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The gathering crisis

This is about the gathering crisis in the UK, not any other crisis-hit nation.

Here is a compendium of the firehose of dismay that's been blasting me in the face for the past couple of weeks. Share and enjoy! And feel free to use the comment thread to discuss what's coming next for the UK as the vector sum of Brexit, COVID19, the energy crisis from the Ukraine war, and the worst inflationary bubble since 1980 punches us in the face.

First, Europe is in the grip of the worst drought in 500 years.

England is officially in drought too, and the potato, onion, and carrot crops are all expected to fail, with potato yields in particular down 50%. (Before we mention Brexit crippling exports of Scottish seed potatoes to the EU.)

Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister for a couple more weeks, but is treating his remaining time in office—since his resignation was announced—as garden leave: he's been holidaying in Greece. However, he refused to hand over the reins to Deputy PM Dominic Raab in the meantime. The rash of ministerial resignations that led to Johnson's resignation has left a number of portfolios vacant, with no successors appointed. In effect, Johnson's executive team downed tools and walked out, leaving the building empty. In consequence, government business is being blocked or ignored, as the worst crisis in 50 years bears down on the nation.

Inflation is skyrocketing, with Citi forecasting it will hit 18.6% in January, largely due to the energy crisis resulting from the Ukraine war feeding through the system to hit domestic and business consumers.

(It's not just Citi; the Bank of England are forecasting 13% inflation towards the end of the year.)

This is probably going to lead to a Sterling crisis, which won't help—Sterling is currently close to its ten year low against the US Dollar (it's only been lower in mid-March 2020, when the UK abruptly slammed into lockdown).

Small businesses are already folding as their energy contracts raise prices by 400-1000% for the next year: there are worries about care homes being unable to keep their residents warm. 8% of businesses already report that price increases to date threaten their viability, but worse is to come.

There is a forecast risk of unscheduled, protracted, rolling black-outs in midwinter.

The government's own forecasts of a "reasonable worst case" (which include some scheduled blackouts) still rely on the UK importing electricity via the grid interconnectors from France, the Netherlands, and Belgium—but those nations are having their own energy problems.

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of the SNP government in Scotland, has proposed the unthinkable, that nationalising the energy sector should be back on the table, after it was reported that 36% of Scottish households would be in fuel poverty by October. But Truss isn't listening to her (see below).

Brexit hasn't delivered trade opportunities, but mountains of red tape, with a hit to the economy estimated at roughly 6% so far. But the UK economy already shrank 11% in 2020, the worst year since 1709.

Brexit has delivered some deregulation, though: notably, the Conservative government ditched EU standards on effluent discharges, resulting in the (private) water companies discharging raw sewage into almost every river, and the seas around the UK coastline.

So it is no longer safe to swim in UK waters.

In part this is due to difficulties in importing chemicals required for water purification plants from the EU ... but that's also a Brexit side-effect.

The English NHS is officially hitting it's regular annual "winter crisis" (with hospitals unable to take new patients, and A&E units logjammed with emergency cases) in August.

There's a staffing crisis, with armed police units (normally backstops for regular cops on patrol, called in only during violent incidents) being sent to heart attack patients because there are either no paramedics, or the ambulances are all full and queuing at the logjammed A&E units.

With inflation already nudging 10% it should be no surprise that workers are asking for pay rises. The railway network is being hit by 24 hour strikes, with widespread public support for the actual workers—it seems some employees are better rewarded than others. That's's not an isolated example: Average pay for FTSE100 executives jumped by 39% to £3.4M from 2020-21.

Meanwhile here in Edinburgh—in the middle of the biggest arts festival in Europe—the bin workers have started a two week strike, after a Labour-led coalition with the Conservatives on the city council rejected a request for a 5% pay rise and offered 2% instead.

(It's a boomtown for rats right now!)

Actually, everyone seems to be striking. The criminal bar has just walked out, demanding a 25% pay increase after a decade of actual cuts to their remuneration for representing criminal defendants in court. But don't worry about being put on trial, criminal cases take an average of 708 days to come to court at present, And that's if you're arrested in the first place—police numbers are down 15% since 2010, and service budgets have been cut by at least 20-25%.

Dock workers at Felixstowe, the UK's biggest container port, are striking for the first time in 30 years.

Public transport in London is being hit by strike action.

There is even a whiff of General Strike in the air.

Liz Truss, the most likely next Prime Minister of the UK, has responded to these crises by dressing up as Margaret Thatcher, striking a pose in front of a Union flag, and:

(This last tidbit might be related to the fact that Sturgeon has been interviewed—twice!—by Vogue, and couldn't give Truss any advice into how to get profiled by that magazine when Truss reportedly asked her at the COP26 summit, instead of talking about the climate change crisis.)

Editorial time:

I have no idea what comes next.

We are clearly seeing the usual disaster capitalists haul out the usual nostrums for "curing" the ailments of economic shocks, as described in The Shock Doctrine.

That's what those big FTSE100 pay rises are about, and the rumbling about privatizing the NHS, and the attacks on unions, and the culture wars being played at stadium rock volume in all the news media.

But it's not clear that they'll work this time—the crisis is too big to shove under the carpet.

The harvest is failing. Energy bills are soaring to the point where businesses, already hit by a bad recession, are going bust because they can't keep the lights on. (Not posting a link but I've seen reports of Fish and Chip shops shutting down because they can't afford the power bills for the fryers—or, soon, the bill for the potatoes and the expensive sewage-free imported fish.) A third of the country can't afford to pay their bills: there's a grass-roots movement to start a payment strike against the energy companies, who are seen as exploiting the situation for profit.

The health service is in crisis. Inflation is wiping out pensions and savings. A general strike seems possible by the end of the year, something that hasn't hit the UK since 1926.

Politics is dominated by an incumbent party who have ruled, except for a 13 year period (during which they were replaced by the Tory-Lite regime of Tony Blair), since 1979—43 years of conservative policies. They're completely out of new ideas, but the next leader of the nation is intent on recycling the same tired nostrums indefinitely, using an astroturfed culture war on wokery as cover rather than trying to address the deep structural problems of a state that has been hollowed out and looted for half a lifetime, so that there is no resilience left in our institutions.

This is the sort of crisis that brings down nations.

1294 Comments

1:

I almost want to say 'well, the last one to leave turns off the lights', but as it is, it seems likely that there won't be any electricity for the lights anyway, so the lights will be off way earlier than that.

2:

People keep on saying that we are going to hit the iceberg if we don't do something. They seem to have failed to have noticed that we hit the iceberg some years ago (probably a decade or so, when 'austerity' was chosen as the response to 2008, but certainly before Brexit.) We're now just seeing whether we hit the seabed at speed or drift gently down.

3:

I have no idea what comes next.

I hear tax cuts are on the way.

And I'm sure there will be political ads in the US on how it is Biden's and the D's fault. Trump would not have let it happen.

[sarcasm off][somewhat]

4:

I for one welcome Scotland in the wide-open arms of the EU, probably VERY SOON, as part of a Gaelic-Welsh-Northern-Ireland-Ireland union. And if that doesn't work, emigration to Amsterdam is not a particularly bad idea either. I run a nifty homebrew centered on Githyanki, I'd love your input.

5:

It's worth noting that although Brexit isn't making things any better, most of the problems are coming from structural failure across Europe. And winter, without Russian gas, is going to be VERY cold.

Who knew that policy documents don't make up for having a broken economy, mired in bureaucracy, and with nothing to offer but tourist destinations?

6:

Stuff I didn't want to put in the OP:

I expect the results of winter blackouts, superinflation, and food shortages will focus a lot of Scottish minds on independence as the SNP's deadline for holding a referendum (October 6th, 2023) looms close. If it doesn't, we're screwed: there is absolutely no way that a hard right Tory government, once it has wangled re-election, will not reverse the devolution of powers we've had since 2000 and reinstate direct rule over what they see as a fractious province. (Their attitude to Scotland is very similar to the Russian establishment attitude to Ukraine.)

In previous cycles the current crisis would be fixed by a short, sharp dose of socialism, probably delivered by the Labour Party. But Labour today is a right wing party, centered roughly where Margaret Thatcher once stood. The Conservative Party of 2022 is the result of the party of 2012 making a determined attempt to crush its right-wing fringe, the UKIPpers and BNP-adjacent soft-fascist extreme (as opposed to the violent street thugs of EDL or Britain First). They succeeded too well. Former "centrist" Tories -- Thatcherites one and all -- were pushed out as too liberal, and the party is now wholly owned by the far right, as Liz Truss's policy platforms suggest.

We might be looking at a choice between a military coup(!) or a fascist dictatorship emerging naturally from the ruling party within another 5 years.

The situation we're facing is backstory-of-V-for-Vendetta bad.

7:

Parenthetically: woke up this morning and realized I was really depressed.

Putting this all together made me feel ... not better, exactly, but better about being depressed because depression seems like a reasonable response to these circumstances.

8:

The sterling crisis started when the UK pulled out of the EU with the Brexit vote in 2016. And it's never recovered (and as an ex-pat it's cost me personally thousands of dollars as most of my money was in the UK). The FT, even before all the bad news this week was stating last week that if the pound hovers around $1.15 it would be doing well. Think about that. Mot of my life it's been between $1.56 to $2.

During the summer we spent five weeks in Europe, three of them in the England. What was quickly apparent was that the public still to be almost as clueless about what trouble the country is in, partly due to effective distractions by the Daily Fail and Express (I lost count how many Brits were telling me that Biden had dementia, which they clearly got from those rags, yet from my perspective, he's just passed four of the biggest bills in recent US history that actually help people, and I'm not seeing the same competence on the UK side).

Which brings us to the present. The UK has perfected the art with Boris Johnson of just winging it and hoping for the best. That's not going to happen this time around. And it's hard to see who is going to be able to stabilize the situation with an election two years away. As far as I can tell, the only hope is that the Tories decide it's better to lose the election, then blame everyone else for the mess the country is in that they caused, so they can sneak back in in 2027.

The other aspect I'm pretty confident about is that none of the ministers who handed out those massive no-bid contracts are going to jail for corruption. More likely booted upstairs to the House of Lords.

9:

I'll bet on the latter. Never mind. We have two shiny new aircraft carriers for when the USA next wants to start a war somewhere (Iran?)

Serious civil unrest (possibly even an effective general strike) would be 'interesting', as we shall see whether Braverman (the new Home Secretary, according to rumours) and Truss use the Blairite powers to use G4S or even Constellis Holdings (ex Blackwater) to restore control.

10:

Very understandable.

All this is a reminder to me that individual action is really no help here, what is needed is structural actions from especially the state. Of course your government seems to be hell-bent on just destroying everything (talking about the UK, not Scotland) and getting any kind of collective action addressing these crises from them seems... unlikely.

11:

The situation is not irretrievable in theory, at this point.

The problem is that in practice a solution requires the political elite to collectively admit the falsehood of the axioms they built their entire careers on.

If an individual political leader defects from the nationalist-neoliberal consensus, then they get treated exactly the way Jeremy Corbyn was. Corbyn was a soft-brexiter -- his distrust of the EU was based on it having emerged from the EEC, as a capitalist institution: what they hated him for was for being an unreconstructed hang-over from the 1970s when Labour was actually a left-wing party.

Neoliberal politicians can't admit that the crisis is rooted in neoliberal policies.

12:

A lot of the price crisis is due to fuel being paid in dollars, and the pound, as you say, plunging since Brexit.

But an anniversary that might make you feel things can be turned around: Saturday was the 350th anniversary of the death of Johan de Witt, effectively a Dutch Prime Minister. Why is he significant? He was deposed from power, jailed, then lynched and eaten. It seems unlikely fava beans were involved.

And to give it even more relevant, the man thought to be behind it was William of Orange, who later became King here.

13:

We both forgot to add: Truss seems determined to start a trade war with the EU and antagonise the USA. That will do marvels for the economy.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uks-truss-says-determined-deliver-n-ireland-protocol-bill-full-2022-08-17/

14:

Any actual fix takes a post-imperial ethnogenesis that allows a re-introduction of empiricism into public life.

That's difficult in general and more difficult because movement conservatives are against empiricism. (It causes taxes.)

Combine that with a protracted forcible decarbonization event and I don't think the outcomes are predictable; I wouldn't give a Mind much odds.

Any recovery will require a forcible dismantling of the mammonite faith, though. A Schmittean Movement can't accept empiricism in public life. (That's kinda what they're for! topple the established order by convincing people any order is immoral.)

15:

...in favor of boosting fracking and coal mining

Questions from ignorance... Does the UK have gas/oil rich geologic structures suitable for fracking? Are there still coal-fired generating stations around?

16:

The remains of the deep coal layers that fueled the industrial revolution are uneconomical to exploit as coal but you can frack the hell out of them. (See also North Sea oil and gas.) But the last coal-burning power station closed for good a year ago.

Truss is either deeply stupid or immensely cynical (quite possibly both), trotting out endless reams of shibboleths that are pitched at the Tory party membership who will be voting in the run-off between her and Sunak in the next couple of weeks.

Problem is, even if it's just cynical electioneering she's writing cheques she can't cash -- she's going to have to appoint a cabinet from the ranks of the current Parliamentary Conservative Party, and she's promised them £50Bn in tax cuts, stat.

She's Johnsonian in her lack of overt respect for facts, the only question is whether or not she knows it.

(Sunak is in some respects worse -- he's an ultra-wealthy former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge fun manager, married to a billionaire. He's so out of touch with the ordinary people that he has no idea about the financial pressures they're under.)

17:

No arguments here.

Scotland has a much better chance on its own -- even though the divorce from the UK will be a shit-show of epic proportions.

(The irony of Scexit is that it replicates in miniature all the myriad petty disconnects of the Brexit divorce process. If anything, it could be worse: it replaces the EU counterparty -- a legalistic committee -- with a malignant nationalist death cult.)

But once free of England, Scotland won't be forced to bob along in the wake of the UK's Conservative leadership. With 70% support for joining the EU, there's hope for a successful economic restructuring and reorientation --

Oh wait, that's what Ukraine was doing.

18:

I'm very obviously going to stay away from transpondian politics, and I hope Chicago provides a bit of respite.*

That said, I'll pitch again Terry Tempest William's four stage dealing with horrendous shit mosaic model, as used in refugee camps.

--Your life breaks

--Mourn the loss

--Pick up the pieces

--Create new life with those pieces.

One of the things we all seem to have trouble with is the mourning part, because that's gotten really unpopular. So instead we deal with it as anxiety and depression, maybe?

I'd suggest that it's not just okay but freaking necessary to mourn the loss of the UK you all grew up with, as a necessary part of creating new things out of the rubble the scheisskopfs are leaving you to work with. Hopefully it helps provide structures for working through this unthinkable mess.

19:

You're pretty close, here:

"...use the Blairite powers to use G4S or even Constellis Holdings (ex Blackwater) to restore control"
If you had to name the 'alarm bell' signal for me to sweep up my hard-currency stash and passport into the 'Go Bag' and get the next flight out, it would be the news that external 'security consultants' were inbound on a contract to support the police in protecting public safety...

That's a polite way of saying that the regime are bringing in mercenaries who are not subject to international law* to carry out orders that the British army and police cannot be given and would not be trusted to obey if they were.

But you also said 'G4S'.

Close, and you may well be correct, in a way. But Mrs May and her successor Preeti Patel already have a militia: the UK Border Force.

They have auxiliary forces under contract which do indeed include G4S. Which is to say: not only are you right, They are in place already.

They also have detention centres, which are not open to inspection by the United Nations and the Red Cross, in which there is no statutory requirement for an inquest into the death or disappearance of any inmate.

