Utopia, you are standing in it!

The astonishing world-wide expansion of capitalism in the third quarter of the [nineteenth] century…
(The Age of Capital, page 147)

Eric Hobsbawn (1917 to 2012) was one of Britain’s leading historians. A lifelong Marxist, his most famous books are the trilogy covering what he himself termed ‘the long 19th century’, i.e. from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to the Great War in 1914. These three books are:

• The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (1962)
• The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (1975)
• The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (1987)

To which he later appended his account of the ‘short’ 20th century, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914 to 1991 (1994).

The Age of Capital: 1848 to 1875

The Age of Capital: 1848 to 1875 does what it says on the tin and provides a dazzlingly panoramic overview of the full economic, political and social events right across…

200 small nuclear reactors are presently powering 160 ships and submarines all around the world, and have been for decades.

What’s on foot is a move to bring those reactors onshore and use them to shore up power grids being wrecked by the chaotic intermittency of wind and solar.

STT promotes nuclear power because it works: safe, affordable, reliable and the perfect foil for those worried about human-generated carbon dioxide gas – because it doesn’t generate any, while generating power on demand, irrespective of the weather – unlike the forever unreliables: wind and solar.

One of the feeble ‘arguments’ against it, is that nuclear power plants are of such vast scale that they take longer to build than the pyramids of Giza, and cost twice as much. SMR technology takes the sting out of that case.

And, as Walter Starck outlines below, SMRs provide the perfect opportunity to reintroduce our…

Supermarkets are easy, apparently. So easy that you can set up and run a chain of them and at the same time “actively work towards other government goals across the environment, technology, business, and the labour market.”

What does that mean? The author helpfully explains (I am not making this up, somebody actually said this):

• develop[ing] skills and technology in software, robotics, and distribution systems
• developing 21st-century skills across the New Zealand workforce.
• sustainable practices such as innovative packaging, bulk product refill stations
• solar-powered warehouses could give consumers more reasons to use Kiwishop
• prioritising local suppliers to reduce transportation costs
• ensure better nutritional values for produce
• incentives for food suppliers to use sustainable practices… utilising hybrid, organic, or te ao Māori farming methods
• sustainable seafood manufacturing practices could be rewarded, further enabling the Government to achieve its related objectives.
• better business practices, such as paying staff at least the living…

Today, Sunday, August 15, 2021, marks the 50th anniversary of the closing of the gold window at the US Treasury, at which a small set of privileged entities were at least legally entitled to demand redemption of dollar claims issued by the US government at the official gold price of $35 an ounce. (In 1971, as in 2021, August 15 fell on a Sunday.) When I started blogging in July 2011, I wrote one of my early posts about the 40^th anniversary of that inauspicious event. My attention in that post was directed more at the horrific consequences of Nixon’s decision to combine a freeze on wages and price with the closing of the gold window, which was clearly far more damaging than the largely symbolic effect of closing the gold window. I am also re-upping my original post with some further comments, but in this post, my attention…