Utopia, you are standing in it!

How ironic it is that a wholly weather dependent power source has such a bitterly hard time coping with the … ahem … weather.

When Hurricane Maria visited Puerto Rico last year, she managed to splatter wind turbine blades all over the island, leaving residents completely powerless: Weather Dependent Wind Power: Leaves Hurricane Victims Powerless

A typhoon in Taiwan did much the same:

And lightning has been laying them to waste in Ireland:

It’s almost as if Mother Nature has got it in for these things? This time a little blow in Japan managed to knock another one out of the game.

Awaji Island wind turbine topples over as typhoon cuts through western Japan
The Japan Times
Kyodo
24 August 2018

KOBE – A 60-meter-high wind turbine erected in a park on Awaji Island in Hyogo Prefecture toppled over in the early hours of Friday as powerful Typhoon Cimaron…

Submissions to Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee on the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (Monetary Policy) Amendment Bill close today.  Despite my scepticism about the value of the process –  given that the Bank and the Minister are already actively recruiting members of their tame Monetary Policy Committee –  I did lodge a submission this morning.

The full text is here Submission to FEC Reserve Bank of NZ Amendment bill Sept 2018

Most of it covers ground I’ve dealt with here over recent months, albeit in more abbreviated form. There are two main aspects to the bill:

• the proposed change in the statutory goal of monetary policy, and
• the creation of a statutory Monetary Policy Committee.

On the former

The case for having active discretionary monetary policy is – and always has been – about cyclical stabilisation.   We don’t need an active Reserve Bank to deliver broadly stable price levels over…

Yesterday, the Labour Party adopted – at least for the time being – the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism with all its examples, though with a caveat which Labour Friends of Israel claimed had the potential to undermine the example which labels antisemitic calling “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”. 

One example from the IHRA definition recently approved by the Labour Party not directly related to Israel seems relevant in light of a 2014 speech by Seumas Milne – currently Jeremy Corbyn’s communications chief and then Guardian associate editor – that we highlighted in a post at the time.

The IHRA example defines as antisemitic the following:

Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion

Now, here’s Milne on Aug. 9, 2014, during Israel’s war with Hamas, speaking to 

Monopsony in labor markets is seems to be becoming a hotter topic year after year.  I can’t help but cynically think that some of its popularity is due to the fact that it can be used as a rationale for policies that are widely popular with the public, but less so with economists, like minimum wages, worker safety legislation, unemployment insurance, and legal protection for unions.  However, the reasons why monopsonies are a problem for economists don’t seem to be the reason why more politicized commentators oppose them.

A quick review on the economics: a monopsony is a lesser-known cousin of the monopoly, so lesser known that any economist discussing monopsony with noneconomists will hiss the “s” in monopsssssssssssssssony to emphasize the difference.  The difference here is that, in a monopsony market, there is only one buyer of the good in question, which, in this case, is labor.  The existence…

Cooling my heels at the airport, I call your attention to a new book by Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University. The book: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. (That jawbreaker of a title was obviously taken from Allan Bloom’s surprising 1987 bestseller,The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students).

The screenshot below will take you to the new book’s Amazon site:

You’ll know their views from their 2015 Atlantic piece with the same title, but they’ve expanded and revised it, as you can see from the CBS News video below. In the meantime, the New York Times has, surprisingly, given the book a good…

During 2016, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio sought to shut down horse carriage rides calling the practice inhumane. The result was an explosion of animal rights hoodlums that came out of the woodwork relentlessly seeking to shut them down. Fortunately, de Blasio’s efforts flopped, but it hasn’t stopped the mayor from thinking of other ways to destroy the city’s tiny horse carriage ride industry.

At the end of August, de Blasio announced that the horse carriages will be moved from Central Park South to designated areas inside the park itself, thereby reducing their visibility and accessibility to the public. Worse part about it, The Wall Street Journal reports the horse carriage companies say they were not notified of the changes in advance and unable to give any input.

De Blasio did this through a city Department of Transportation rule change and not legislation like he tried…

Karen Bartlett’s new Holocaust work, ARCHITECTS OF DEATH: THE FAMILY WHO ENGINEERED THE DEATH CAMPS possesses a powerful narrative as it examines the German manufacturing firm J. A. Topf and Sons and its role during World War II.  The problem for the firm is that a few of its manufacturing products centered on ovens, crematoria, and the parts necessary to build them.  These products made up only 1.85% of Topf and Sons actual products, but these items were linked to Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau, and Mauthausen concentration/extermination camps.

The monograph begins with Hartmut Topf, the great grandson of the firm’s founder trying to come to grips with his family’s past.  After the war, Hartmut wanted nothing to do with the family business as his true loves were theater, puppetry, and journalism.  When he was a boy during the war his best friend Hans Laessing, was Jewish and he would disappear into…

I wrote a post a few weeks ago responding, in part, to absurd claims made in a TV interview by the Green Party co-leader and Minister for (against) Climate Change, James Shaw about the economic impact of pursuing the net-zero emissions target he and the Labour Party are championing.

He says investing in meeting our climate change goals will be a massive economic boost, rather than a burden.

“What we’re talking about here is a more productive economy, with higher-tech, higher-valued, higher-paid jobs. It’s clearly a cleaner economy where you’ve got lower health care costs, people living in warmer homes, congestion-free streets in Auckland.

“It’s an upgrade to our economy. It’s an investment, you’ve got to put something in, in order to generate that return. If we don’t, the clean-up costs from the impacts of climate change will well exceed the costs of the investment we’ve got to make to…