If you ever hear of the Home Office's immigration personnel and infrastructure being called-up to assist 'as a temporary administrative measure' - and we probably won't use the term 'Emergency' and we don't actually need emergency powers to do that) - get on the next plane or ferry out.

The Home Office militia and prison camps will be normalised into a domestic security role - not law and order! - and they will be something far worse than the existing police and prisons because they routinely defy the courts already and there are no effective mechanisms of accountability and review.

The bitter end of that road to Hell - - and I can assure you that I won't be here to see it - would be the recruitment of 'auxiliary personnel' and 'National Security Volunteers'. Essentially, handing-out armbands to the successor organisations to the National Front, and any other 'loyal citizens'; less politely, skinhead thugs with swastika tattoos, and swivel-eyed crucifix-wavers who will obey any order, no matter how inhumane, if they get a crack at sexual deviants and abortionists.

Betcha there's a lot of them working for the Home Office detention system's private sector solution partners already: the process might not even need armbands.

So yes, you're right.

I bet you wish you weren't.


* No really: look it up. US armed forces and their auxiliaries - Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi, and KBR Logistical Support - are explicitly protected by American law, so as to never be rendered to the Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

20:

Nile: You probably know this already, but we saw the start of this sort of thing in the US under Trump. He weaponized ICE (Immigration authorities) to a huge degree, and there were reliable anecdotal reports of random protestors being arrested by non-uniformed people who would only say they were Federal Agents and being taken who knows where. Then during the DC protests a group of Riot Cops (again wearing unmarked uniforms) appeared, wouldn't answer any questions. Turns out they were federal Bureau of Prisons riot cops (ie, the folks who go in when there is a Prison riot).

All this seems to have mostly been forgotten; one of Trump's magical powers is he broke so many norms that no one could keep up with them all.

But yeah, given the UK Tories seem to love them some Trump and the UK frankly has less protections against Police Overreach (what protections there are are statutory and can be changed or ignored) I think your prediction is probably spot on :-/

21:

One thing that confuses Americans is that there seems to have been no movement away from neoliberalism by Labor. In the US the D Party is hobbled by too many D officials who are still stuck in the 1990s, but the public aspirations of the Party are in the direction of more activist government and a more generous welfare state, if not an open disavowal of Clinton's policies.

The Labour Party, from over here, seems to have basically nobody in it who realizes that it's not 1993 (or even 1999) anymore. You'd think there should be some space for at least a soft-Left Party with a platform of "Nobody freezes to death or starves" even if they won't go full on seize-the-commanding-heights-of-finance.

22:

Well, yes. That's because Labour is currently in the grip of its own internal right-wing faction, after they went backstabby on Corbyn and Momentum (the internal left-wing faction). Which left them absolutely nowhere to go and with no plan of their own except for "(1) get into office by any means necessary, (2) ... (3) profit???".

Starmer has repeatedly made it clear that winning is the only thing that matters, because without control he can't achieve anything. So he's doing his best to make his party palatable to what he sees as an overwhelmingly Tory-leaning electorate. I believe the history books will index this under "mistakes".

23:

Bear with me for a moment: I think I have spotted a way a #Scexit could really f**k over London.

Assume Scotland jumps instantly from UK to EU membership, and by "instantly" I mean that there is never a single moment in time, where Scotland is not member of either UK or EU.

Upon landing in EU, Scotland will be party to (the other side of) the UK/EU Brexit agreement, so all that stuff with customs &c &c &c. is already negotiated, signed and sealed.

To avoid EU's byzantine induction process, the Council of Ministers conclude that London did not have the authority to yank Scotland out of EU /the way they did/, and since the citizens of Scotland therefore never stopped being EU citizens, it is not an "induction" but merely a "continuation".

The /the way they did/ bit can be any technicality, up to and including the #brexit voting material not being sufficiently handicap-friendly or just plain misleading.

The #brexit agreement says, in almost as many words, "what's ours is ours, what's your's is your's", so everything physically in Scotland is now Scottish.

That includes any military units, submarines and nuclear weapons, and if Scotland wants to impose a specific real-estate tax on foreign non-EU ownership, they are free to do that under EU's laws.

It would go down in history-books under the heading "BXL has the last laugh"

24:

The bit that's missing is how fast this is happening...

...Energy bills are soaring to the point where

We're past that point, and we're already seeing secondary effects: it's accelerating, damage has already been done, and it might not be possible to halt it - let alone recover from it - until the economy is much, much smaller than it is today.

Take, for example, private sector nurseries: the energy bill hike has hit them hard, they operate on razor-thin margins, and their customers - working parents who make a decision whether they can actually afford to work after their childcare costs - respond to rises in fees by ceasing to use the service.

But nurseries are also being hit by a second-order effect: they are losing staff to distribution centres - including Amazon, who are appallingly low payers - who have been forced to raise their wages in response to the cost-of-living crisis.

And the mass closures of a nurseries which have lost too many parents to be viable business has a it's own second-order effect: parents leaving the workforce.

So that's a consequential effect for other companies, both in terms of lost consumers and the forced contraction of their own businesses' ability to produce goods and provide services - and a secondary pressure to inflate their own prices, in order to pay enough to attract replacements as well as keeping up with their own workforce's cost of living crises.

Or not keeping-up, and contracting or closing, as they lose their own workforce.

I've picked-out the childcare sector because it's getting headlines, and the effects are easy to observe: but they are everywhere, and self-reinforcing by mechanisms which kicked-in far, far faster than pay rounds and monthly inflation surveys.

There is also the ultimate second-order effect: Central Bank anti-inflation economic Kool-Aid. Yes, we're getting an interest rate hike because businesses who borrow money must be forced to stop expanding and raise their prices. Or close.

The next question is: why are businesses so fragile?

And that's easy: energy companies aren't the only rent-seekers gouging their prices, and 'Rent-seeker Classic' - commercial landlords - have been bleeding the business sector white for decades.

Why are households so fragile is, of course, a related question, for values of 'related' that bring to mind parasitic fungi and the mating habits of bedbugs... The relationship is that British businesses have been underpaying the lower quartile of workforce so severely, and for so long, that nearly half of all foodbank users are now from households with one or more adults in paid employment. We are structurally a starvation wage economy and there is only so much you can do to cut the wage bill before you don't have any workers at all: ask any Nursery manager.

My heart bleeds for companies in that position.

25:

Next step - create scapegoats. While it's traditional to use Jews, in today's UK politics, Trans people are more vulnerable, being attacked by most of the media and fashionistae.

While it might take some creativity to manufacture the link between rising energy prices and trans children, even more unlikely things have been adduced in the past. Trans people have been blamed for far more.

The FSB did a great job in most respects, but have been unable to prevent the short term flow of weaponry to Ukraine, while the British manufacturing economy still stands. Societal disintegration is happening, but far too slowly.

26:

Bear in mind that UK courts have already ruled that the referendum itself was void - it's just that none of the damage was done by the referendum (which was purely advisory), but by the actions taken by the UK Government since the referendum (which were done in full compliance with the UK constitution, and could have been done before the referendum).

If the CoM want an excuse, the easy option is to rule that while English constitutional requirements were met, Scottish were not, and thus the Article 50 notice was void in as far as it covers Scotland. With a bit of political dancing (and I'm about 85% confident the SNP would be a willing partner in this dance), you could get Scotland to take over the former UK membership in return for the Scottish government giving up the UK opt-outs permanently and declaring that the EU should end opt-outs entirely over time.

That, in turn, would involve some careful behind-the-scenes work with Denmark (EMU, Schengen sort-of, Area of freedom, security and justice) and Ireland (Area of freedom, security and justice, Schengen) to get them on side, but would put a lot of pressure on Poland (Charter of Fundamental Rights) to rejoin the CFR and end its opt-outs completely.

I don't know enough about Danish politics to know how workable such a deal would be - with the Irish opt-outs, they exist to maintain the CTA with NI, and there's some clear routes to removing the formal opt-out by referencing the Withdrawal Agreement in its place (leaving the CTA protected by other means).

27:

"But the last coal-burning power station closed for good a year ago."

Coal is going, but not totally gone in the UK. According to https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ it has about 1 GW of capacity left and, though coal frequently delivers nothing for extended periods, in the interval 1 June 2022 - today provided a total of 547 GWh. Total demand was 61.4 TWh, so coal is pretty tiny, but not zero.

I have no idea where that coal was burned.

(As long as I have the spreadsheet open, it shows that for those same summer months, combined cycle gas turbine generation provided 30 TWh, half the total demand. The UK may need a fair amount of gas this winter.)

28:

Given that's happened to sterling since 2016, Scotland could plausibly take on the euro as a currency -- the real issues would be debt gearing and interest rates, not the exchange rate making the voters suddenly feel poor. Which is negotiable, with a bit of goodwill on the part of the EU and the ECB (in return for expansion and a chance to stick it to Westminster).

(The "just coast along using sterling like nothing has changed" is an obvious non-starter, and the "we'll invent a Scottish Pound, pegged against a basket of reserve currencies" was always a workaround for "join the euro zone" anyway.)

29:

Part of the "fun" is that many of our biomass burning stations are converted coal plants, and can still run on coal. So by one definition, we have no coal burning plants left (because they're all biomass plants), but by another, we have coal capacity left (since most of our biomass plants can burn coal instead of biomass).

30:

"most of our biomass plants can burn coal instead of biomass"

Thanks, I didn't know that. Coal, now that one thinks of it, could be seen as a type of biomass...

31:

I recently noticed something interesting in the cinema. I've seen three movies in the last couple of weeks, two of which were definitely mainstream. The ads before them all were, relatively speaking, 'woke'. But ads have one purpose: to sell people stuff, and they're not about to produce something unless they think it does that. So these ads were what they were because either people want that or at least the advertisers think they do. And these were not obscure arthouse films and not in obscure arthouse cinemas (well, one was, but I'm discounting that one).

My guess is the former: most people actually think that treating other people decently, even other people who are different in various ways, is a good thing.

So what's the whole anti-woke thing about then? Well, I think it's just the same as everything else they're doing: Sunak and Truss are competing for the votes of a bunch of decrepit white men who are extremely unrepresentative of what most people actually want.

I don't know how this plays out in terms of winning the next election. If they intend to have a meaningful next election of course.

32:

You're too nice!

No, really. You want a 'Screw-Em-Over Screxit', start with the premise that a seceding territory which achieves self-determination and statehood does not take on any part of their former rulers' debts.

This is the the sting in the "We're going and just you try to stop us" flavour of independence: if it's achieved by negotiation and mutual recognition, the former capital can get an agreement to take on a share of their national debt.

Effectively, they're forcing the new nation to buy its way out.

But... The new state can subsequently repudiate these obligations - it's a type of onerous debt - and default on the payments. If, and only if, it has sufficient diplomatic and economic support from other countries, and no need to fear retaliation from their former rulers.

And if independence isn't achieved by negotiation at all, and enough third-party nations do recognise the new state, then none of the former 'parent' state's obligations apply. No debts, no treaties, no rights for resident citizens, nothing.

In practice, human rights, and rights of property, must be respected by a new state, or they'll lose friends immediately.

But...

If there's diplomatic support from enough trading partners to negate lawsuits, retaliatory sanctions, and a WTO complaint, the newly-independent state can declare any assets (land, public services, public infrastructure) that have been sold by their former rulers to the private sector, without their citizens' democratic consent, to have been unlawfully expropriated, and therefore subject to renationalisation without compensation.

...And, as we're talking about Boris Johnson's successors in the next Conservative government, it would be very, very easy to reinforce those claims of unlawful expropriation with credible accusations of corruption.

If ever the SNP decide to play hardball, they can hint at doing that: or state it, explicitly, that this will be the policy of the post-independence state. And that's a very powerful weapon of blackmail, to force the current Westminster regime to the negotiating table:

"We'll renationalise with compensation if you accept our terms: otherwise, your campaign donors and your hosts for those lucrative directorships when you retire, will lose everything they unlawfully 'own' in Scotland at midnight on Independence Day".
The threat, alone, is a significant impairment to the value of Scottish assets that Westminster politicians want to give away to their friends. And the SNP can do it selectively, to whichever campaign donors bought up (say) the yet-to-be sold Crown Estates and National Parks in Scotland, and the yet-to-be-privatised Scottish health services.

Plus, of course, there's the matter of any evidence that might exist in support of prosecutions for corruption - both for (say) privatisation contracts, and for any irregular Covid PPE contracts that might have had an impact on Scotland.

The Scottish Lord Advocate and Procurators Fiscal might, just might, be free of the strange reluctance of Westminster's Director of Public Prosecutions to investigate such allegations - and the Lord Advocate might, just might, be happy to cooperate with countries who pursue 'extraterritorial' action against bribery and corruption and the associated money-laundering, wherever it occurs, by pressuring international banks to freeze the funds involved.

So there is every prospect of the independence process being messy - and I fully expect an attempt at looting by the Westminster regime - but The Scottish National Party has some very powerful threats available to use against any Conservative politician who believes that they need not negotiate at all.

Meanwhile, the SNP have to do everything they can to mitigate English rent-seekers' artificial recession and Westminster politicians' attempts to worsen it.

33:

I expect we'll see continued industrial action over the next 12 months and probably a significant increase in trades union membership. The Labour Party is probably correct in their assessment that struggling working class voters who are fed up of the Tories have nowhere else to go in large numbers. Which means the the Labour Party can disavow in public the rowdy trades unionism and industrial action whilst blaming the government for mishandling the crisis. Keen as I am on more bargaining power for workers I'm not sure that increased trades unionism, even if successful in strike action and pay negotiations, necessarily fixes things over the medium term. If the fundamental problems are climate change, energy and food price increases caused by Covid and war related disruption those problems don't go away just because workers have more bargaining power.

You can't just declare internationally traded gas to be a lower price.

Not sure what the Labour Party do once they win the 2024 General Election and have to deal with more robust, larger, better resourced and potentially victorious trades union movement - given that the UK government has limited options to fix the underlying economic problems the country faces in the short-term. Even if they started a national programme of onshore wind turbines and insulation that's still 3 years away from having a meaningful impact on energy prices.

And the country feels in a truculent mood after two or three years of Covid and the behaviour of Boris Johnson. I'm not sure they (we) are in the mood for another round of patient endurance.

So I can see real potential for large scale civil disobedience and violent protest - probably next summer (especially if hot) once the impact of energy prices and food prices has had another 9 months to impact people.

34:

Far more likely, Muslims and 'immigrants'.

35:

The problem is that that's last year's bogeyman, and is fast becoming played out as a source of fear. Trans people are the upcoming bogeyman, and not yet played out.

36:

I've seen three movies in the last couple of weeks, two of which were definitely mainstream. The ads before them all were, relatively speaking, 'woke'.

Last week at my niece's wedding I was chatting with one of the other guests, and we noticed that in most of the ads we saw in the last year or so many of the families were mixed. While I'm happy to see my nieces relationships finally show up in advertising, I am curious whether those same ads are playing in more rural areas, or if they see different versions.

37:

Mourning generally happens when something is over.

(A demand that something be over because that allows emotional processing has happened with COVID; it was not a net win for anybody.)

Creating that state of being done is a political force in and of itself; it was a significant issue in both World Wars, for instance.

There is no meaningful prospect of over any time soon.

Any future is going to be won, not recovered.

38:

I don't know how this plays out in terms of winning the next election. If they intend to have a meaningful next election of course.

Short answer: it doesn't.

They don't have to worry about fighting the next election unless they take over their own party first -- and can rally the party behind them.

