Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’m a proud advocate and defender of capitalism for the simple reason that it is a system that is consistent with human freedom while also producing mass prosperity that was unimaginable for much of human history.

Jurisdictions that embrace capitalism enjoy great progress while nations that veer in the other direction suffer economic decline, as vividly demonstrated by comparisons such as the relative performance of Hong Kong and Argentina.

And, for what it’s worth, the Princess of the Levant even says capitalism is “a sexy word.”

But not everybody agrees.

A column by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post has some very depressing poll numbers.

…the Harvard Institute of Politics has released a new poll of young voters… One key finding in the poll, which surveyed over 3,000 people from ages 18-29, is that these young people see a robust role for government in guaranteeing a right to…

Image credit: How to Improve Your Online Content for Better Readability

There are about 300 blogs on the list, although I am weeding out those which are no longer active or have removed public access to sitemeters. (Let me know if I weed out yours by mistake or get your stats wrong).

Every month I get queries from people wanting their own blog included. I encourage and am happy to respond to queries but have prepared a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) people can check out. Have a look at NZ Blog Rankings FAQ. This is particularly helpful to those wondering how to set up sitemeters. Please note, the system is automatic and relies on blogs having sitemeters which allow public access to the stats.

Here are the rankings of New Zealand blogs with publicly available statistics for April 2016. Ranking is by visit numbers. I have listed the…

Reposted in full (I hope Roger P doesn’t mind) from his excellent blog, a brief synopsis of the SREX section of the new IPCC report, which confirms that there is no proven link between extreme weather events and longer term temperature trends or co2 levels.

The full IPCC Special Report on Extremes is out today, and I have just gone through the sections in Chapter 4 that deal with disasters and climate change. Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where “right” means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.

I’ve always enjoyed Star Trek.  Like many others, I’ve enjoyed its hopeful vision of the future, its far reaching technological speculations, its exploration of moral and social concerns and perhaps most significantly, its wild speculations of a post-scarcity economy.  

The author of the piece makes a game effort at rationalizing the ST economy, but given the timeline, I don’t see how it comes together. 

How can you mass produce warp and transporter technology, weapons systems and marshall the considerable labor and materials needed for a Federation class starship without a private sector and without resorting to totalitarianism?  

Between these types of questions and the general veneration of government bureaucracy and the slavish deference to hierarchical command structures, Star Trek’s general affinity for rational thought and secular ethics goes very flaccid.  

Sorry, dude. You simply can’t build a fleet of starships without mobilizing considerable labor and resources. Proto post-scarcity…

Driver-less car [image credit: google.com]
Or they may not. Robotic futures tend not to work out as predicted, but here’s another one, as DW.COM reports.

One likely roadblock is the amount of electricity required to make it feasible. Another one could be public resistance…

By 2025, self-driving cars could lead to a steep decline in fossil fuels – and in personal car ownership. Smart electric vehicles will pick you up, drop you off, and mostly look after themselves. A realistic scenario?

By Randy Hall ~

I wanted to do a longer post on the fall of the USSR, and that will appear here at some point, but I wanted to do a quick post now with some minor points.

First, a chart of the fall, measured from peak GDP,

That’s 13 years to recover. Some communists take this to mean.. ahá! This proves that communism works, as GDPpc falled badly when the transition to capitalism happened. Here’s the chart for the years prior to the fall:

So communism was zooming along, then a transition to capitalism happened, and it took quite a few years to recover.

There’s a catch, however. Those two charts are for Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. :-). You just accepted the superiority of Nazism. Oops.

Here there is a comparison between Chile (just after Pinochet), Spain (just after the Civil War), Germany (just after the end of…

Cross-posted from I-CONnect blog.

Towards the end of the 1990s I was invited to a workshop just outside of Berlin at which a group of young academics gathered to discuss the future of the European Union.  The workshop was funded by a German think-tank that had generously, if perhaps misguidedly, provided significant amounts of food and drink to assist the process of contemplation.  We had a great time, but by the end of the two days the future of the Union was, if anything, rather blurrier than it had been at the start.

One conversation I had at the workshop has stayed with me.  An earnest German doctoral student tackled me about Britain’s position on the Eurozone.  He wanted to know why Britain had decided not to join, and voiced a dark suspicion as to the answer. Was it true, he asked, that Britain planned to wait, see how…