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish, to which I’ve just subscribed, has his usual tripartite column, along with the “view from my window” series and a place where he reproduces and responds to readers’ beefs. (To his credit, he took a reader’s advice to heart and is giving up issuing tweets that “simply mock or provoke without context.”) The three issues he takes up are wokeness—in particular a review and discussion of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories, which I’ve discussed before; an attack on Trump for intimating that he’d delay November’s election on the grounds of mail-in ballots; and a further defense of J. K. Rowling.

If you want to subscribe to Andrew’s site, it’s only $50 a year (a measly $1 per week), and you can do so here. To be honest, I’m jealous of Sullivan. When it comes to politics—though not religion: he still adheres…

Tesla plant [image credit: Steve Jurvetson @ Wikipedia]
H/T TechXplore

But Plan B includes putting heavy batteries in already heavy trucks, making them too heavy for hauling goods — or reducing their payloads. But at least the fact that there aren’t going to be anywhere near enough batteries to replace all fuel-powered vehicles with expensive EVs is out in the open, leaving climate obsessives with yet another headache. Wade through the usual paranoid propaganda to see how big the problem is.
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We need to change our transportation system, and we need to do it quickly, claims The Conversation.

Road transportation is a major consumer of fossil fuels, contributing 16 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, which warm up the Earth’s atmosphere and cause changes to the climate.

It also pollutes the air, threatening health and costing taxpayers billions of dollars annually.

At the same time…

Like the proverbial All Black test match, the nearly 400-page Arnold-Palmer report into the Special Air Services actions in Afghanistan, is very much a game of two halves.

In the first half, Sir Terence Arnold and Sir Geoffrey Palmer literally blow authors Jon Stephenson and Nicky Hager out of the water for their claims in their book Hit & Run about the SAS conduct of the raids.  In the second they rightly chastise the NZ Defence Force over what can best be described as muddied, incompetent maladministration and misleading briefings to ministers.

For the first half, take this example:

”  …  the principal allegations in Hit & Run about the conduct of TF81 personnel (the SAS troopers) on Operations Burnham and Nova are not accurate.

“First, the operations were not revenge operations; nor were they ‘ill-conceived’.

“There were legitimate reasons for them—there was reliable intelligence indicating there were insurgents in…

Someone else who can’t believe the climate can change naturally. But it always has done so.
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He resigns from the influential media company’s board, citing “disagreements over editorial content”, reports BBC News.

In a filing to US regulators, he said he also disagreed with some “strategic decisions” made by the company.

The exact nature of the disagreements was not detailed.

But Mr Murdoch has previously criticised News Corp outlets, which include the Wall Street Journal, for climate change coverage.

By Hans von Spakovsky and Kaitlynn Samalis-Aldrich~

Twice the usual number of suspects, including CNN’s combative Jim Acosta, have been criticizing President Donald Trump for the concerns he has raised about elections conducted entirely by mail.

As the president said in a tweet, we do need absentee ballots for “many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day.” But the president is right to be worried about elections conducted entirely by mail.

Going entirely to by-mail elections would endanger the security and integrity of the process, particularly if officials automatically mail absentee ballots to all registered voters without signed, authenticated requests. (Photo: Darylann Elmi/Getty Images)

Absentee ballots are the tools of choice of election fraudsters because they are voted outside the supervision of election officials, making it easier to steal, forge, or alter them, as well as to intimidate voters.

Going entirely…

By Hans von Spakovsky~

Many people misinterpreted President Donald Trump’s tweet Thursday morning about a possible delay in the Nov. 3 election as a threat by him to postpone the election. But that’s not what his tweet said—and in any event, no president has the power to delay Election Day.

Concerns that President Trump has raised about mail-in voting are based on documented problems we have seen with such voting. (Photo: Seb Oliver/Getty Images)

“The president is simply raising a question, whereas Democrats are proposing an entirely new system (of massive mail-in voting) that will result in enormous delays in the election results,” a senior Trump administration official told Fox News Thursday afternoon.

In a morning tweet, the president wrote: “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the…