Utopia, you are standing in it!

When party management at Westminster was still being developed the only means of ensuring good attendance at parliamentary debates was to ‘call the House’, an event described in 1855 as ‘one of the most interesting and exciting scenes’ the Commons ever witnessed. At a time when MPs’ attendance at debates was often poor, the practice was employed when important questions required the full attention of the House.

The earliest authenticated call of the House took place in 1549, although the procedure is thought to have originated in a statute of Richard II. Usually MPs were given at least one week’s notice that a call was to take place, although the interval could vary between one day and six weeks. On the day appointed the order might be discharged (i.e. dropped), but if proceeded with the Members’ names were called over according to their counties, which were arranged alphabetically, the English…

Because every MW of wind power capacity is matched with a MW of reliable coal, gas or nuclear power, the ‘case’ for subsidised wind will never add up

Generating electricity 30% of the time – albeit that wind power outfits can never tell you in advance which 30% of the time that might be – the cost of ‘backing up’ intermittent wind power becomes astronomical. These days reliable generation is referred to euphemistically as ‘firming capacity’ – conjuring up the notion of some kind of Viagra for putting a little stiffness in the grid.

Duplicating a reliable generation system with an unreliable one, not only duplicates the capital cost it also increases the cost of running the former, as coal and gas generators are forced to ramp up and down, according to the weather. All of which results in monumental waste and astronomical costs.

Jay Lehr takes a look at…

If you’re a policy wonk, you’ll enjoy this history of how government regulation has hindered the development of telecommunications technology.

I want to focus on the part of the video, beginning about 30:00, which discusses “net neutrality.” The interview with Professor Hazlett took place in 2017, at a time when there was lots of fighting over this issue.

The pro-regulation crowd claimed that net neutrality was needed to protect consumers from slow and expensive service. And they made all sorts of ridiculous claims about the Trump Administration’s plans to get rid of the Obama-era regulation.

At the time, this tweet from the Democratic members of the U.S. Senate got a lot of attention.

So what actually happened after net neutrality was repealed?

I suppose the first question to answer is:

Did..

…the…

…Internet…

…slow…

…to…

…a…

…crawl?

Not exactly. Robby Soave gives us the details in a…

A portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation [image credit: R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution @ Wikipedia]
This article starts off confident that the researchers are right – ‘we now know’ etc. – but later retreats and says ‘the cooling appears to have’ etc. But as the Little Ice Age is an interesting topic it’s worth a look.
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New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age?

The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming, says Phys.org.

The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, a period of cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.

This cold spell, whose precise timeline scholars debate, but which seems to have set in…

Despite the now well-established academic interest in homicide, criminal justice historians have paid relatively little attention to a sub-group of murderers with whom the media has long been obsessed: the so-called serial killers. Whilst there remains a debate about how many victims a killer must claim before the ‘serial killer’ label is applied,[1] and a distinction should be made between spree and serial killers,[2] for our purposes it is more important to note that the term is now used mainly to describe male sex killers of the type personified by the infamous Jack the Ripper of 1888.[3] Those who kill successive victims for purely financial reasons tend to inspire less enduring fascination. However, they too are serial murderers and, as such, offer historians valuable insights on the investigative and legal tactics used to identify and convict uniquely dangerous repeat offenders. In Britain, poisoners were among the earliest…