Utopia, you are standing in it!

The renewable energy debacle in Germany means that it won’t axe its nuclear plants and is likely to start building more of them, like their French neighbours.

The French, of course, set the benchmark for generating clean, safe and reliable nuclear power; they’ve been doing so for nearly 60 years and still get over 75% of their electricity from their nuclear plants, and export large volumes of what they generate to power starved Germans and Brits.

Meanwhile, Australia sits as the only G20 Nation to not employ nuclear power. With the power pricing and supply catastrophe out in Europe, Australia’s legislated ban on nuclear power looks positively insane.

Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves and, despite its shifting policy of limiting the number of mines and states that have banned them, is the world’s third-largest uranium exporter. Happy to export it, but too dim to use it…

A conversation about the similarities and differences between taxes and social security contributions – my son is studying economics – prompted me to head off to the OECD website and get the data on total taxes and social security contributions as a share of GDP.

Here is what I found for 2021 (the OECD didn’t have this level of data for its Latin American members, and I omitted Ireland and Luxembourg, as their GDP numbers aren’t a suitable basis for these purposes).

That is the snapshot for the most recent year, 2021, and here is how New Zealand has compared to Australia and to the OECD median (countries in the first chart) for the period back to 1995 when the data are comprehensive.

To be honest, I was a little surprised. I guess time passes and impressions need updating from time to time: the story I had been walking around…

World energy markets keep defying the wind and solar cult’s prediction that coal’s days are over. The meme has it that ‘coal is dead’, but in reality it hasn’t suffered so much as a flesh wound.

Indeed, thermal coal prices are off the charts, with record demand driving record prices: Australian thermal coal prices hit $US$400 ($548 a tonne) in March, with prices still on the rise.

The black stuff remains critical because it does something that sunshine and breezes can never do; fed into coal-fired power plants (such as the Isogo HELE plant in Japan depicted above) it provides cheap and reliable power around-the-clock, irrespective of the weather. The reason that coal remains in constant (and indeed rising) demand is that simple.

The Australian’s Greg Sheridan picks up the thread below.

Coal is booming but you won’t hear about it at the ABC
The Australian
Greg Sheridan
3 October…

Because of her support for lower tax rates, I was excited when Liz Truss became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Especially since her predecessor, Boris Johnson, turned out to be an empty-suit populist who supported higher taxes and a bigger burden of government spending.

But I’m not excited anymore.

Indeed, it’s more accurate to say that I’m despondent since the Prime Minister is abandoning (or is being pressured to abandon) key parts of her pro-growth agenda.

For details, check out this Bloombergreport, written by Julian Harris, about the (rapidly disappearing) tax-cutting agenda of the new British Prime Minister.

Westminster’s most hard-line advocates of free markets and lower taxes are looking on in despair as their agenda crumbles… When Liz Truss became prime minister just over five weeks ago, she promised to deliver a radical set of policies rooted in laissez-faire economics — an attempt to boost…

To be honest I was never a great fan of Charlie Chaplin. I was always more of a fan of the Laurel and Hardy type of humour. I find that Charlie Chaplin’s movies dated quite badly compared to the aforementioned Laurel and Hardy movies.

However there is one notable exception. There was one Chaplin movie that has stood the test of time. That movie of course is “the Great Dictator”, released on October 15,1940.

It is relevant now as it was in 1940.

The film is a satire on Adolf Hitler, played by the main character Adenoid Hynkel. The story is based on Hynkel looking exactly like “a Jewish barber”: both are played by Charles Chaplin. But it begins with a notice: “Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely co-incidental”

Chaplin spent two years developing the script and began filming in September 1939, six days…

Edgar Ætheling or Edgar II (c. 1052 – 1125 or after) was the last male member of the royal house of Cerdic of Wessex. He was elected King of English by the Witenagemot in 1066, but never crowned.

Edgar was born in the Kingdom of Hungary, where his father Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside, had spent most of his life, having been sent into exile after Edmund’s death and the conquest of England by the Danish king Canute the Great in 1016.

His grandfather Edmund, great-grandfather Æthelred the Unready, and great-great-grandfather Edgar the Peaceful were all kings of England before Cnut the Great took the crown. Edgar’s mother was Agatha, who was described as a relative of the Holy Roman Emperor or a descendant of Saint Stephen of Hungary, but whose exact identity is unknown. He was his parents’ only son but had two sisters, Margaret…

Oct. 15, 2022: Most spacecraft try to avoid hitting the atmosphere. Lucy is about to do it on purpose. On Oct. 16th, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will skim Earth’s atmosphere, passing only 220 miles (350 kilometers) above our planet’s surface. Near closest approach over Australia it will be visible to the naked eye glowing almost as brightly as a 1st magnitude star.

This is a gravity assist maneuver–the first of three required for Lucy’s complicated mission to visit 8 different asteroids. The slingshot will give Lucy the energy it needs to fly towards the asteroid belt and, its ultimate destination, the orbit of Jupiter.

Named for a hominid fossil found in 1974 in Africa, Lucy is on a mission to study a completely different kind of relic: the Trojan asteroids. These are primitive leftovers from the formation of our solar system, collected into swarms around two of Jupiter’s Lagrange…