Utopia, you are standing in it!

There are some remarkable stories of the private sector showing initiative when governments fail to maintain infrastructure.

• In response to dithering by government, residents and businesses in Hawaii put up $4 million to fix an important community road.
• Smugglers in Russia repaired a road to facilitate untaxed trade between Russian and Belarus.
• I also wrote about a guy in England who was fed up with the slow pace of road repairs and built a private toll road.

Regarding the final example, here’s a video on his project.

I’m particularly amused that this example of practical libertarianism (I’m guessing without the cost overruns that are inevitable with government) was made possible because zoning laws (normally an obstacle to sensible land use) basically allowed the organizer to ask for forgiveness afterward rather than permission beforehand.

To be sure, these isolated examples are hardly a sign that infrastructure is going to be…

By Anton Lang ~

This Post details the daily wind power generation data for the AEMO coverage area in Australia. For the background information, refer to the Introductory Post at this link.

Each image is shown here at a smaller size to fit on the page alongside the data for that day. If you click on each image, it will open on a new page and at a larger size so you can better see the detail.

Note also that on some days, there will be a scale change for the main wind power image, and that even though images may look similar in shape for the power generation black line on the graph when compared to other days, that scale (the total power shown on the left hand vertical axis) has been changed to show the graph at a larger size to better fit the image for that…

Adolf can’t stop laughing.

I’ve just read the list of super draconian measures announced for the poor bastards who live in Melbourne.

Among other things only one person from each household may go shopping each day and only to a supermarket within five kilometres distance from home.

But get this!

“Exemptions include visiting a person with whom you are in an intimate personal relationship, including outside metropolitan Melbourne.”

I kid you not.

Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish, to which I’ve just subscribed, has his usual tripartite column, along with the “view from my window” series and a place where he reproduces and responds to readers’ beefs. (To his credit, he took a reader’s advice to heart and is giving up issuing tweets that “simply mock or provoke without context.”) The three issues he takes up are wokeness—in particular a review and discussion of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories, which I’ve discussed before; an attack on Trump for intimating that he’d delay November’s election on the grounds of mail-in ballots; and a further defense of J. K. Rowling.

If you want to subscribe to Andrew’s site, it’s only $50 a year (a measly $1 per week), and you can do so here. To be honest, I’m jealous of Sullivan. When it comes to politics—though not religion: he still adheres…

Tesla plant [image credit: Steve Jurvetson @ Wikipedia]
H/T TechXplore

But Plan B includes putting heavy batteries in already heavy trucks, making them too heavy for hauling goods — or reducing their payloads. But at least the fact that there aren’t going to be anywhere near enough batteries to replace all fuel-powered vehicles with expensive EVs is out in the open, leaving climate obsessives with yet another headache. Wade through the usual paranoid propaganda to see how big the problem is.
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We need to change our transportation system, and we need to do it quickly, claims The Conversation.

Road transportation is a major consumer of fossil fuels, contributing 16 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, which warm up the Earth’s atmosphere and cause changes to the climate.

It also pollutes the air, threatening health and costing taxpayers billions of dollars annually.

At the same time…