Utopia, you are standing in it!

The headlines said it all.

“High power demand forces blackouts in some areas”: Radio NZ.

“Things are running tight this morning: Transpower boss’ warning to Kiwis”: NZ Herald.

“’So Third World’ : Government faces pressure after power blackout” : Stuff

But doesn’t NZ have plenty of energy? After all, the Ardern government – in 2018 – could rule out any further offshore exploration for oil and gas.

And Energy Minister Megan Woods, more recently, has been complaining that wholesale power prices are too high.

It all hit home with dismaying force this week when – for the first time in several decades – NZ experienced enforced power blackouts.

As Stuff reported:

“The government is facing serious pressure after rolling power blackouts on one of the coldest nights of the year, with National saying the situation is ‘third world’.”

While his competitors continue to fumble around with much delayed, modest successes like getting spaceships into sub-orbital flights, Elon Musk’s SpaceX corporation continues to power ahead with stuff that’s at least a decade in front of them, not to mention national space agencies like China’s and NASA.

Following the successful atmospheric test flight of Starship SN15 – after a few catastrophic landings for earlier models – the next test ship, SN16, was simply scrapped while work moved ahead on a sub-orbital / orbital test vehicle.

This is entirely in keeping with SpaceX’s iterative development process of rapid design-build-test prototyping.

Only a few days ago, it was observed that the Super Heavy Booster (formerly called the BFR), the 1st stage of the Starship system, had been moved to its launchpad in Texas.

But just the other day, it was seen that an actual Starship sub-orbital/orbital model, SN20, was lifted…

Giant lithium-ion batteries have an alarming habit of exploding and, when they do, literally burning for days.

Following up on our recent post concerning just such a case – where a Tesla mega-battery exploded in a toxic fireball in southwest Victoria – here’s a couple from the team at Jo Nova and Watts Up With That? that detail the aftermath.

The Tesla battery fire burned for longer than it operated for
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
3 August 2021

We all heard about the Tesla Megabattery fire in Victoria last Friday, but you may not know it only started operating on Thursday night. Or that 30 fire trucks and 150 firefighters took 76 hours to get the blazing battery under control.

So it burned for three times longer than it operated.

When they burn, Tesla batteries produce smoke with aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, lead, selenium, manganese and chromium.

Luckily no…

Several years ago the Law and Economics Association hosted an event in Wellington in which the New Zealand Initiative’s Eric Crampton and I each told our stories about New Zealand immigration policy. My account is here, and a link to the talk I gave is here.

A few months ago a couple of Victoria University of Wellington academics responsible for a Masters class (in a programme I didn’t even know existed (Masters in Philosophy, Politics and Economics)) invited us to do something similar for their class. We did that today.

My text is here (if Eric chooses to link to his slides on his blog I will include a link) (UPDATE: link here). My focus was solely on the economic dimensions of immigration policy, and in particular on the implications for economywide productivity (as the best proxy for whether large-scale policy-led non-citizen immigration has been beneficial for…