Utopia, you are standing in it!

Mary Seymour (August 30, 1548 – unknown), was the only daughter of Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley, and Catherine Parr, widow of Henry VIII of England and Ireland. Mary was born at her father’s country seat, Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire.

Parents

Catherine Parr was the eldest child of Sir Thomas Parr, lord of the manor of Kendal in Westmorland, (now Cumbria), and Maud Green, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Thomas Green, lord of Greens Norton, Northamptonshire, and Joan Fogge. Sir Thomas Parr was a descendant of King Edward III, and the Parrs were a substantial northern family which included many knights.

Catherine was Queen of England and Ireland as the last of the six wives of King Henry VIII from their marriage on July 12, 1543 until Henry’s death on January 28, 1547.

About six months after Henry VIII’s death, she married her fourth and final husband, Thomas…

Remember, the only species environmentalists don’t want to save and make life a living hell on Earth for are humans.

PHOTO CREDIT: By Bonnie from Kendall Park, NJ, USA – Carlin Does Trenton, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4027048

2019 & 2021

We have just undergone a futile election which has produced substantively the same outcome as the previous general election in October 2019: a Liberal plurality around 15 to 20 seats short of a majority.

On 21 October 2019, Canadians elected the 43^rd Parliament as follows:

As of around 0900 on 21 September, the preliminary results show that on 20 September 2021, we have elected a 44^th Parliament virtually identical to its predecessor. The results in some ridings might change as Elections Canada counts the rest of the mail-in ballots this week, but the general result of a Liberal plurality at roughly the same level as two years ago will not.

Now let’s take a look into the calculations that Ronald Brakels made to prove that hydro power (Snowy Hydro 2.0) is more expensive than battery storage (Hornsdale Power Reserve). His arguments were spread over many paragraphs and at first glance it was not very clear what he was calculating exactly and why. Therefor, I thought it might be a good idea to redo his calculations. This reconstruction will be the subject of this post and I will clearly write out all his calculations in order to better understand his arguments.

The calculation can be divided into three parts.

Our friends on the left believe (or at least claim to believe) that the United States is an unfair nation because the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

More specifically, they assert that the economy is a fixed pie and that when people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos become rich, then there is less prosperity for everyone else.

This is grotesquely inaccurate, as I explained earlier this year.

We have a great opportunity to revisit this issue because the Census Bureau just released its annual report on Income and Poverty in the United States. I went to Table A2 and created this chart to show how inflation-adjusted income has increased over time for the average household.

In other words, families are earning more, no matter how we measure the average (“median” is the household in the middle and “mean” is the average of all…

That is the title of a new New Zealand Initiative report out yesterday, with the subtitle “How misunderstanding the past jeopardises our future”.

I’m no fan of this government, including its economic policies, and often lament how little New Zealand economic history is taught (none at all for example in our capital city university), so I should have been favourably predisposed towards such a report, which appears to have been prompted (specifically) by a couple of recent quotes from the Minister of Finance. This is how the report starts

And here is how it ends

You’ll get the drift.

I’m very sympathetic to the story that both Robertson and his boss are keen on a “bigger and more intrusive and directive government”, and it is clear that they have no serious ideas about (and demonstrate little interest in) reversing the decades of relative productivity decline. Most likely, their approach will…