Also, the backers of the Tory party have complete mass media control. Expect a very dirty GE campaign to be fought on both the culture wars propaganda we are currently seeing, but also using ratfucking attacks ads (once they've co-opted Ofcom and the Electoral Commission so that a blind eye will be turned to American-style attack ads -- although most of the attacks will come via social media, which is currently unregulated).

39:

If ever the SNP decide to play hardball, they can hint at doing that: or state it, explicitly, that this will be the policy of the post-independence state.

Who was the MP from Scotland (not SMP, regular MP in London) who did the speaking for the SNP in the Commons during the Brexit arguments? I would pay to listen to him deliver that message.

40:

The Drax power station in Yorkshire was converted from coal fired to biomass. Could be converted back again, should the Tories get rid of the rest of the "green crap", to use David Cameron's phrase. Food, staying warm, having a roof over your head. This winter, it's pick your favourite two (at most) for a lot of people. As others have said, this is the road running out on forty plus years policy from Conservative and Labour Tory Light governments.

41:

And the danger of London bridge falling down grows every day. Imagine a coronation with all of Charles' siblings (Andrew?) and offspring and relatives (Fergie?).

42:

Yeah, where's the coal coming from? It'd have to be imported -- the UK has no current operational coal mines. In a sterling crisis, that gets expensive fast. (Last I heard they were shipping coal in from as far afield as South America.)

43:

Trans people make a convenient bogeyperson because they are sufficiently rare so as to ensure that most people don't know many personally. It is much easier to hate a 'weird looking' stranger you only see in pictures and memes, and then only the most extreme 'weirdness'.

Of course, most bigots don't consider that many of the people they know are quietly not 'normal' in the bigoted sense of the word.

I have tried to point this out to a couple of very conservative acquaintances in the last couple of years. 'I've known you for 15 years. 10 years ago you never thought or talked about trans people at all. Now it's all you talk about. Have you met any in the meantime? Have you observed any scary behaviour? Or is it just possible that you are being manipulated into fearing the 'other' rather than noticing what's actually happening.'

I'm quite certain the transphobia will continue until it stops being useful to those who are fanning the flames. I'm also certain there will be some stochastic violence as a result of that campaign. It's fucking infuriating.

44:

While all of this is problematic, I've come to the conclusion that democracy generally won't solve problems. It kind of meanders until a crisis state is reached. (Crisis -> breakdown of civic order on levels that appear unlikely to be contained by local law enforcement.). (eg, rioting after MLK assassination...)

Fundamentally, the cost of involvement for a civilian exceeds that benefits they receive, whereas 'interests' receive quite a bit more. So, there is a real issue of motivation until things get bad enough that relatively sane people start lighting things on fire.

Since there is not rioting yet, there isn't a crisis yet. Come winter, if people are squatting in local mansions to avoid freezing to death, that'll be a crisis. If they freeze to death in the streets, not a crisis, just a bad thing.

Gosh. Depressed again.

Honestly though, I respect all forms of protest.

45:

Oh, yes, they are likely to be persecuted, but they don't make very good scapegoats. The latter implies, not merely that you can arouse hatred against them, but that you can convince people that they are to blame for all the current problems. And, despite what Simon Farnsworth says, Muslims and 'immigrants' are NOT just last year's bogeyman - the hate rhetoric is ongoing, just as for Jews in previous eras.

Remember that homosexuals and the disabled were persecuted under the Nazis, but were not used as the scapegoats.

46:

The hate rhetoric about Jews is still ongoing, and that about homosexuals. It's just that polling shows that Muslims and immigrants are joining Jews and homosexuals as an ineffective choice of target, partly because we've had it played so often that it only works on the people who are already primed for it, and not on people who need a scapegoat, and partly because there's now enough people who are openly Jewish (or gay) that people are asking "why are the Jews a threat when people like Stross are clearly just people like anyone else?".

A challenge with constantly motivating people with hate is that, by and large, people expect things to get fixed. If things aren't getting fixed, the "it's the XYZ group what break it" rhetoric falls apart unless XYZ keeps changing so that your average bigot in the street never realises that they're being offered scapegoats.

47:

Paraphrase from the Grauniad:
How appropriate that Truss is going to be PM of an island, that is lapped entirely by its own sewage

Potatoes - mine have grown, but I've been watering them, though I expect them to be undersized.
Handing over to Raab would only make things worse - see the shambles over the lawyers' strike (!) today. He's "just" another incompetent obstructionist feeding red meat to the tory shire-tossers, just like Shapps ....
Not so sure about blackouts, bacause so many business' will have closed, the demand for power will be down. But we will be in a slump, how nice.
Power supplies: String a greenie up TODAY! { Maybe not, just isolate them in a house with neither electricity nor gas } Nuclear power is horribly expensive, no power is even more expensive.
Don't know about re-nationalising power, but water should be renationalised WITHOUT COMPENSATION, immediately, under the Sale of Goods Act - water privatisation was "Not of Merchantable Quality" ......

This is the sort of crisis that brings down nations.
Actually, no. THIS is the sort of crisis that brings REVOLUTIONS.
If the food & power run out, especially the food, it's game over.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Charlie @ 6
"Hard-right tory guvmint wangling re-election?
NOT going to happen
- @ 16 - I'd go for cynical & amazingly stupid!
@ 42 - that new mine in Cumbria
Also, last I heard, a lot of the Eastern Yorkshire coal-field was still exploitable ... Um

EC
Braverman as Home Sec? Euuuwwww ..... Violent spppression won't work, not this time.
If only because everyone will simply sit down, I think.
- later
Truss starting rabid trade war will crash the economy even faster, of course.
- @ 34 - I fear you are correct.

Nile
get on the next plane or ferry out. - I'm 76, my wife is borderline unwell, though still working OK .. I can't get out.
You are in Ireland, are you not? Dublin?

PERSECUTED: How about all the "Dangerous left-wing intellectuals" { I would qualify under the tories rules }
ANYONE AT ALL who speaks in BBC English & asks awkward questions & points out that they are arseholes could be scooped up & blamed ...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
WANTED
An easy route to getting an EU passport ...
Could I bullshit my way into an Irish one?
If Scotland does break away, what criteria for a Scottish one, as I have connections to both Clan Johnstone & MacNeill ??

48:

There is still a small about of open cast about. The government delayed the decision on the new pit near Whitehaven, as they've all checked out till there is a new leader. No idea how the supply/demand thing plays out with firing Drax from the available, or medium term available coal in the UK. Now the NUM is almost completely dead, I'm sure there are some conservatives who would love to revive deep mining with a suitably cowed work force. British pits for British children! It's a possible Tory policy, so it doesn't have to make any sense.

49:

If Scotland does break away, what criteria for a Scottish one, as I have connections to both Clan Johnstone and MacNeill ??

Unknown and unknowable.

Before the 2014 referendum the SNP's position was that anyone legally resident in Scotland on the day of independence could ask for and get citizenship and a passport.

An earlier precedent is the Anglo-Irish treaty, which allows for dual nationality for anyone in Ireland at the time of separation, and full reciprocal rights (including voting, not just residence) for citizens of the two nations thereafter. But the A-I treaty situation would require a degree of goodwill on the part of London that I fear is simply lacking (and yes, I am aware of the Black and Tans, Easter Uprising, etc).

Really, we can't know at this point. It's reasonably certain that anyone living in Scotland now (and indeed up to the date of the referendum next October) has their feet under the table. And I expect Scotland to have a much more enlightened immigration policy than the UK currently has -- all parties agree Scotland needs to import workers. But that's all we can say.

50:

Ian Blackford MP springs to mind.

51:

So....

I'm wondering. If the UK parlimentary system breaks hard fascist and the rule of law gets rewritten to "whatever we can get away with," what are the chances of an authoritarian takeover by a billionaire family?

Not that lot. Them. King William the (Re)Conqueror, starting the whole conquest of the British Isles all over again most of a millennium later, after everyone else hives off England and rejoins the EU?

How bad would it have to get before this would become the better solution?

52:

Ian Blackford MP springs to mind.

That's the gentleman. I have no idea whether his politics or other personality quirks are good or bad, but I greatly enjoyed watching him do outraged.

53:

Charlie, I realize how cruel this is... but are you looking at an English potato famine?

54:

ARound '85/86, when my second marriage was going down the tubes, and between my then-still-wife and myself, we'd had an insane number of people die - 8? 9? Some older, some our age.

I put a sign over my desk at work that would be appropriate for you: "If I am depressed, it is for good and sufficient reasons (which may or may not be any of your business), and if I wasn't depressed, I wouldn't be facing reality".

Everything that any "oh, cheer up, it's not that bad" could possibly say... used against them.

55:

Re: "The new state can subsequently repudiate these obligations" - as opposed to Haiti, paying off it's "debt" to France for ending slavery for what, 100 years?

And immediate nationalization, with no compensation... you're skipping over what happens on the other side of the border: all those "poor" investors, ruined. Why, they might jump out windows, or shoot themselves....

insert micrograph of a tardigrade playing the tiniest violin.

56:

Admittedly, the Israelis are doing Jews no favors whatever, with apartheid of Palestinians, and the "cities"/balkanized camps of them, and raids on human rights groups.

57:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1094317/DUKES_2022_Chapter_2.pdf Describes the UK’s production and use of coal. There are still UK coal mines, including some small deep ones. Though most of the supply is from imports, including Russia. There are still 3 coal power stations running as such, but they would only be capable of supplying single digit percentages of electricity. The other major use of coal is industrial, e.g. steel manufacturing.

58:

I saw a mention that Britain has just received its first shipment of LNG from Australia. Coal isn't as energetic per tonne as gas and it's more difficult to burn for energy but it's available in large quantities from various countries that haven't drunk the renewables Kool-Aid. Who knows we may even end up importing coal from China or even lignite from Germany.

Britain does have a few coal-fired power stations kept in reserve, all of them in England AFAICT. They are usually only operated during the high-energy-demand periods of winter and limited by law to less than 1500 hours operation annually. This could change.

We're losing most of the nuclear generating capacity we had -- both Hinkley AGRs and both Hunterston AGRs are now shut down and in decommissioning. That's about 2GW of predictable capacity gone forever, with the other 3GW or so of AGR capacity expected to shut down over the next five years unless arms are twisted regarding serious engineering problems intrinsic in the AGR design. That will leave only a single 1100MW PWR at Sizewell operating until the first EPR at Hinkley Point C starts up (first fission officially expected by 2026, realistically not supplying power to the gird until 2028 at the earliest).

59:

Alas, potatoes are mostly farmed in Scotland.

60:

Potatoes
Most "seed" - that is good, clean, disease-free potato tubers are raised in Scotland, for export to England & Ireland ( Brexshit has fucked the latter ). BUT - Those potatoes are then re-planted in England (etc) for the next year's crop to be eaten.
Like a lot of agriculture, there are long lead times, something city dwellers & non-allotment holders do not recognise. The seed catalogues for 2023 have just started showing up, for instance.
For me & my fellow allotment holders, the problem is going to be sourcing spuds ready to be planted March - May 2023 & possible even worse in 2024.

61:

Nil. And it would be a VASTLY better solution than what we have now, because he would do a much better job and be a lot more socialist.

62:

Personally, I think history is a more reliable guide, and I can think of no cases where using old scapegoats failed and using new ones succeeded,

63:

"The Labour Party is probably correct in their assessment that struggling working class voters who are fed up of the Tories have nowhere else to go in large numbers." Unfortunately, they do - specifically, nowhere. They stay at home because the Labour Party they grew up with, the one that would actually solve their problems, doesn't exist any more, and the options are the Lib Dems (right-wing by nature, perfidious by habit) and the Greens (who've been thoroughly painted as cranks, and have played into that with their flirtations with homeopathy and transphobia).

64:

When will the first bank crack under the strain of defaulted mortgages?

65:

That would have been 2008.

66:

Bit overly pessimistic. It's an EPR, presumably it will have a test phase greatly resembling OL3, which did not wait two years to deliver power after first fission. OL3 is in test phase now which amounts to "We supply power when that is convenient to us while we run this baby through its paces", and expected to be running full throttle in commercial service come December.

.. Uhm. looking at app . electricitymaps and the interconnects.. The French reactors should almost all be back in service when winter hits, so that is 3 gigawatts of power that can probably be counted on (especially since both sides of the channel are EDF, and EDF wont want blackouts for reasons of pride if nothing else).. but Belgium and Netherlands are distressingly heavy on the gas.

67:

I don't know much about what is happening over there, but I did find the following in the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/world/europe/uk-energy-bills-inflation.html?searchResultPosition=2

"Leadership Vacuum Heightens Worries as Crises Loom in U.K.

As energy prices and inflation soar under a caretaker prime minister, critics say transition at the top is leaving Britons in limbo at a tumultuous moment."

Money quote: "But the transition in leadership in the top tier of the British government has made those challenges more acute. The country has a caretaker prime minister who is preparing to depart, there is a war of words between his two potential successors, Parliament is not in session and it’s vacation season, too.'

But there is another side of the story presented:

"“The conversation between the energy companies and government is being facilitated and continuing,” said Hannah White, acting director of the Institute for Government, a London-based research institute. “So, I don’t think policymaking is quite as paralyzed as some of the media is seeking to portray it.”

Ms. White said that part of the criticism of Mr. Johnson might come from those who always opposed him. “They may be using the fact that he’s not solving this problem as a stick to beat him but, in my view, it wouldn’t be right for him to be making a policy intervention,” Ms. White said."

"Neo Liberal Policies"? You guys are still using those? Count yourselves lucky, our conservatives have gone all the way over to corporate feudalism over here.

68:

I note OGH is apparently now writing editorials in The Guardian...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/22/the-guardian-view-on-liz-truss-a-little-englander-pm-risks-running-a-little-england

Liz Truss’s no-holds-barred approach to campaigning seems likely to put her into Downing Street. The betting is that she has built an unassailable lead in the Tory party leadership race. Her maverick boosterism seems to play better with party members than Rishi Sunak’s wonkery. However damaging her economic policies turn out to be, it may be her Little England politics that do the most harm. A poll this weekend showed Scotland is more likely to become independent if Ms Truss becomes prime minister. Her hard line on the Northern Ireland protocol has alienated nationalists and moderates in the province, which is on course to leave the UK within 20 years. Nationalists in Wales too would be boosted by a Truss premiership.

And the rest of it runs down most of Charlie's points in an abbreviated way.

69:

Mourning generally happens when something is over.

No. Mourning is about letting go of something. It's part of the process for marking that something is over.

You and I live in different parts of the world and see things differently. What I'm seeing here is a lot of "let's get back to normal" causing all sorts of misery, when "normal" has no covid and ignores climate change.

If you're trying to hold onto normal AND trying simultaneously to deal with all the problems and monsters (mostly human) who are shredding your normal, you're caught in two struggles at once. Anxiety, depression, and burnout would be predictable in such circumstances, would they not?

My advice to let go and mourn isn't to give up adapting, it's to give up the hopeless position maintaining the world as it was 20 years ago, to process the emotional consequences, and hopefully to free yourself of that one struggle so that you can start creating with what you have.

Then, instead of trying to cling to the shreds of a (neo) liberal society, you can hopefully join the struggle to build an equitable society in the face of climate change, in your part of the world. No guarantees, of course, but it seems like a shorter course of pain than storing up all the mourning you need to process until that hoped-for day when it's over.

70:

Normally I would agree with you, because in most cases that would be the wiser mindset. But there is an exception: when your life was broken from the beginning, from before you were born, and there are no pieces to pick up. For many people clinging to their traditional way of life isn't a choice, it's the only safe course they know.

