Utopia, you are standing in it!

Last week, I shared some great information from Superabundance, a new book that shows how economic liberty has made us much better off, as measured by how much more we can buy per hour worked.

Today, let’s look at a related benefit of capitalism, which is that we don’t have to work nearly as many hours to achieve high living standards.

Here’s a tweet from Chris Freiman, a professor of philosophy at William & Mary University. As you can see, people in market-oriented nations work far fewer hours than they did 150 years ago. In some cases, hours worked per year have dropped by more than 50 percent.

When economists study these issues, they generally say the willingness of people to supply labor (whether to work and how much to work) depends on compensation. In other words, people give up leisure because they want money so they can consume.

Untold $billions are being squandered to connect unreliable, intermittent and diffuse, wind and solar to power grids; grids that were working just fine before the unreliables turned up.

The wind and solar industries spear turbines and plaster panels way beyond the back of beyond. Increasingly remote locations for wind and solar generators require serious upgrades to transmission infrastructure, adding hundreds of $millions to transmission costs, that would have otherwise been avoided, had Australia simply stuck with conventional generators and not squandered $60,000,000,000 in subsidies to intermittent wind and solar.

As any first-year physics student will tell you, transmitting electricity over distances results in a mathematically predictable loss of the power transmitted, over any given distance. The greater the distance, the greater the absolute loss.

Just like the value of prime real estate, the most beneficial situation for generating capacity is all about location, location, location.

In the main, conventional…

Alaska had it’s first election with a new voting rule and Tom Cotton is pissed.

I want very badly to be snarky here and make fun of the Senator for being so nakedly Trumpian in an effort to discredit any democratic institution the instant it doesn’t produce exactly the result he prefers. Fun aside, snark at Senator’s expense misses the bigger and more important mechanisms that are in play. I think the current instantiation of the Republican party is afraid of ranked choice voting. The Senator, in his angry little tweet, only lends greater credence to the theory. More broadly, its often worth unpacking when incumbents get upset about legitimate institutions, particularly when that anger is asymmetric across parties and coalitions.

What is ranked choice voting?

Quickly, ranked choice voting is any system where voters…

The communist in this case being the last leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died a few days ago at the age of 91.

I actually liked the guy for his basic decency and smarts, although that decency did not stop him sending in KGB agents to Eastern block countries to do their usual job of killing “agitators”, until he realised it would also take tanks and troops, as in East Germany in ’53, Hungary in ’56, and Czechoslovakia in ’68, and decided he couldn’t follow in the footsteps of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. So yes, I’ll give him credit for not doing the worst he could have – but that’s pretty weak sauce even if it does testify to some basic human decency.

That decency was also attested to here by John Hinderaker at Powerline, based on dealing with him at a US event in 2000:

I am always intrigued in the history of how things come to be. Like who was the first to discover could be turned into a hot beverage. However, as the title suggest this is not a blog about coffee but about my other guilty pleasure, Chocolate.

The history of chocolate is a bit more mysterious then that of coffee.

From Latin America to the modern day, chocolate has come a long way to get to the shops and eventually to you. From where did chocolate originate to how it became the indulgence we cherish and enjoy today.

The history of chocolate began in Mesoamerica. Fermented beverages made from chocolate date back to 1500 BC. The Mexica believed that cacao seeds were the gift of Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom, and the seeds once had so much value that they were used as a form of currency. Originally prepared only as…

With Europe’s renewable energy disaster laid bare for all to see, the focus is now on “real energy” – power that’s available 24 x 7, irrespective of the weather and where the Sun sits in the sky.

For fairly obvious reasons, the Small Modular Reactor has captured the imagination of power-starved Europeans, with two key contenders vying for a slice of what will be a very healthy market.

Britain’s Rolls-Royce is well ahead of the curve, with a 470MW unit almost ready to roll.

In the US, NuScale, based in Oregon, has cleared all of the regulatory hurdles and is ready to deliver 924MW reactors to those with the wit and temerity to acquire them.

The wind and solar cult run the line that SMRs are a pipe dream, cooked up by conservative reactionaries, which menas they’re bound to ignore the 200 small nuclear reactors presently powering 160 ships and…