Why wasn’t there a Scramble for Australia?
28 Jul 2023 Leave a comment
in defence economics, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, international economic law, International law, Public Choice Tags: age of empires, Australia, economics of colonialism
Happy Birthday World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR – Week 105
28 Jul 2023 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: World War I
Chaotic Wind Power Output Leaves Power-Starved Texans Praying To Wind Gods
27 Jul 2023 Leave a comment
Banking on the wind for your daily power needs is prone to disappoint. From the moment human beings harnessed thermal energy the path of industrial and modern civilisation was set. No more begging for beneficial breezes to spin that mill. Power could be had as and when we needed it, not when mother nature felt inclined to provide it.
Then came self-serving, rent-seeking crony capitalists – backed by an ideologically driven cult – who hijacked energy policy, returning us to an age of superstition and wishful thinking.
What stands out in the first piece by Bill Peacock is not the perfectly predictable collapses in wind and solar output, it’s the argument put forward by a Reuter’s columnist that Texas’ troubles will soon be overcome by “greater wind speeds” which, he reckons, will provide a “major boost” to Texan power supplies and avert any further power scares during hot weather.
Now…
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JERRY COYNE: Could Mātauranga Māori advance quantum physics?
27 Jul 2023 Leave a comment
Reproduced with permission
- Jerry Coyne writes –
I suspect the answer to the title question is “No way!”, but the incursion of Mātauranga Māori (“MM”, or Māori “ways of knowing”) into New Zealand’s science is reaching ludicrous depths. Even in the U.S.A. we don’t see headlines like the one below. (Note that “complement” is misspelled as “compliment”.)
Why am I so sure this endeavor won’t work? Simply because there is nothing about quantum physics in MM, and I can’t envision any MM-derived insights into the discipline that could advance it beyond what modern physicists are doing already. Of course Māori physicists, like the one below, could well make contributions to quantum mechanics, but it’s hard to see that those insights would come from MM, a mixture of trial-and-error knowledge gained from living (gathering plants and fish), theology, superstition, tradition, and ethics.
Nevertheless, the termites have dined so well that we…
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Economic Liberty and Prosperity on Indian Reservations
27 Jul 2023 Leave a comment
The federal government screws up some big things (Social Security, health care, higher education, etc).
This video shows it also screws up on targeted issues.
The clear message is that the federal government has very bad policies that are hurting Native Americans.
It’s almost as if the system is designed to benefit bureaucrats rather than recipients (a very common problem with federal programs, unfortunately).
But not every problem is caused by Washington.
Here’s a chart from some new research by Thomas Stratmann of George Mason University. He created an index measuring the extent to which various reservations promote or hinder economic liberty.
As you can see, more economic liberty is correlated with higher levels of household income.
And here are some brief excerpts from his study.
This paper proposes a Reservation Economic Freedom Index for over 80 Indian reservations. …I document a positive association between reservations…
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George Escapes The Birthday Party Fire | The Fire | Seinfeld
27 Jul 2023 Leave a comment
in television, TV shows
Nobel Prize for World’s Worst Climate Model
26 Jul 2023 Leave a comment
Patrick J. Michaels reports at Real Clear Policy Nobel Prize Awarded for the Worst Climate Model.Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Given the persistent headlines about climate change over the years, it’s surprising how long it took the Nobel Committee to award the Physics prize to a climate modeler, which finally occurred earlier this month.
Indeed, Syukuro Manabe has been a pioneer in the development of so-called general circulation climate models (GCMs) and more comprehensive Earth System Models (ESMs). According to the Committee, Manabe was awarded the prize “For the physical modelling of the earth’s climate, quantifying variability, and reliably predicting global warming.”
What Manabe did was to modify early global weather forecasting models, adapting them to long-term increases in human emissions of carbon dioxide that alter the atmosphere’s internal energy balance, resulting in a general warming of surface temperatures, along with a much
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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