71:

Not 300, but this is for Greg. The fun starts about 60% of the way through... gauge 1, live steam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxPUU87OIEA

72:

It sounds like England should surrender to Scotland. Immediately.

73:

The situation is not irretrievable in theory, at this point.

Well, no, it isn't, but a theory of the UK getting a government having a good chance of fixing the problems, or at least trying seems quite far-fetched to me.

I'm also dreading what kind of crisis we get at some point here in Finland - yeah, the 'prime minister was caught dancing and maybe drinking at a party' 'scandal' seems minor compared to many other places, but that's forgetting our quite leftist and Green government hasn't been that good in many other respects. For example, the actions taken to mitigate the climate crisis have been lacking, and our healthcare situation is not brilliant, either.

Our Minister of Family Affairs and Social Services has mostly just shrugged and made non-comments on the lack of nurses, for example. 'Nothing to be done'. There's also 'gentlemen's agreements' that different healtcare instances don't compete for nurses with wages, for example. At the same time, doctors seem to be getting raises.

Not the UK, and not yet comment 300, but even though the UK seems to be pretty far in the crises other places are not without at least the makings of some.

74:

Well, if you want a new nurse who is trained in $specialty, I think that typically takes about 4 years not including admissions time and recruitment (3 years for their degree, and another one for training). For a doctor that is more like 7 to 10 years. That's typically 1 to 2 terms of a government yes?

75:

"I'm also dreading what kind of crisis we get at some point here in Finland - yeah, the 'prime minister was caught dancing and maybe drinking at a party' 'scandal' seems minor compared to many other places,"

One party. No Covid restrictions making it illegal. No fine. Didn't lie about it repeatedly and get other ministers to lie about it. Didn't eventually have to resign, after the government is effectively paralysed for months over it. Didn't immediately check out and go on holiday for more months while the potential successors fight it out to replace them and ignore what's left of your country sliding in to chaos. You've got a long, long way to go!

76:

Troutwaxer
We ALREADY DID THAT - in 1603

Whitroth
Interesting - however, I managed to get one good shot of the old "Bournemouth Belle" train, before the end of steam (!)

77:

whitroth
BUGGER ...
Google is falling down on the job & I can't "see" your blog address - I want to send you a picture.

78:

The two main problems with the Scottish Independence scenario are both economic. The first is that 2/3 of Scotland's trade is with the rest of the UK; quitting the UK would create the same issues of red tape and border controls as Brexit. If Scotland joins the EU, it would gain access to that larger market, which would offset some of this disadvantage, but look at the geography.

The second is that Scotland is currently running a deficit and its not clear how this would be funded; it could lead to most austerity measures. This would especially apply if Scotland were to join the EU and the EU required Scotland to keep to EU deficit targets (although in practice other EU members seem able to finesse this requirement, at least for short periods).

Economically, ScExit would be been more practical while the UK was in the EU. Brexit has decreased the economic viability of Scottish independence while simultaneously increasing the political reasons for leaving.

79:

This situation is a combination of the Winter of Discontent, the Three Day Week and the 1973 Oil Crisis.

The Winter of Discontent was over 1978-79 under a Labour government: high inflation led to high wage demands from unionised workers, lots of strikes, and the subsequent election of Margaret Thatcher.

The Three Day Week was the response of a Conservative government in the winter of 1973-74 to an energy shortage caused by a national miners strike. Businesses were limited to operating only 3 days per week to save energy. At the time most UK electricity was generated from coal.

The oil crisis stemmed from the formation of OPEC as a global energy cartel. Energy prices increased dramatically, leading to a world economic recession.

Energy is an input into pretty much everything, so if there is less energy then there is a general reduction in world economic output. If outputs drop then consumption must drop. The question is: how does a national government spread the pain of that adjustment? For people on the breadline a drop in consumption means hunger, cold and homelessness. For people not on the breadline it means a reduction in their standard of living that they dislike and blame on whoever is handiest. Its not their fault, so they feel literally short-changed and demand that Somebody Do Something to restore their standard of living to what they feel entitled to have. Unfortunately you can't do that for everybody, so politicians naturally seek to help those who will vote for them and concentrate the pain on those who wouldn't vote for them under any circumstances. Under a Conservative government that means hitting poor while trying to support the middle class.

The current wave of strikes demonstrates the fundamental limits of unionisation as a strategy for improving the lot of workers. Some groups of workers have industrial muscle; they can cause serious disruption with a short stoppage. When the train drivers go on strike for 1 day its a major news story. Other workers are not so fortunate. I haven't heard about the pay demands of the train cleaners, for example, because if they go on strike for 1 day nobody would notice, and if they went on strike for a week they would simply be replaced. Thus the benefits of industrial action flow primarily to workers with that industrial muscle, leaving out the workers who lack it.

The next general election isn't going to happen until 2024 or Jan 2025. The Conservative party has enough of a majority to avoid any vote of no confidence, and the longer the delay the more time it has to get the economy back into some kind of order and let voters forget about the whole Boris fiasco. This is unlike 1978, when the Labour government had no overall majority and hence lost a vote of no confidence.

Looking further forwards, we can hope that the longer term result of this is a greater emphasis on nuclear power, energy efficiency, renewable energy and storage as means to gain better energy security. That was the response to the 1973 Oil Shock. As they say, never let a crisis go to waste. Unfortunately the current government is in headless chicken mode (literally: the PM is MIA and many cabinet posts are empty) and is barely able to think past one month, let alone a decade.

For Charlie, and anyone else feeling depressed, remember: this too shall pass. As a rule the response to a crisis is a broad rethink of how things work. Thatcherism was a response to the long-term failures of Keynsianism, triggered by the crisis of the Winter of Discontent. Now we have a new crisis caused by a combination of the long-term failings of Thatcherism and the trigger of Putin's War. This is a new opportunity for the world to rethink how it does things. The unwisdom of relying on politically unstable countries for energy has been exposed for a second time. (And all countries where energy is the major industry are politically unstable by nature). The unwisdom of treating the regulatory state as an intrinsically Bad Thing rather than a tool that must be carefully maintained has also been exposed. This is the point where think-tanks can publish papers that make politicians go "aha" and start to push the right long-term policies.

In the very long run of course, those long-term policies will either contain errors of their own, or they will be pushed beyond the point of effectiveness by people who have inherited the ideology but not the understanding (c/f Truss and Thatcher). This will lead to a new crisis in another 50 years, and the people then will no doubt get depressed about it too.

80:

The recent train strikes have in part been about the cleaners and their pay. But as they're in the same union as the guards who are rather more critical to services running then they can cause disruption.

81:

"Far Kurnell!"

This is the rumoured utterance of Lieutenant James Cook when he first set foot in a locality now known as Kurnell in NSW (the conceit is that it is in memory of this statement), on encountering members of the Eora nation who tried to spear him. Some of the spears are still in the British Museum, as I understand it. No-one has been able to identify the locality in the UK that Cook is supposed to have been recalling at that moment, but that's how things go.

82:

The question isn't whether "this too shall pass"; it's who will take control and which policies will they implement?

83:

A couple of counter-points:

It is pretty obvious, that the countries which have been most resistant to "green energy" is faring significantly worse in the putin-energy-crisis, than the more forward thinking countries.

Germany is an interesting case, being split in north and south, where north often have a surplus of wind generated electricity and no way to send it to the south, due to fossil interest's successful political sabotage of the necessary transmission facilities.

This will hurt UK big time, and even though wind-generation is a LOT faster to build than nuclear power, the energy-crisis in England may well last a couple of years longer than elsewhere, because of the political idiocy, past, present and future.

Nuclear in it's present multi-GW form (ie: EPR) is not going to play any relevant role: It is too expensive, too slow to build and has far too high financial risk attached to it.

Even where it does get built and hooked to the grid, it's inability to modulate production is going to erode the business case.

France and UK will do it anyway, at great expense, for reasons of "national pride" and more pragmatically because they need the career-path for their nuclear sailors.

Smaller reactors will be too expensive where alternatives exist, but they will have a role in arctic/military/research context, where today diesel is flown or sailed in. (McMurdo, Concordia, Jan Mayen, Daneborg, Thule etc.)

84:

The UK has a very services based economy and for this to work it requires enough people with enough disposable income to keep it running. As peoples finances reduce due to increases in food, energy, mortgage, and rent they'll have less to spend on the "nice to have" as they'll be concentrating on the "need to have". So businesses with less of an issue with energy costs will still find themselves going under as their customers can no longer afford what they're selling/providing.

85:

Well, there are trained nurses, they've only gone to other jobs in increasing numbers during the last couple of years, due to poor wages and working conditions (wonder why...).

So, even though the lead time for educating new ones is many years, there are at least some people who could do the job, if they thought they would get enough compensation and if the working environment wasn't too bad.

Of course apparently the various nursing education establishments seem to have some trouble filling all the available starting places. It's not very surprising, to me.

Incidentally, apparently there are also problems getting enough workers also in the event business (festivals and such) and restaurants and hotels. People have been laid off or suspended for a couple of years, so it seems many of them took the hint and sought other jobs. This summer many festivals seem to have been in trouble because they couldn't get enough people working for them, and it seems to be same for many restaurants and hotels.

86:

there are trained nurses, they've only gone to other jobs in increasing numbers during the last couple of years, due to poor wages and working conditions

Australia has a great many of those too. Not helped by the supposedly "Labour" governments deciding that 6% inflation means wage rises need to be capped at 3% which is really 2.5% due to shenanigans with compulsory superannuation. So while for the past 10 years they've had a 1%-2% pay cut every year, this year it's at least 3%.

As pointed out by many people, "the government" employs a lot of people, so if they think wages need to rise they have an obvious way to do that...

My expectation is they won't, but also that if they did bang in a 10% pay rise across the board for all government employees the noise from the far right media would focus on the very highly paid ones getting hundreds of thousands of dollars extra. But if teh guvvimunt did the "smart" thing and said pay rises drop for anyone on more than ~1.2x median wage and blah blah no-one on more than 2x median wage gets a pay rise (~$170k, which in the old days was about 50k British Pounds but this week it's more like 110k)... the far right would latch on to some povo staff and go absolutely mental. "cleaners in parliament are getting 20% more than the poverty line!!@#%$#!"

87:

The second is that Scotland is currently running a deficit

We don't actually know this because the UK government has very carefully obfuscated everything to do with Scotland's balance of trade, to ensure that no economic case for independence can be made.

Consider businesses operating in Scotland but headquartered in England, where their profits are reported -- and vice versa, of course (but it's usually the English management tail wagging the high employment Scotish dog). Or consider people working in Scotland but paying income tax in England, and vice versa, because they're working in the other country on a "temporary" contract (which can be 12 months at a time, with rolling renewals, as in the case of one middle-to-senior university administrator I know).

88:

Australia has a great many of those too. Not helped by the supposedly "Labour" governments deciding that 6% inflation means wage rises need to be capped at 3% which is really 2.5% due to shenanigans with compulsory superannuation. So while for the past 10 years they've had a 1%-2% pay cut every year, this year it's at least 3%.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same here, too. The negotiations for pay rises for nurses and similar professions seem to be capped at a couple of percent per year, which is a pay cut. There were also complaints by other unions that if the nurses get a high pay rise, they have to get it, too - so there's really no way for nurses (generalizing here) to get relatively higher salaries.

(I for one would like higher wage rises, but I also understand that I'm pretty well off and really have not yet issues even though the cost of living goes up. Better to even out the salaries, I say.)

89:

better about being depressed because depression seems like a reasonable response to these circumstances

Yep. That's the pattern I see in myself, though sometimes the alternative construction, "lalalalalLALALALALALALAICAN'THEEEEEEARYOULALALALALA" works better for me, especially if accompanied by loud music and alcohol.

Singing helps too. And bird photography, dinghy sailing and making things with my hands (well along with a bunch of power tools). A well known Australian science journalist wrote a book about coping with climate grief recently, but I've been struggling with it as I find it almost hopelessly privileged and self-indulgent. Persevering but, seems like it might be worth it. There's a nice chapter on hope versus courage which I disagree with, but not in a way that makes me angry and that seems to make all the difference.

90:

Truss is saying that whether or not energy use should be restricted is up to individuals, and not the government's problem.

According to a comment I read elsewhere there used to be a weak link in the London gas network. Contingency planners estimated that if it went down it would take all the currently licensed gas fitters in the UK about 30 years to reconnect all the houses

If a city loses its gas supply it's effectively gone forever.

91:

Does 2x4 not understand that there is a difference between restricting energy usage and subsidising insulation and renewables?

93:

I'll go with "does not understand" and leave it at that.

94:

I almost recommend moving to Canada. The worst thing we have is the Ontario premier cutting nurses' salaries and using staffing losses to justify shifting work to private clinics... who are allowed to pay higher salaries to their nurses (;-))

95:

I think we also had situations with nurses leaving the public clinics... and coming back to work as contractors via contracting companies, having better salaries and terms of employment. Which is of course more expensive than just raising their salaries in the first place, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

96:

While reading this blog, some older blogs and similar stuff lately, one thing gets popping up in my mind.

What will happen when all of the sudden Queen Elisabeth will die?

She been the public face of GB almost since the end onthe whole Post-WWII Era.

And she more and more reminds me in a away of good old Emperor Franz Joseph I. Who in one way or another was basically the glue that held the Old Austrian Hungary Monarchy together.....

97:

I'm not sure if "want of understanding" disqualifies someone from being a Member of Parliament, although I think it can disqualify them from voting.

98:

Not the UK, and not yet comment 300, but even though the UK seems to be pretty far in the crises other places are not without at least the makings of some.

Yeah. Imagine the problems in the U.S. if IQ45 wins in 2024... :-(

99:

I think we also had situations with nurses leaving the public clinics... and coming back to work as contractors via contracting companies, having better salaries and terms of employment.

Overworked, underpaid, and burned-out nurses in the U.S. are increasingly becoming travel nurses, giving them higher pay, more control over their working conditions (easy to change to a different employer), but usually no benefits. A mixed blessing...

100:

Looking at the Scottish parliament makes me wish we had an English one.

101:

"This is a new opportunity for the world to rethink how it does things."

We've just had one of those, with the plague. The response has been to deliberately reject the opportunities for learning, to direct public opinion into pettiness and bitchery to prevent the public from learning from those opportunities itself, to stick with blind determination to the procedures whose crapness has been made blatant, and generally to try and pretend there's nothing happening as much as possible. Not limited to the UK, but it has been particularly noticeable here because we've had a government that basically doesn't seem to give a fuck about anything that has any rational connection with the welfare of the country in any sense (in contrast to the usual pattern of bad governments in the past, who have at least had some kind of concern for the welfare of the country even if it was misdirected in concept and cocked up in implementation). We've still got that same government, moving even further towards irrational and counterproductive irrelevancy, and with every prospect of not being able to get rid of them for another couple of years, and I don't see any reason to believe they won't respond in the same way only worse.

102:

Overworked, underpaid, and burned-out nurses in the U.S. are increasingly becoming travel nurses, giving them higher pay, more control over their working conditions (easy to change to a different employer), but usually no benefits. A mixed blessing...

Were becoming travel nurses. That window is closing.

As most know, my wife works at a hospital, and she flagged the whole travel nurse phenomenon for me. It peaked during the pandemic, because the hospitals were burning through nursing staff trying to cope with the flood of patients in the ICU.

The people who became travel nurses tended to be young and mobile. Given that hospitals were crazy-busy and not giving their employees proper time to recover, not having a job was one way for the nurses to deal, if they could afford the break between traveling contracts.

