Utopia, you are standing in it!

From the Commentaries, Volume 1 pp. 160-162.

Blackstone here sets out his expansive view of the powers of Parliament in disagreement with Locke.

III. We are next to examine the laws and customs relating to parliament, thus united together, and considered as one aggregate body.

The power and jurisdiction of parliament, says Sir Edward Coke, is so transcendent and absolute, that it cannot be confined, either for causes or persons, within any bounds. And of this high court, he adds, it may be truly said, “si antiquitatem spectes, est vetustissima; si dignitatem, est honoratissima; si jurisdictionem, est capacissima.”

It hath sovereign and uncontrollable authority in the making, confirming, enlarging, restraining, abrogating, repealing, reviving, and expounding of laws, concerning matters of all possible denominations, ecclesiastical or temporal, civil, military, maritime, or criminal: this being the place where that absolute despotic power, which must in all governments reside somewhere, is intrusted by…

National Grid’s preliminary investigation into the blackout that caused widespread disruption in England and Wales last week has raised the possibility that it was caused by the world’s largest offshore wind farm accidentally going offline.

The provisional report, which was submitted to regulators on Friday, suggests for the first time that the Hornsea offshore wind farm, which is owned and run by Denmark’s Orsted, may have tripped offline seconds before an outage at a smaller, gas-fired station.

The findings, which were relayed to the Financial Times by people briefed on the report, suggest the blackout may have been avoided if not for an error at the wind farm.

Full story (£)

The post Leaked Report Points To Wind Farm Failure Causing UK Blackout appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

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August 17, 2019 at 01:59AM

Basic Economics, Liberty Pen and the Free to Choose Network have all been prolific in posting taped lectures by Milton Friedman onto YouTube.

Here in this lecture entitled: “Is Capitalism Humane?” Friedman concludes that systems in and of themselves have no values. Capitalism is neither humane nor inhumane, but rather the results of the systems used are the way we should evaluate what’s best for the common man. Capitalism has been for the greater benefit of all.

My latest for Learn Liberty looks at proposals for starting an equalization program to redistribute from rich to poor states in the U.S. and finds them wanting. Due to the audience for that blog, I kept that post nontechnical and brief. I’ll reproduce part of it here and then elaborate on some of the complexities and possible counterarguments.

[C]ritics of federalism point to one big disadvantage: federalism, they say, is unfair.

This criticism particularly applies to the fiscal aspect of federalism — that is, the ability of states to choose their own tax burdens and spending levels. The argument runs like this: states have different tax bases per citizen (some are richer than others), so richer states can tax their citizens at lower rates than poorer states, offer…

Provincial Growth Fund supports more full-time orchard jobs.

In May TVNZ took a hard look and decided (according to the headline on this report) Jobs created by provincial growth fund may not be quite what they seem.

The report proceeded to reveal: 

Voters in the eastern German states of Saxony and Brandenburg head to the polls on 1 September for crucial state elections. The results could have an outsized impact on German climate policy for three reasons.

First, these states are home to many of the coal communities most affected by Germany’s coal phase-out and are therefore a testing ground for the government-driven change required to avert a climate crisis. Second, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is increasingly defining itself by its climate change denial, is near the top of the polls in both Brandenburg and Saxony. Third, if the Social Democrats (SPD) suffer—as expected—another defeat, it could hasten the end of the coalition government in Berlin. As the hottest summer on record comes to an end, Berlin and Brussels will be looking at…

Unions sometimes protect some workers – their members – but usually at the expense of other workers. Government protects its employees and special groups of workers at the expense of other workers.

Both unions and government restrict freedom. Friedman explains how the competition of employers for the talents of workers leads to the highest wages and best working conditions.

On August 12^th a report titled “The Kenyan dance parties where men are banned” appeared on the BBC News website’s ‘Africa’ page.

Readers of that sympathetic report were told that:

“The team behind a new event in Nairobi argues all-women’s dance parties can create safe nightlife spaces for women. […]

“You have to be so strict in a place with men. You just want to go out with your friends and men interfere,” says Jane, 26, who’s come to the party with her best friend Shani.

“So having a space where it’s all women immediately feels safe and you feel you are with people who understand you.””

And:

“Munira, 22 and Khadija, 25 are best friends. As practising Muslims, they often find themselves with minimal options when it comes to night life.

They say that, although women from all faiths attend the all-women parties, they particularly suit…

This week, I was asked to participate in a panel at ASA about scholar-activism. The panel was organized by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra with panelists Daniel Laurison, Philip Cohen and ASA’s Margaret Vitullo. The whole panel was fascinating. Before we get to what I said, I just want to affirm the following so that people on don’t misconstrue what I said:

• I believe that activism is valuable.
• I believe that many scholars are great activists.
• I believe that it would be very good if social scientists contribute to the public.
• There are many excellent sociologists whose work has public impact.

So, then, what’s my beef? I have three points:

Scholar-activism can cheapen activism: This happens in a few ways. For example, some people might say, “everything we do is activism.” Or, people who aren’t activist are implicit activists because they reinforce the status-quo. With respect to scholars of color, some might…

[Update 8/15/2019: It seems appropriate to republish this post originally published about 40 days after I started blogging. I have made a few small changes and inserted a few comments to reflect my improved understanding of certain concepts like “sterilization” that I was uncritically accepting. I actually have learned a thing or two in the eight plus years that I’ve been blogging. I am grateful to all my readers — both those who agreed and those who disagreed — for challenging me and inspiring me to keep thinking critically. It wasn’t easy, but we did survive August 15, 1971. Let’s hope we survive August 15, 2019.]

August 15, 1971 may not exactly be a day that will live in infamy, but it is hardly a day to celebrate 40 years later.  It was the day on which one of the most cynical Presidents in American history committed one of his…

In my series on the impact of intermittent power sources, I got to the point where I was working with a unlimited battery capacity to find out how big that storage needs to be to fill in the gaps of less production with stored power from earlier excess production. I came to the (surprising) conclusion that almost 2,500 GWh was needed to fill in all the gaps. To recap, this is how the stored power looked like over the year:

Which I found an awful high number for storage. Therefor my question back then was: is it really necessary to store all that power? What would happen when storage is limited to a value below the optimal capacity?

Squandering other people’s money is what the wind and solar industries do best. Let’s face it, they wouldn’t exist without massive and endless subsidies.

The chaotic power they occasionally produce has no commercial value and as Warren Buffett put it “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” Buffett might have continued, that it’s the only reason anyone invests in them.

In the detailed analysis below, Larry Brown goes further to reach the conclusion that, with or without subsidies, these things make no sense at all.

Wind Farm Back-of-the-Envelope Economic Analysis
Larry F. Brown
Watts Up With That?
21 July 2019

We visited a wind farm in southern Utah recently. I’ve always been curious about the costs, profitability, and physical size of these things as well as the footprint and…