Why TVs Have Become So Inexpensive
02 Oct 2021 1 Comment
in economic history, economics of information, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, survivor principle
Dying In The Mud – Autumn Is Taking Its Toll I THE GREAT WAR – Week 10
02 Oct 2021 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: World War I
Heatwave of 1895-1896
01 Oct 2021 Leave a comment
There was a year long global heatwave which began during September 1895. Rather than trying to understand it, Tony Heller reveals government agencies have attempted to erase it.
Covid has camouflaged cracks in the Cabinet and hidden failures in the govt’s performance
01 Oct 2021 Leave a comment
Is the political tide which Labour rode in triumph to victory last year beginning to ebb? The September Colmar Brunton poll pointed at least to it being on the turn.
Not that political pundits saw it that way. They were too heavily focused on how National’s leader Judith Collins had crashed to a new low point and canvassing how soon the caucus dissidents would coalesce to overthrow her.
Those experts hardly noticed that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s once stellar popularity has moved off its peak and is now down at 44% — even though the communication skills which propelled her to the heights have been in daily evidence during the latest Covid Delta outbreak.
The other curious feature of the mainstream media’s analysis of the Colmar Brunton sampling was the almost universal view that the ACT party is sucking the oxygen out of National, excluding the rather different prospect that …
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Henry IV of England and his claim to the English Throne
01 Oct 2021 Leave a comment
From The Emperor’s Desk: in my recent post I discussed how Henry Bolingbroke became King Henry IV of England. Historians consider him a usurper and although he did have a strong hereditary claim to the throne his assumption of the crown was more of a right by conquest than him being the legal heir to King Richard II.
When Richard II was forced to abdicate the throne on September 29, 1399, Henry was next in line to the throne according to Edward III’s entailment of 1376. That entailment clearly reflects the operation of agnatic primogeniture, also known as the Salic law. At this time, it was by no means a settled custom for the daughter of a king to supersede the brothers of that king in the line of succession to the throne.
Indeed, it was not an established belief that women could inherit the throne at all by right:…
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The Germany 2021 result and the electoral system
01 Oct 2021 Leave a comment
explains how Left party won list seats despite missing the 5% threshold
The German general election of 2021 has resulted in a situation in which neither major party can form a government without either the other, or more likely, a coalition that takes in both the liberal FDP and the Greens. With the largest party, the social-democratic SPD, under 30% of seats, it is an unusually fragmented result compared to most German elections. Naturally, this being Fruits & Votes, attention turns to how much more fragmented this outcome is than expected, given the electoral system. The answer may be a bit of a surprise: not all that much. I expected this outcome to be a significant miss for the Seat Product Model (SPM). But it is really not that far off.
For a two-tier PR system, of which Germany’s MMP can be thought of as a subtype, we need to use the extended version of the SPM developed in Votes…
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