This led to some nasty problems. One is that it increased the burden on settled nurses (with families and houses) who couldn't pick up and leave. Since they're more senior, and unionized, this became a problem for the hospital. Did I mention that many hospital executives are nurses with MBAs, not doctors? And did I mention that the nursing world is small enough that people traveling from hospital to hospital in the same city get rapidly spreading reps through all the local hospitals?

The bigger problem is that hiring travel nurses messes up budgets, because they have higher per-hour costs. Yes, they have no benefits, but that's a different budget. So hospitals paid more to fill in staffing holes with contractors. As one might expect. These costs weren't bearable in the long run, because Covid care in the US didn't make money for hospitals. Elective surgeries make the money that supports emergency care, and replacing elective surgeries with Covid care seriously decreased hospital incomes, at the same time they were paying more for traveling nurses.

The good news with omicron is that so far, while infections are high, admissions to the ICU are not. Most Covid cases in the hospital are actually getting detected in people coming in for other reasons (as well as non-lethal Covid). This is a bit of a nuisance, since an infectious person can turn up anywhere, instead of in emergency headed for ICU, but the load on the nurses is less.

And so is the call for traveling nurses. It was a good opportunity while it lasted.

104:

Paul
You analysis is generally good, but: And all countries where energy is the major industry are politically unstable by nature - Britain 1815-1914 - I think not.
- which leads to Dave Berry's comment, to which I would add ... ..."And how badly/terminally do they screw-up by-the-numbers" - as this lot seem determined to do.

dpb
If Truss is saying that, she's even further out of her tree than I suspected - really, seriously bonkers. Of course, if she follows through on that expect a (too-late) screeching U-turn, after it's all imploded.

paws
Doesn't matter, because 2x4 will simply APPOINT ( "An unelected bureaucrat ) a total fucking thicko like "lord" Frost - who is already tipped for some job where he can do maximum damage, such as Environment ...

Pigeon
@ 100 - YES @ 101 - Oh shit, how true.

105:

What will happen when all of the sudden Queen Elisabeth will die?

Your google search term is "London Bridge". That's the UK government contingency plan for her death. Large chunks of it are already public, starting with two weeks of national mourning, lying-in-state followed by a state funeral, a probable hit of 1% to annual GDP that year due to all the time off/disruption, and (some months later) the coronation of a new King.

The new King will be Charles, unless he dies beforehand. No ifs, no buts. It's the job he's been waiting for all his life, he ain't gonna abdicate.

The stench of patriotic bullshit will reach positively American levels of nostril-stunning offense to anyone who would prefer to see the UK dragged kicking and screaming into the 19th century. The likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg will use it as a bully pulpit to bash on anyone seen as insufficiently forelock-tuggingly obsequious to hereditary power during the whole wank-fest. It will be, in a word, ghastly.

The hangover will set in only once Charles (by some other name -- Henry IX?) is on the throne, and delivers his first official State Opening of Parliament speech as himself rather than a proxy for mum.

At that point expect support for the monarchy to fall off a cliff, especially in Scotland and NI.

Having been identified with a single person for the past 71 years, it may never recover from the cognitive dissonance of being suddenly amputated and attached to a guy with a face like a horse's ass.

106:

all countries where energy is the major industry are politically unstable by nature - Britain 1815-1914 - I think not.

Peterloo. Tolpuddle Martyrs. Rise of the workers' movement. Foundation of the Labour Party (who took power not long after your window) and groundwork for the collapse of Liberalism. Rise of the Irish nationalist movement leading to secession which would probably have happened by 1916 if not for the First World War. Extension of the franchise, first to working men, then to women (again: would have happened sooner if not interrupted by a world war). Introduction of an income tax, reform of the commons, introduction of modern policing practices -- what do you think the aforementioned were a response to?

The UK would have been unrecognizable -- politically, probably culturally, and certainly economically -- to an MP from 1815 who fell asleep and woke up in 1914.

The only reason it didn't collapse was because the establishment was able to loot resources from the imperial dominions to buy stability -- both by stuffing the rentier class's mouths with gold, and by spreading a thin veneer of prosperity around for the proles.

107:

Other than Anne, my respect for the Saxe-Coburg-Gothes is somewhere around the bottom of the Challenger Deep

108:

London Bridge Falling is also probably the functional end of the Commonwealth, or at least the aspect of it where the Queen is the official head of state of somewhere other than the UK.

109:

NSFW Honest Government Ad from TheJuice that "everything is fine in the UK, thanks to the Tories".

It's a rather profane parallel to OGH's original post, plus some things the UK government purportedly doesn't want you to do to help the situation.

111:

The hangover will set in only once Charles (by some other name -- Henry IX?) is on the throne, and delivers his first official State Opening of Parliament speech as himself rather than a proxy for mum.

Still trying to figure out why it's more cognitively dissonant to go with Chuckie 3 than with some other name. We've know him as Charles since 1948, and he's not going to reign at most more than a decade. It won't help him to be "Who's This King Henry IX dude" when everything's contracting around him.

Anyway, I want to see more nerds calling him Charles the Darwinator....

112:

"Long-term Keynesian failings"... or the reached-the-breaking-point of the wealthy to be ultrawealthy, stick it to the proles, with a heavy dose of OPEC creation?

113:

Can I ask about this "newly installed" "Queen of Canada"?

114:

What are the chances that the Tories decide to respond to the Scottish Referendum the way that Spain responded to the Catalan one -- i.e., the referendum is illegal, and thus we will arrest the leadership of the SNP for holding it? Will we see Nicola Sturgeon fleeing into exile in Brussels?

115:

Except, of course, the hospitals, etc, are also paying the contracting companies to make a profit, and so cost a lot more than simply raising the nurses' salaries.

116:

One situation you're missing: a lot of places like nursing homes are hell-holes, run by the incompetent and empathy-surgically-removed. I head about this from #1 Daughter all the time.

117:

My guess is that they will declare it void, ignore the result (unless it is 'no' to independence). refuse a binding referendum, and reject any verdict of a European court. What happens then is unclear.

118:

Charlie and others, one question: since Corbyn was displaced... what happened to Momentum? Has it disintegrated, or ?

119:

the 'prime minister was caught dancing and maybe drinking at a party' 'scandal' seems minor compared to many other places

From what I've seen in English media (not being able to read Finnish), I get the impression that if your prime minister wasn't female this wouldn't have been newsworthy.

120:

Be careful what you wish for - you may get it.

I think that most of you will see the abolition of the monarchy, and the constitutional reorganisation necessary will be (ab)used to remove the last remaining checks against fascism.

121:

There's also 'gentlemen's agreements' that different healtcare instances don't compete for nurses with wages, for example. At the same time, doctors seem to be getting raises.

Cynically, I'm wondering if nursing being majority-female while doctors being majority-male has anything to do with that?

Because here in Ontario, female-majority professions are getting shafted while male-majority ones are getting (or have been given) pay raises.

122:

If I remember correctly a report from ages ago, Charles once planned to use the name "George" when he gets crowned.

123:

One situation you're missing: a lot of places like nursing homes are hell-holes, run by the incompetent and empathy-surgically-removed. I head about this from #1 Daughter all the time.

Speaking from very personal experience, I know. I got to oversee care for a relative with Parkinsons when he couldn't be cared for in-home.

The nurses in these places aren't short term contractors, they're immigrants, often from the Philippines in my part of the world. If you're careful choosing the home (again speaking from experience. Guess who got to tour a bunch of homes?), the workers are neither incompetent nor unempathetic . They're just overworked, because they're stuck trying to provide "affordable" care to people who can't be cared for by their families or by in-home caregivers, and that's a lot of work.

And so it goes.

124:

No, it's still around, but is c. 5% of the size of the Labour party, and the latter's ruling clique regards it as a worse enemy than the most extreme Conservatives. Realistically, there has been little change since the 1950s, except that Blairites treat the left wing as heresy, but there have been periods when left wing views have been considered as a minority viewpoint.

Given that Clegg destroyed the Liberal Democrats, England will be stuck with a bifurcated single party system for the forseeable future. The left wing may hope that the forthcoming disaster and chaos will lead to a change and voters moving to them, but I think that is implausible.

125:

https://mrw.5-cent.us is my website.

I successfully logged on. Apparently, when I first tried to register two weeks ago, your server stored my information even though I never received a confirmation email, so another attempt to register resulted in "email address already in use" error. So today I clicked on a "Forgot password" link, and it allowed me to reset the password and to finally log on.

126:

Charlie @ 105
Agree about the tories desperately trying to get the Monarch to represent THEM, but it ain't going to work ...
Chas has been pushing Environmental issues for over 60 years - directly in opposition to the ultra-rights "what climate problem?" lies.
Expect a clash.
I also expect Chas ( With William's help ) to try to tone it all down - unlike 2x4 they are not stupid.
In the meantime, Queenie has a record to beat - that of Louis XIV of Frogland, whose offical reign was: {looks it up } - 72 yrs, 110 days.
Lizze became Q on 6/02/1952, which takes us to ..... 2024 .... 27th May { If I have calculated correctly. }

@ 106 Every single one of which was a minor incident. { Excepting the Curragh Mutiny, which then produced an even worse reaction in 1916 ...}
The only actual problems were in 1832 { The so-called "Great Reform Act", which specifically disenfranchised women } & 1847-8, when the whole of Europe was in turmoil, because of utterly shit harvests.
And, actually, the "rentier" class did better than that - the major enlightened employers were setting up workers insurance & pension & sickness schemes as early as the mid 1870's - "going along with Bismarck" in fact(!)

127:

justify shifting work to private clinics... who are allowed to pay higher salaries to their nurses

Which is interesting, as Bill 124 has been used to control the wages of other workers not employed directly by the government but by a third party paid with public funds (ie. just like private clinics).

I think the difference in this case is that the Tories are trying to privatize the public health system, so this is a way of opening the door. It's the same playbook Harris used to "create a crisis" in education a generation ago.

The end result will be what is already happening to dentists. Used to be a dentist owned their own practice, but now many dentists (and vets, who are in the same situation) are mere workers in practices owned by private venture capital, with quite low wages. When only a few clinics were corporate-owned wages were reasonable, but as independent clinics get thinner on the ground dentists' wages are going down…

(Source: family conversation, three nieces and two nephews-in-law being dentists.)

So end game is public tax dollars got to private clinics, wages are held as low as possible (partly because private nurses/doctors will be removed from unions), and the health care spending goes to profits. Just like private Long Term Care homes…

128:

1847-8, when the whole of Europe was in turmoil, because of utterly shit harvests.

Utterly shit harvests? You don't say...

129:

Charlie and others, one question: since Corbyn was displaced... what happened to Momentum? Has it disintegrated, or ?

Labour Party membership is down 100,000 in the past year (from a peak of roughly 500,000 five years ago), giving them a serious cash flow problem -- they wanted to make it up with donations from wealthy supporters, oddly the wealthy supporters' donations have not materialized.

130:

So of your three national parties, the LibDems are only in it for the money/power, the Tories are incompetent (or at least their ideology is incompetent,) and Labour is stuck in La La Land? What a Fustercluck!

131:

What are the chances that the Tories decide to respond to the Scottish Referendum the way that Spain responded to the Catalan one

If they could they'd already have done so.

There's a case heading for the UK Supreme Court right now, asking for a ruling that the Scottish Government is legally competent to order a non-binding, consultative referendum on independence. (Note that "consultative, non-binding" is what the Brexit referendum was.)

The SC may rule it is, or is not, lawful.

If it is lawful, then the referendum will go ahead. If it is unlawful ... then the SNP and Scottish Greens will vote to dissolve the Scottish Parliament and hold a snap Scottish Election, on a single manifesto policy: "if we are elected to form the next government, it is the will of the people that we should declare independence." (If you don't want independence, vote against us.)

Note that under the Scottish electoral system it is difficult (but not impossible) to form a majority government -- it's a mix of FPTP constituencies and a top-up vote allocated via a Party List PR system in multi-seat districts.

Anyway, the point is: Scotland was an independent nation until 1706, then voted to merge its parliament with the UK parliament. Then in 2000 Scotland got its parliament back, after a referendum. Some powers are reserved for Westminster, but a straight majority vote (within Scotland) was what it took to achieve major constitutional reform. And the UK constitution today, EU membership aside, is much the same as it was in 2000.

Spain, in contrast, fought a civil war and adopted a constitution in 1939 which basically said "this is a unitary state, secession is treason".

To switch the UK over to such a system would require a government -- led by second-raters like Truss or Johnson -- to draft and pass extremely disruptive constitutional-level legislative modifications in a single parliamentary session (without getting cock-blocked by the House of Lords, who can currently send anything they don't like back for revision for 12 months, no takesie-backsies), and get it in place before next October. This is a tall order.

Someone with the malign intellect and drive of the younger Margaret Thatcher might get it done to deadline, but probably not while dealing with: COVID19, hyperinflation, an energy crunch, a disastrous recession, Brexit, and yadda yadda.

Truss is no Thatcher. She's just a deeply stupid Thatcher cosplayer. She probably won't even try, she'll just stand in the road looking puzzled as the HGV bears down on her.

As it is, more than 40% of the English population don't care if Scotland leaves (per polling), and about 60% of Brexit voters would prefer to see the back of Scotland if that's what it takes to protect their precious Brexit. Johnson dealt with this by sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU", but that tactic only works for a while, and after a winter of rolling blackouts, possible food rationing, and inflation, it's going to be very hard to make the case to the Scottish public for the union being in Scotland's interests.

132:

Pretty much, yeah. Why anyone who has the option doesn't vote SNP, PC or Scottish Green I do not know. Are the Welsh Greens a separate party from the English Watermelons?

133:

That is unfair on the LibDems - they are well-meaning, centrist, disorganised and politically stupid. They are generally to the left of New Labour.

Labour are trying to win at all costs, mostly by applying pink lipstick to Conservative policies.

134:

Someone with the malign intellect and drive of the younger Margaret Thatcher

Someone like Vivienne Rook (from HBO's "Years and Years")?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUPf5GagKF0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcvvhQCG8Yw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOnnq41BTPQ

135:

Paws
NO ONE with any sense votes "Green" - they are against the only long-term solution to baseload power - nuclear -& would like to leave Zelensky to Putin's mercies whilst withdrawing from NATO. { Note: The Scottish greens may have come, partially, to their senses by now, I don't know }
EC
Yes - the Lem-0-crats got a bad deal in 2012 & acted stupidly, but - Cameron had the largest party.
We still need electoral reform, before Scotland breaks away, otherwisw we are stuck with a permanent fascist majority in England.

136:

NO ONE with any sense votes "Green"

Greg, we know you hate Liebor with a passion, The Greens are shit, and the LibDems are just useless. You don't seem to have a lot of choices for parties to vote for.

137:

France and UK will do it anyway, at great expense, for reasons of "national pride" and more pragmatically because they need the career-path for their nuclear sailors.

I think your assessment is spot on and this in particular rings true.

I suppose the fun what-if question around Scottish independence is what mileage could Scotland make by going nuclear-free, assuming it can achieve energy independence from the UK by other means?

138:

Yes, this is true, and it's bloody annoying. It ends up being a case of "vote for whoever's most likely to get more votes than the Tory candidate". Even if there is some minority party candidate for your constituency who does provide some reason to vote for them, with our shitty electoral system it's more likely to be a counterproductive move than anything else.

139:

That's the whole point of a two party system, though. You're not supposed to have the option of voting for a party you like, and parties are actively discouraged from being likeable. They need to have policies that at least some of "their side" hate, because other parts of "their side" require them.

That's both explicit in the first past the post rules, and implicitly in the behaviour of the dominant parties. Look at how the English parties in the supposedly "British" parliament refuse to have anything to do with nationalist-but-not-English parties. Even Plaid Cymru get the cold shoulder.

With explicit coalitions you can have the green side allied with the left side and the authoritarian side if you want, or whatever other weird and wonderful mix of parties can be persuaded to work together on the day (why hi there Italy). But when you're locked into two parties, the cost of changing positions is huge. So you end up with a brown-green fight in the left party and so on.

140:

I took a quick look at Scottish GDP figures and it appears that Scotland is running a deficit of 5%, which is not that bad. The interesting thing is that Scotland is running a modest surplus with the rest of the world and a big deficit with the rest of Britain, which is getting worst. My guess is that the reason for this is that the English economy is tanking and they are not buying Scottish stuff whereas the Scottish economy is doing better and they are still buying English stuff.

5% percent is manageable if you have the full rang of economic tools. The one thing Scotland must NOT DO is adopt the Euro. The Euro is a disaster for Europe. The Euro averages the national currencies of countries involved. If you have a stronger than average economy like Germany, your currency is permanently undervalued increasing your competitiveness. If your economy is weak, your currency is permanently over valued stifling growth.

If Scotland joins the Euro, it will probably arrive with an overvalued exchange rate, and the Euro restricts the economic tools you can use, like a stimulus over 3% of GDP to dig your way out of a recession.

New Zealand and Scotland have almost identical populations and GDPs. New Zealand has its own currency, and it does fine.

141:

A couple of years ago I expressed the opinion that relying on imports of fossil fuels was a bad idea, and that they would be cut off or become ruinously expensive. I also expressed the opinion that the crunch would come in far less than the 20 year build time of nuclear. That the outflow of money from the purchase of expensive fossil fuels would devalue the pound enough that the price of imported food and energy would be out of reach and that the UK would become effectively uninhabitable, at least at the population size it currently has.

This current crisis is shit, but it's not unexpected is it?

142:

Well, they could let the Scots run the UK. They seem to know what they're doing.

No?

Is there no-one the country might rally behind? Anyone? Leaders of vision and courage are now needed - are there any who might emerge?

The problems of the UK are the problems of modern democracy writ large. The US founders, classical republicans all, expected that the country would elect wise far-seeing statesmen to lead the USA. Well. No. Instead the country was dominated by mechanics and shopkeepers, and the demagoguery was beyond belief. That era more-or-less ended with the Presidency of the slaving, genocidal Andrew Jackson, who left the USA in a shambles. The country shambled along for decades after that, and then came the Civil War.

They didn't know. They couldn't know.

But we do know. What now?

143:

Is there no-one the country might rally behind? Anyone? Leaders of vision and courage are now needed - are there any who might emerge?

For the next couple of years the question that matters is "is there no existing tory MP that the country might rally behind?"

Until there's an election or a revolution, they're stuck with electing a prime munster from the MPs in parliament, that are also inside the party that holds a majority.

It's kind of like looking in a bin of reject kiwifruit for a nice apple to polish up and give to the teacher. You can look, but I don't like your chances.

(there may be better similies from people who didn't grow up picking and grading kiwifruit)

144:

»[…]become ruinously expensive. I also expressed the opinion that the crunch would come in far less than the 20 year build time of nuclear.«

I understand why you guys are fascinated by nuclear power, because so am I.

But you seem to think if a different kind of nuclear power than what the laws of physics allow.

When the chairman of the AEC said "too cheap to meter" back in 1954, he did not say "cheap", he said that the overhead of installing meters, reading them and calculating the electricity bill would be waste of money.

Here's the technical/historical background:

First remember that in USA there are different electricity rates for "commercial" and "residental".

In 1950-1960, electrical utilities saw growth in demand to the tune of a doubling every ten years or more, and since nobody dared predict where the curve would flatten, the only plausible way to grow was nuclear: Oil and coal reserves were known to be finite.

But nuclear power cannot be modulated on a daily basis.

If you reduce the power output of a nuclear reactor to 70% for some hours, you will either have to shut it down or run it flat out 100% for approximately 72 hours, in order to keep the control domain stable.

In order to meet daily peak demand, the nuclear reactors would have to run flat out 24*7, which again means that the capital and operational costs are controlled entirely by the peak demand, essentially making the electricity "free" at all other times of the day.

Since the peak demand was from commercial consumers, installing meters on residential consumers, which would only be active during peak-load, would be a waste of money: The residential load is capped by the fuse on the pole.

That is why future power would be "too cheap to meter" for residential consumers, but not even close to "cheap" for commercial consumers.

And since the laws of neutronics have not changed, the situation is still the same:

You can use nuclear up to around the minimum daily load, and that will be "very nearly cheap" as Pterry described it, but using nuclear for any of the variable daily load is hideously expensive.

If you do not believe me, find me /any/ nuclear power reactor in the world, which modulates its production on a daily basis.

If you look at the recently approved(-ish) "small" reactor from USA, what they are proposing is five or six small reactors in the same pool, so that you can modulate the total plant output by turning them entirely on or off individually, on a rotating base.

But their target customers are military bases and polar habitation (McMurdo, Concordia, Jan Mayen, Daneborg, Thule etc.) which have a very high minimum daily load from heating, and where the competition is flying, sailing or sledding diesel in.

In theory molten salt reactors, with "continuous fuel adjustment" can be modulated, because that is an euphorism for out-gassing the Xenon as fast as possible and removing other neutron-eating fission products using hand-waving technologies. If you think anything is going to be easier with 700-800°C hot molten alkali salts and continuously reprocessing spent nuclear fuel dissolved in it, I can point you at any number of "nuclear startups" who would love to take your money.

So your dire predictions /does not matter/: There is simply no way to supply more than the minimum daily load with nuclear power, which will not redefine your notion of "hideously expensive" or bring you deep into "Things I Wont Work With" territory.

145:

Moz
Calling you out on that one: we know you hate Liebor with a passion, - LIAR
This person is my local MP - I have always voted for her, she lives 8 doors away from me, her mother is a personal friend & I know Stella to speak to & have a chat with { Assuming she's not rushed off her feet, which she usually is }
Get it right, in future, huh?

The Raven
They seem to know what they're doing.{The Scots} - really?
Ask Charlie & Paws about the piles of festering rubbish in the streets?

146:

You can use nuclear up to around the minimum daily load,

But just as with renewables, you can add storage to increase that minimum load. That's both the traditional "off peak heating" load and the newfangled chemical and hydro storage schemes. I say newfangled meaning "invented well before terrestrial nuclear power" but whatever. In the UK that could easily mean invading Scotland to build more pumped hydro plants, because they have a big one (and wave it about surprisingly little, all things considered).

Back in the olden days when it was transmission capacity that was the limit Aotearoa had quite some encouragement for people to run water heaters and solid storage heaters on controlled loads so that the morning peak would be lower, and the evening peak would avoid having much water heating in it.

In coal fired countries I understand they did the same thing for the reasons you describe - coal fired generators don't like daily cycling.

147:

It seems to me that a nominal function of the monarchy is to ensure that the government acts to preserve the United Kingdom and to serve and protect the British people. If you were a trusted advisor to the crown, what practical course of action would you propose to forestall the unfolding crisis?

148:

Heat buffers. For reactor designs which are not water cooled, adding tanks to the cooling loop before and after the turbine block is quite cheap. Then you make the turbine block oversized for the reactor, and now you have a setup where the reactor can be left in "Full throttle", while power production shifts with demand.

Heat storage is vastly cheaper to build than electricity storage, and since with this setup it happens before converting any heat to electricity, there are no conversion losses.

Gates is building a sodium cooled reactor with this feature, and Seaborg is doing with with NaOH cooling (Yes. The base. They have chemists that got it to stop eating steels via additives.) A liquid regime of 323 to 1388 Centigrade is pretty useful for cooling, but the same idea should work with lead and salt cooling too.

149:

Oh, my mistake, I was misled by your passion for Corbyn and anyone left of Blair. I assume you're a fan of Starmer but search here is a bit borken so it's hard to find out.

150:

Here's the view from a life long LibDem voter, I find them to be more pragmatic and less ideologically driven than the other two main parties.

From the left they believe in the welfare state and trying to mitigate the vagaries of life we're all prone too. From the right, properly regulated businesses and an acceptance of them making a profit.

The issue is that left wing voters see them as capitalist lackeys in hock to big business and the right sees them as pandering to the weak and work-shy and how dare they try to limit what businesses can do.

151:

In pure coal grids it's generally handled by building for the peak, then using steam bypass. Coal plants are even more discomforted by shutting down than nuclear.

152:

I know a few people involved in the uk nuclear sector who were very upset when load following was forced on nuclear operators post privatisation.

Their solution was to buy gas turbines for the variable part, of course.

153:

It's not a helpful comment at all, but boy am I glad to have left the UK in 2013. The writing was already on the wall, but nobody wanted to hear about it. At the time it was easy for me to compare UK to German political reporting, and it was abundantly clear that there was a severe disconnect between the two.

Within the UK, the UK's relatively special position within the EU was viewed as a guarantee that renegotiation in the UK's interest was going to be successful. Outside the UK - in Germany, at least - the same position was seen as a challenge to the foundations of the EU that must be squashed by just about any means; the higher the cost to the UK, the less ambiguous the message to the other member states.

I wish I had any answers or better yet, a way out to offer, but all I've got is ramblings from the perspective of someone who has lived on the edge between the EU and UK during (parts of) a crucial period. So I'll leave it at this.

154:

I suppose the fun what-if question around Scottish independence is what mileage could Scotland make by going nuclear-free, assuming it can achieve energy independence from the UK by other means?

Scotland's remaining nuclear power stations need to be decommissioned in the fairly near future -- possibly by 2024, certainly this decade (I haven't been tracking the latest) -- because they're all AGRs, coming up on 40 years old, and it turns out there's an irremediable design flaw (neutron irradiation induced cracks in the graphite core that threatens to block gas channels and jam the control rods and can't be fixed).

Meanwhile Scotland produces on average more electricity than it consumes solely from renewables -- we have the largest offshore wind farms in Europe -- and is a net electricity exporter. Even if you subtract North Sea oil and gas (what remains of it) Scotland is in an energy exporting nation, although renewables are subject to supply interruptions so either grid-scale backup or gas peaker backup plants are necessary.

The main risk of Scotland aiming for 100% renewables is that solar is a non-starter up here (demand is at maximum during those 18 hour long winter cold nights), and if climate change leads to significant changes in the prevailing winds we could be in a big trouble. As it is, a case can probably be made for a couple of replacement nuke plants -- and possibly for SMRs with municipal heating hook-ups for Aberdeen, Dundee, and Inverness when the oil and gas are tapped out.

155:

For the next couple of years the question that matters is "is there no existing tory MP that the country might rally behind?"

You are correct that that's the right question, but unfortunately they monstered all the sane (and experienced) former front bench ministers right out of parliament and party over the 2017-19 period, because the current incarnation of conservativism isn't your old school One Nation conservativism, it's an ideologically committed hard right English Nationalist party engaged in the pursuit of an unattainable utopian ideal of Brexit -- a mirage they can never reach.

There have been competent Tory leaders within living memory. Most of them have quit politics, been exiled to the House of Lords, or officially come out in support of the LibDems, which also tells you everything you need to know about them.

156:

There is simply no way to supply more than the minimum daily load with nuclear power

There is a solution to this problem, however: go all-in to use nuclear to meet peak demand, then find some intermittent application for the surplus power output during slack periods.

What we really need is a Fischer-Tropsch synthesis plant that can handle variable power inputs -- possibly by using molten salt reservoirs as thermal batteries? -- so it takes water vapor and CO2 out of the atmosphere and turns it into long chain alkanes, as feedstocks for chemical processes (plastics production for example) or jet fuel.

This is of course all horribly expensive etc. but it allows us to keep burning jet fuel and keep the planes flying without additional fossil carbon emissions, and it gives us the cheapest possible baseline for nuclear power (i.e. mass produced plants running at optimum power output all the time).

157:

Greg: the piles of rubbish on the streets are due to the bin men going on a two week strike.

They're on strike because a Scottish parliamentary committee on funding municipal workers was deadlocked right down the middle until Labour enlisted Tory support to block an SNP move to offer a 5% pay rise.

This then filtered down to municipal level where the Edinburgh council -- which is an Labour-Tory coalition, despite the SNP being the largest single party on the council -- refused to deal.

So this bullshit isn't something you can blame on the SNP. It's entirely due to Labour being so intent on sabotage that they'll actually go into coalition with the Conservatives and sabotage any attempt to solve the problem.

158:

Moz
I will take that as a partial apology .... Starmer is what we have got & the best hope of getting the tories OUT.
However, see Charlie, later on { # 155 }, oh there WERE half-ways reasonable people ( "One Nation tories" ) once upon a time - they were, quite deliberately, thrown out, in favour of the smiling faragistes we have got now - not a pleasant prospect.
One can hope that the Lem-0-Crats have learnt, but I'm not holding my breath.

... the pursuit of an unattainable utopian ideal of Brexit -- a mirage they can never reach. - is it deliberate? Do they know it can't be done, but they can keep whipping their base in the following of this mirage?
Or are they religious believers, whom no facts can shift?

159:

If you were a trusted advisor to the crown, what practical course of action would you propose to forestall the unfolding crisis?

Arrange a fiery car crash that takes out both Liz and Chuck simultaneously?

Seriously, there doesn't seem to be anything the crown can accomplish by intervening other than to make everything far, far worse. Liz is 96 and about as proactive and energetic as any other 96 year old, which is to say, don't look for her to start dragging wannabe PMs onto the carpet for a dressing-down.

Prince Charles is a 73 year old multi-millionaire. And that's our starting point for the next monarch's reign.

They are institutionally ossified and rigid, eyes fixed on a horizon that is measured in centuries or decades, not years or months. Their overriding preoccupation is: don't rock the boat, don't jeopardize institutional continuity. To such an extent that they're unlikely to recognize a pre-revolutionary situation emerging in time to get on the right side of history.

They're also so insulated from the ordinary people that they probably don't have a clue what's going on -- all their information is filtered through the increasingly deranged Conservative-aligned press, and ministerial and civil service briefings that emanate from guess who.

160:
  • Or are they religious believers, whom no facts can shift?*

It's religion: Little Englandism.

From outside England, it looks like the contraction of Empire didn't end when all the dominions gained independence; it kept on pulling back, and today the UK is run like an English empire (with NI, Wales, and Scotland as distant dominions).

Ask yourself why there are so few Tory MPs in Westminster elected from Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Or, Wales excepted, Labour MPs. There's a huge crisis of legitimacy within the UK and it has been growing for decades -- and been systematically ignored.

When the UK is run by a duopoly of Conservatives and Labour who are minority parties in the other countries, that's not a good sign for the future.

161:

I don't see what good your think that car crash would do, however much you think that William would be better. I cannot see King William suspending Parliament, appointing a (military-style) socialist government to sort out the immediate crisis, and organising a constitutional convention. Much as I regret that :-(

Your last paragraph is definitely wrong. That could be said about the British sheeple, but I can assure you that the major royals are much better informed than you imply. It doesn't reach the press much, but they take the trouble to talk to real experts NOT appointed by the government. Out of touch, yes, though much less so than our current ruling clique.

162:

It looks that way from inside England, too, though I would quibble about 'distant'.

163:

Obviously, there are global challenges - general energy problems, supply chain disruption, the COVID pandemic which lingers, the increasingly obvious consequences of climate change, political instability in several regions.

Ideally, each one of those would lead to a re-thinking of the global consensus - but it's not clear the impetus has been strong enough, and there are powerful forces arraigned behind the status quo.

The UK faces all those challenges, but they are exacerbated. The causes are myriad and contain all sorts of feedback loops.

Through a long chain of events, we will have a government in 2 weeks which aligns with the values, priorities and goals of a (very!) small fraction of the population. That government can barely rely on the support of half of its own fraction in parliament, and has to maintain the line on various reality-defying policies (any minute now, those Brexit opportunities will come to the rescue!).

We have an opposition which is so hamstrung that it cannot propose policies which would go beyond "anodyne".

So, along with the global challenges, we have:

  • A health service [https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1562004612172873728?s=20&t=3uMO5UqrjmAgSdi0zVxesg[(which is crumbling, in summer).
  • Inflation which will exceed that of most countries experience
  • Low productivity, compared to our G7 competitors; Brexit is likely to have a significant negative impact over the next years.
  • A heavily financialized economy, which rewards financial engineering and investment in property rather than productive investments; coupled with short-termist incentives.
  • A decade+ of low investment in and/or privatisation of public services, leading to low public trust in our institutions
  • A constitutional arrangement with many brakes - FPTP, devolution, House of Lords with little legitimacy
  • Long-standing, and increasing inequality, in income, wealth and opportunity

My worry is that we won't "rethink" the way our society works. Even if Ms Truss had a coherent view on how to organize the UK and a plan for delivering it, she lacks the backing of her party. Even if the Labour party win an election, they're so hamstrung I can't see anything beyond status quo, but slightly less terrible, as the policy.

Debts that cannot be repaid won't be repaid. The foodbanks are already running out of stock. Businesses are closing or simply ignoring their energy bills. The home-owership revolution, which has sorta discouraged people from demanding change over the last 40 years, might not be as effective when people are facing unemployment and unpayable bills...

I may be unduly pessimistic, but I think we're in for a chaotic few months.

165:

Broad question about inflation: to what extent does it matter? If it's resolved, is the UK still witnessing a mounting crisis, or is Brexit plus climate woes plus Ukraine enough on its own?

I note that 10% inflation seems to be the norm in almost every country of the world right now, and that it's not being driven by demand (wage growth is relatively modest...everywhere, really, so we're not seeing prices rise because disposable incomes have suddenly increased by 10%.)

This indicates that inflation is supply-side, mostly due to the pandemic, but also the war, which leaves you with good and bad options. One bad option is to hike wages to meet inflation, compounding the problem. ("Now you've got supply-side inflation and demand-side inflation.") Another bad idea is to hike interest rates to cool demand, which is a bit like throwing water on an electrical fire: the wrong tool for the job.

A better idea is to go after the big end of town and discourage their blatant profiteering (in contrast to wage growth, global corporate profits have been quite healthy since the pandemic). Alternatively, or simultaneously, wait it out while the logistical chains are re-established and the problem more or less resolves itself. This is, at least, the solution for any country which isn't facing multiple crises at once. But where does that leave the UK?

166:

EC
In almost complete agreement - "The Monarchy" is "Above Politics" - but with the ongoing "controversy" ( i.e fascist lies about there being no climate crisis ) a long-term view of Charles ( & William ) has become political. This will lead to, um. interesting" fights.
Liz undoubtedly knows about her grandfather's stance during the General Strike, when the tory right tried to "capture" the Crown & got: "I want to be King of ALL my people" from George V (!) REAL PROBLEM: How bad does it have to get, before they are entitled & allowed to intervene? See also the Norwegian fim: "The King's Decision" - & we are probably getting into that territory!
..... Charlie @ 164
THAT would be as bad as severe food shortages & will lead to rioting, but there's a nasty Puritan streak in today's politics which will try to take advantage of this.

BATTEN DOWN EVERYBODY.
All I can think of is the end of Bernstein's Opera: "Candide"

167:

The UK is especially fucked as even before the Ukraine war, food prices were spiraling out of control due to Brexit-induced shortages -- the UK imports much/most of its food from the EU, so you can imagine what adding 48-72 hour delays to low cost but spoilable fruit'n'vegetable imports at customs clearance did. Food was set to go up 20% this year and then we got sandbagged by energy bills on top.

The energy component of inflation might come down, but the Brexit-induced bits are locked in for years to come.

Also, official statistics low ball how much British workers earn on average; more than 50% of families receiving Universal Credit (social security top-up payments) are doing so despite having wage earners in full time employment. There has been a huge and horrifying pay squeeze in progress since 2008. But the general Tory reaction to "I'm not paid enough to live on" is "get yourself a better-paid job, like bank manager or MP".

168:

If pubs and chippies going out of business doesn't provoke revolution, nothing will.

169:

"as feedstocks for chemical processes (plastics production for example) or jet fuel."

Or fuel for combined cycle turbine power plants to serve as backup for intermittent wind and sunshine?

Of vague relevance, I went to the never-sufficiently-to-be-praised Gridwatch and got its demand, wind and solar power data for the UK for last meteorological winter, 1 Dec 2021 to 28 Feb 2022. It turns out that wind + solar fell short of meeting total demand by a factor of ~3.6.

So at a minimum you need to build a lot more more solar panels and windmills if going all-renewable is the goal. But even if the wind + solar had been 3.6 times greater last winter, there would have been an unbroken period of nine days, 15 Dec to 24 Dec when demand exceeded supply, often by more than 25 GW and for a total shortfall of over 5 TWh. Just building more windmills and solar farms, while necessary, might not be the best way to handle the overall problem.

And yes, "horribly expensive" is going to be a mild way to characterize any approach.

170:

This indicates that inflation is supply-side

I think that's a false dilemma fallacy (applying law of the excluded middle when the middle is not really excluded). Wages growth isn't the only inflationary demand-side measure. Tax cuts are inherently inflationary, for example, possibly more so than wages growth.

But that's just a starting gambit... while most forms of economic activity involve creating value in some way, you don't have to buy into the labour theory of value to recognise that there's a difference between value that is created using inputs like labour and materials, and value that is created literally from nothing. I would argue that any value created literally from nothing - in activities like arbitrage and property speculation - are themselves inherently inflationary.

171:

That won't be enough. I think that it will happen only when the government manages to crash the economy, and half the population is facing actual starvation and even homelessness. Until then, they will be able to keep the bottle corked. I stand by what I said in 2016 and again in 2020 (see All Glory to the New Management! #965), except that Patel has lost her chance (thank heavens!)

172:

An interesting new form of energy storage, designed for the European winter:

https://newatlas.com/energy/reveal-aluminum-energy-storage/

173:

I take your points, and of course I'm simplifying, but we're witnessing high inflation throughout the world which implies it's not substantially down to fiscal policies – or else the inflation rate from country to country would be more variable. However, that hasn't stopped the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia), for example, from pointing the finger at the labour force and consumer spending and calling it a day. Per Charlie's comment, the UK government has found a similar scapegoat.

The real solutions are slow and politically unpalatable. Putting a dent in property speculation by increasing affordable housing stock, for example. And probably too little too late when you're being fucked from every direction at once.

174:

135 - Greg, I specifically talked about the English "Greens" as the "watermelons" (green shell with red inside). Beyond ignoring my point, what are you saying?

138 - s/Tory/Liebour in Scotland.

139 - Once again, it's Scottish National (no "ist") Party, and the Welsh name "Plaid Cymru" translates into English as "Party of Wales".

145 - Ok. This would be an issue of lack of funding in the Block Grant, as paid to the Scottish Government by Westminster, and controlled by either the Con Party or Liebour. That said, it appears Charlie know more about the fine detail than I do.

160 - Northern Irish Political Parties Yes folks, there's an entire Wikipedia article on the subject.

175:

Scotland is in an energy exporting nation, although renewables are subject to supply interruptions so either grid-scale backup or gas peaker backup plants are necessary.

In a sane world, an independent Scotland would remain part of the shared GB energy market, in a very similar way to that in which the island of Ireland has a shared energy market. Then the variability of Scottish renewables get diluted into the much fuzzier variability of British renewables (because when you have a bigger system, especially a geographically spread-out one, both supply and demand have gentler variations), and whatever storage / peaking plant / demand response / etc is needed at a GB level is applied however it makes the most sense.

Obviously we don't live in a sane world, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Westminster threaten to cut the power lines at the border. Even though, as noted, the mean flow is north to south.

There are already electrical interconnects between Scotland and NI. I wonder whether strengthening them a lot (expensive) and joining the Island-of-Ireland market would make sense...

176:

Reading through the comments here, mostly UK and Australian based, it seems both of these countries AND the US where I sit have a similar problem. A majority of the populations and politicians (of all political stripes) want to think the problems are local to their countries and can be fixed with policy changes within their borders.

177:

EC @ 171
Almost - they will probably finally realise, when it's already too late & then panic & inevitably fuck it up by the numbers, because that's what they do.

178:

A few elementary calculations show that wind and solar could only just meet the UK's current electricity requirements, and don't have an earthly of meeting the requirements when (if!) our direct fossil fuel use is converted to electricity. Whatever you may think of nuclear power, it is not a short-term solution. There is simply no option but to cut our use, drastically, AND import power.

Scotland, on its own, is in a better position.

179:

No dissent there. But, in any case, once a crash has started, it is impossible to stop, and the best that can be done is to mitigate some of the effects and plan how to pick up the pieces afterwards.

180:

Interesting. Having looked at the paper, it hasn't yet been prototyped and, worse, needs the development of viable inert anodes. I haven't checked its calculations, of course, but it seems to have addressed all of the right points.

181:

OK, let me be un-depressing...

"England is officially in drought too"

You'd have a tough time believing that looking out the window here. Place is soaked. It did it a couple of days ago too, and a couple of days before that, and a couple of days before that.

182:

A drought is an event of prolonged shortages in the water supply, whether atmospheric (below-average precipitation), surface water or ground water. A drought can last for months or years, or as few as 15 days.
In other words 2 or 3 rain storms do not constitute an end to a drought. I'd need to check Met Office figures, but I'd not be surprised to find that Scotland is at least in a prolonged dry spell based on monthly average rainfall since April.

183:

"There are already electrical interconnects between Scotland and NI. I wonder whether strengthening them a lot (expensive) and joining the Island-of-Ireland market would make sense..."

There's an interconnect from France to Ireland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Interconnector), in the works, although its 4 or so years out. Assuming the French can keep their power going, it would make a lot of sense for Scotland to be in that market also.

184:

You can do the same thing with sodium, too, the chemistry being somewhat less fierce because of the generally lower melting points of sodium compounds. Electrolysing NaOH is a tolerably tractable process operating at much lower temperatures than electrolytic aluminium production, and you can use metallic anodes rather than graphite.

One thing the article doesn't mention is that the energy output from the metal+water oxidation step in the discharge process doesn't have to be all heat; if you treat it as electrolysis backwards you can get most of it as electricity. So it's versatile enough to not be wasteful for houses that are well insulated enough not to need much extra heat.

The only thing is that it's a very old and well-known idea (which has been suggested many times on here, as well), yet it still hasn't gone into action...

185:

There are already electrical interconnects between Scotland and NI. I wonder whether strengthening them a lot (expensive) and joining the Island-of-Ireland market would make sense...

Revive Icelink to bring geothermal and/or hydro power from Iceland into that as well?

186:

The answer to nuclear power's inflexibility is the same as the answer to wind and solar power's variability: storage.

Pumped Storage development in Portugal

Pumped Storage development in Switzerland

Pumped Storage development in the EU and Scotland (from 2020)

Essentially, super-Dinorwig pumped storage facilities; and the EU appears to be committing to breaking ground on 20 gWH per year of it for the next decade.

To be clear: this isn't about the Dinorwig use-case of handling transient demand spikes - this is about smoothing supply across a 24-hour cycle.

The Alps and the Pyrenees have about 200 geologically- and commercially-usable sites for Nant de Drance equivalent installations - more, if energy prices continue rising - and that brings us into double-digit Terawatt-hours of storage capacity; and, as this is storage of water that is pumped back up to the upper reservoir, rather than use-the-water-once hydropower, long periods of reduced rainfall are less of a problem.

Whether the EU keeps up the momentum on pumped storage is another matter; but the investments involved are roughly the same as the next 10-20 years of Europe's anticipated replacement costs for end-of-life coal and nuclear plants. Which is to say: expensive, and possibly double the costs of business-as-usual, but not unaffordable. And probably cheaper in terms of the ecological and geopolitical gains of sustainability and energy security.

England also has a major 'pumped storage' development opportunity in the single-digit Gigawatt-Hour range, with two free pumping cycles every day: a tidal barrage on the Severn Estuary: whether Brexitstan will ever consider doing it is another question.

187:

I take your points, and of course I'm simplifying, but we're witnessing high inflation throughout the world which implies it's not substantially down to fiscal policies – or else the inflation rate from country to country would be more variable. However, that hasn't stopped the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia), for example, from pointing the finger at the labour force and consumer spending and calling it a day. Per Charlie's comment, the UK government has found a similar scapegoat.

It's entirely possible that, since the dollar is the world's reserve currency, American decisions to print lots of dollars as a response to the pandemic are simply rippling around the world, with every other economy responding to that (or not, as they choose).

I agree that inflation gets highly political, though. In my simplistic understanding, everybody wants to be paid a living wage. But if you pay everyone a living wage, then the price of the stuff they do and produce goes up, driving up the cost of living, so you get caught in a spiral if you're not careful. The nasty, normal solution to this is to suppress wages in critical sectors of the economy (growing food and commodity production, traditionally), which in turn means that the people who are politically active get a living wage and support the system. This works so long as the slaves and serfs don't revolt. We've tried to automate our way out of this trap (replace slaves with machines), but that hasn't really solved it either.

The real solutions are slow and politically unpalatable. Putting a dent in property speculation by increasing affordable housing stock, for example. And probably too little too late when you're being fucked from every direction at once.

This one is wrong, unfortunately. Tenements and slums are classic ways for the rich to get richer. It's easy to exploit the desperate. Right now, the new hot real estate scam is buying up trailer parks and gouging the residents until they scream.

Don't get me wrong--I'm all for equitable and affordable housing. The problem is that providing a space that's a) affordable, and b) meets the sanitation codes of sniffy people like me is tricky anyway, and doing it in the face of politics and expensive urban land is trickier still.

Squats and shanty towns are the classic response, and likely too in the UK and elsewhere.

Now if you want a cure for billionaires, that's a bit trickier. The good news is that none of the fuckers are eternal, and most rich families blow through their fortunes in a few generations.

The bad news is that A) they're fucking anarchists, who maintain their staffs of lawyers, accountants, guards, and fixers to keep it that way. Anarchy and "above the law" are synonymous. B) They treat the rest of us as their flock to fleece, not as fellow humans.

A society run by the super-rich (aka an authoritarian regime, plutocracy, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy) classically has one caste above the law (anarchist rulers, kept that way by their mooks), their essential supporters well cared for (socialism for the well off), and everyone else exploited to provide resources for "their betters" (capitalism for the poor).

Fortunately and unfortunately, such systems aren't stable. That's why countries like Egypt and China, which have "long histories of monarchical rule by pharaohs and emperors" actually have lots and lots of dynasties, each of which ended when a regime fell apart. If you look a bit more closely, you'll find that the periods when there wasn't a stable empire/kingdom are quite long too. And if you think about it a bit more, you realize that this means that there's no country on the planet with a long history of stable rule by autocrats...

The bad news in all our cases is that the last time we overthrew the bastards in the West and made ourselves more democratic, we had a lot of resources (taken, erm, from everybody and everywhere else) to make life better for everyone in our countries. We no longer have so much stolen surplus, and it's hard to make a capitalist or even a communist utopia with a shrinking resource base. Especially with a lot of people who grew up in better times and expect those times to return.

It would have been cool if nanotech had worked out and provided all our wants without our input. Or if FTL flight had gotten us to dozens of other planets that were unoccupied and free for the looting. Alas.

188:

If I had to guess, I'd say that would be the point at which we start hearing the phrase "paramilitary wing of the SNP" on the evening news.

189:

Yep: pubs are going to go under - maybe not 70% of them, but certainly more than a quarter: half is entirely plausible.

And this is a commercial opportunity for the chain operators who will buy them up: some of them are Conservative Party donors, and at least one of them is a prominent UKIP and ERG supporter who famously told his staff that they weren't getting any furlough payments to tide them over through the Covid lockdowns, and should seek opportunities in their local supermarkets.

Those people matter, rather more in Westminster than The Society of Independent Brewers, who spoon-fed that article to the Guardian.

Shock doctrine, writ large: and somewhere new for the water companies to pump untreated sewage if they're ever prevented from dumping it into English rivers and the sea.

190:

The big problem with sodium is that even sodium hydroxide is seriously nasty, and sodium metal is incredibly dangerous. It is definitely NOT suitable for most domestic use. What do you do if there is a fire on the premises? Aluminium is cuddly by comparison.

But I agree with you that all such 'solutions' are speculation, at least until they are prototyped.

191:

Sorry, but the coalition with the Tories, for which they got nothing but the Tory agenda, leaves me a significantly jaundiced view of them.

192:

The chip shops, and the pubs? Okay, then, so, have you received your party notice of The Revolution? When are you all going to set up the Humane Inventions?

193:

Supply side... well, but there's more, and not only price-gouging by oil companies. You may have missed this... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/23/record-profits-grain-firms-food-crisis-calls-windfall-tax

194:

I have issues with the concept of "value created from nothing". In what way is that not purely a scheme to get rich quick? I mean, "oh, wow, we can eat this mud, and it tastes great" implies the mud is there, and needs to be dug up, packaged, etc.

195:

"But I agree with you that all such 'solutions' are speculation, at least until they are prototyped."

Which is what worries me. So far, the decarbonization agenda seems to be "Build more wind and solar farms!". That might be necessary, but it's far from sufficient. It would be good to see some of the dozens of candidate supplemental solutions (storage of some sort, mostly) being prototyped at scale.

"At scale" might mean, for a start, backing up a 10 GWe mean output wind + solar plant that suffers a 50% sustained reduction for a week every quarter. Preferably do several of those at a time to explore the multi-dimensional parameter space.

For a start. After running that/those for, say, five years and learning lessons, Phase Two could be instituted. Needless to say, that's very unlikely to happen.

BTW, I take EC's point that the discussion is now centered mostly around current electricity needs. Expanding that to total decarbonization/electrification is TBD.

196:

I have issues with the concept of "value created from nothing". In what way is that not purely a scheme to get rich quick? I mean, "oh, wow, we can eat this mud, and it tastes great" implies the mud is there, and needs to be dug up, packaged, etc.

Probably I'm confused, but I think there are at least two things going on here.

One is monetary inflation. Money's this magical stuff that, in theory, can be traded for anything else, if someone's willing to take the amount of money you have in trade for whatever they have. Create more money (as the US government has done), and the monetary value of everything goes up, because more total money means each unit of money is proportionately less valuable.

Then there's speculation, which is where you drive up how much money people are willing to pay for something else. That doesn't create value from nothing, it alters the terms of trading money for that something else.

Then there's alienation, which is where you take some mud and trade it to someone else for money. The mud in itself has no intrinsic value, nor does your act of scooping it up. The value comes when someone else is willing to give you money for it. Only at that point does the mud become alienated from the wider universe, and incorporated into the economy in which that money circulates. This is where, in terms of that economy, something is created from nothing. It's truly a magical act.

The fundamental problem we have is that all our economies run inside larger systems (biosphere, Earth, solar system) which are mostly outside our economies, and no economy is remotely self-sufficient. Alienation tends to be destructive, and assumptions of universal alienation are unreachable. So one way or another, we've got to figure out how to exist, partially or entirely, without alienation, or we're not going to exist at all. This last is probably easier than we think (lots of things in the world are inalienable), but it is hard to think this way, after a lifetime of being conditioned to think in economic terms and regard ourselves as economic beings. As I said, it is all very magical.

197:

Dead wrong. The SNP have not only disavowed Sìol nan Gàidheal, but have actively banned known members of the extremist group from holding membership of the SNP.

198:

Doesn't mean they can't start another one that aligns more closely with their objectives and values.

But the point I was trying to make is that if the party of government makes a policy of only abiding by referendums (or is it referenda?) if the result is the one they want, the SNP and the people of Scotland in general are going to be left with two choices: Just putting up with it or resorting to violence.

And I don't think they're likely to pick the first option. Not after the last five years.

199:

Which is what worries me. So far, the decarbonization agenda seems to be "Build more wind and solar farms!". That might be necessary, but it's far from sufficient. It would be good to see some of the dozens of candidate supplemental solutions (storage of some sort, mostly) being prototyped at scale.

Speaking from certain knowledge, some are being designed and built right now.

One problem with pumped storage is that any place that could hold the second reservoir, but which does not already have a reservoir on it, probably has real issues that need to be solved first (guess how this environmental activist is getting sucked in....).

Otherwise, battery peaker units are going in with minimal fanfare, because they're simpler and cheaper than natural gas peaker units.

In places like San Diego, I think the general push is less for grid-level stability at the moment, and more for business and homeowner stability, meaning that it's easier to get people to spring for home solar and house batteries than to build regional systems. Likely it's cheaper to pay for poor people to go solar than to build regional systems. This comes down to a few things, including the price of vacant land, grid instabilities, the, erm, personalities and tactics of big power companies like SDG&E and PG&E, the fact that the grid suppliers cut power during red flag fire alerts, because they've already lost billions when their equipment touched off conflagrations, and the fact that per-building solar and storage is really fungible.

On the last, if a charity or someone who needs carbon credits has, say, $100k that they want to invest in decarbonization, installing solar, house batteries, and electric appliances in a few low-income houses or a trailer park is easier than investing in one fiftieth of a solar farm that needs to be permitted, to deal with local NIMBY suits, and only then can be built.

200:

Actually, esp. in the US and "allies", a lot of inflation is driven solely and exclusively by not merely speculation, but changing the terms and fraud. The price of housing in the US is a perfect example, with people who want to get rich quick massively raising housing prices in what is effectively a closed market (what, you don't want to live 60+km outside of town, and spend 3 hours/day commuting?).

And there's the social imperative "you must buy the latest, because we made that crap so cheap it'll break 30 sec after the warranty ends."

201:

When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine."

It's an old, old problem. The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse is charging about a day's wages for a legionary to cover the cost of wheat for a loaf of bread (or three loaves of barley bread), but saying that the foods of the better off (wine and olive oil) are not to be touched. Seems like whoever wrote this text had some opinions about profiteering during a disaster?

202:

In the UK that could easily mean invading Scotland to build more pumped hydro plants, because they have a big one

Actually the big one (Dinorwig, 1800MW) is in Wales, Scotland's entries of Cruachan and Fall of Foyers only amount to 730MW between them! Granted Cruachan does have a lot of storage capacity. There's Loch Sloy (which was proposed for conversion to a pumped hydro station) which adds another ~155MW, and there are several other projects in various states of planning that could add another ~3000MW in total.

There's a project aiming to product a small ~100MW(?) pumped hydro scheme somewhere in Wales, but that was running into difficulties as I recall because the UK military had after WW2 dumped unwanted munitions into one of the pools they wanted to use as a reservoir!

I seem to recall reading somewhere that there's a plausible pumped hydro site on Exmoor, and if all else fails there's the build a very large plastic lined dam and use the sea as the lower reservoir option which I'm sure has been used somewhere. (I think it was mentioned in "Without the hot air" e-book?(

203:

From here*, it looks like life would be less dire if reactionaries didn't act like they were modeling their behavior to match a Dennis Leary novelty song. Is part of the attraction of right wing movements a license for bad behavior?

*Western Missouri.

204:

"I seem to recall reading somewhere that there's a plausible pumped hydro site on Exmoor"

No, there isn't. No lakes at all, and certainly nowhere to have one above the other. There's about one site where you've got a decent enough combination of flow and head to get a worthwhile output from a local generation-only system, and it's already got one.

You need the basic landscape to have started out with a lot more elevation in the first place, and then been glaciated so you get big wide lakey valleys at low level plus useful corries or hanging valleys higher up. So Wales, Scotland, and the Lake District is pretty much the lot, and while there are a few possible sites for little ones that haven't been used yet, for anything with significant capacity we're pretty much out of luck (though I don't know Scotland well enough to question what I've been told in that case).

205:

it's Scottish National (no "ist") Party, and the Welsh name "Plaid Cymru" translates into English as "Party of Wales"

A party can be nationalist, viz "preferring to be a nation" while not having that in its name. Wikipedia, for example, calls the SNP a nationalist party.

While it's certainly possible that the SNP is strongly in favour of UK unity as a single kingdom and at worst neutral on a separate Scots nation, it's IMO hard to draw that conclusion from observation. In other words, {citation needed}

206:

nationalist, viz "preferring to be a nation"

I struggled with a recent episode of The Minefield, where the usually quite reasonable co-hosts Waleed Ali and Scott Stevenson engaged in a discussion where for them it was obvious that there is a clear distinction between the concepts "patriotism" and "nationalism". To me they have long been synonyms, except that some people associate positive connotations with one and negative connotations with the other. I think for them the distinction is that one is about being and acting like part of a polity, which might or might not be a nation state, without necessarily saying yours is better than anyone else's, and the chauvinistic determination that yours is best and all the Others best watch out. I think their claim is that nationalists only hear the first part of the quote "My country right or wrong", and neglect the part that "patriots" also require: "If right to keep right, if wrong to set right". For them "patriotism" is more aligned with "civic commitment" or something of that nature. I think the confusion is really about what is a polity and what does membership of one mean, versus a nation state and especially an ethno-state. Maybe "nationalism" is supposed to imply or require an ethno-state too, but if so I'm not sure I agree (maybe "nationalism" is "patriotism plus racism for them?) I don't think I agree with their usage in terms of the word "patriot", I think my old understanding is still correct, but I don't disagree such concepts exist and can be distinguished.

I think it's different with SNP and Plaid Cymru and it's actually much simpler and more clear cut than this. Both Scotland and Wales are existing polities, countries and historical nations. Nationalism for them means more or less what independence meant for the USA, Canada, Australian, Aotearoa, India and a myriad others, with a strong sideline of "independence specifically from the English". Maybe one or both do have a strong thread of cultural or ethnic national identity that I've missed, but to me it looks like they are talking about self determination for a well-defined polity that already has its own parliament. Maybe this is getting into the same sorts of muddled definitions and distinctions, I'm not sure. But I don't think it's unreasonable to offer a distinction between "national" meaning "I want my polity to be a nation" versus "nationalist" meaning "I think my nation is the best nation", or whatever other thing we associate with that conceptually.

207:

"Actually the big one (Dinorwig, 1800MW)"

Might I humbly suggest that output capability, expressed in MW, be distinguished from storage capacity, expressed in MWh?

208:

Perhaps, instead of pumped storage, which requires topography, someone might investigate acquiring and mooring a bunch of CNG transport ships converted to compressed air storage. Compressed air energy storage at the utility level is a thing, and if there are surplus-but-functioning CNG carriers around that could hold enough pressurized air to make a difference, they could be used as load balancers. Mooring them out of the way and interconnected to the grid might be a wee chore, but so is making a dam for pumped storage in a world running short on cement.

209:

"someone might investigate acquiring and mooring a bunch of CNG transport ships converted to compressed air storage. Compressed air energy storage at the utility level is a thing"

Mebbee, but E = PV, power is dE/dt = VdP/dt and the P goes down as the V is emptied. You'd have to run a model with realish numbers to see where it gets.

210:

and if there are surplus-but-functioning CNG carriers around that could hold enough pressurized air to make a difference, they could be used as load balancers.

I assume you really mean LNG carriers. Because once you liquefy the gas the carriers are really larger refrigerators more than pressure vessels. Some of both but LNG is really about cold. I wonder how compatible "air" is in terms of being liquefied.

211:

But if you pay everyone a living wage, then the price of the stuff they do and produce goes up, driving up the cost of living, so you get caught in a spiral if you're not careful.

Prices only go up if companies can't automate their production. Of course, this leads to other problems, as we've discussed at length in earlier threads.

212:

Create more money (as the US government has done), and the monetary value of everything goes up, because more total money means each unit of money is proportionately less valuable.

Each unit of money is proportionately less valuable only if the economic output of a country (or world?) does not go up. If the U.S., for example, does not create more money when its GDP goes up, then each unit of money is more valuable. The rich get richer, and everybody else struggles.

This was the historical problem with the gold standard, which many countries (including the U.S.) used to have. New gold production couldn't keep up with increased economic output, so those who owned gold got rich. Thus the speech by U.S. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896, in which he famously said "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold".

213:

Is part of the attraction of right wing movements a license for bad behavior?

I suspect that the answer is "yes" for quite a few people. What a significant number of convoy protesters apparently wanted was the freedom to be nasty to people they didn't like.

214:

I assume you really mean LNG carriers. Because once you liquefy the gas the carriers are really larger refrigerators more than pressure vessels. Some of both but LNG is really about cold. I wonder how compatible "air" is in terms of being liquefied.

Not in this case. I meant compressed natural gas. Kardashev nailed the problem with it, of course, but they do use compressed air for load balancing in power plants, so it can't be entirely stupid. Especially if you can get the tanks and pumps really cheap (as from a surplused CNG transport) to keep down manufacturing costs.

I actually contemplated both liquid air and liquid natural gas, both in liquefy and vaporize, and for the methane, liquefy, vaporize, burn, and reconstitute. I could be wrong, but I think you lose too much energy liquefying air and methane to make either workable. Burning the methane would get the energy out of course, but then you're stuck dealing with the CO2. Since the best processes for making CH4 out of CO2 seem to demand a lot of energy, I doubt it would work.

215:

Each unit of money is proportionately less valuable only if the economic output of a country (or world?) does not go up

One of the hidden subsidies, at least in Australia, comes from the question of who exactly issues this new money. Here it's banks. Not the Reserve Bank of Australia, but profit-making banks via the miracle of fractional reserve banking. Which does great things for the profitability of banks, and consequently the wealth and income of their shareholders. But sadly not everyone is a shareholder, and even when everyone was a shareholder that was only of some banks (the state-owned ones). Note that this is separate from the subsidy of government bank guarantees (including the "too big to fail" cash injections)

Which is a polite way of saying that the necessary increase in money supply is deliberately used to increase inequality.

It doesn't have to be this way, and if you're the naive Marxist sort it would seem more just to give that money equally to everyone. Or if you accept the ideas behind progressive taxation and social welfare, that money could be given more to poorer people, or even used as government spending.

216:

Both liquid air and compressed air energy storage exist and there are people trying to commercialise both.

217:

It's also the Reserve Bank.

When the government wants money, for say, a covid support payment, it borrows the money by issuing bonds. Those bonds are nearly all bought by Reserve Bank that creates money out of nothing with which to buy them.

Then the government has created this enormous debt that they've "saddled our children with". Except that the debt is owed to itself, in the form of the Reserve Bank.

As long as the money doesn't leave the country, it doesn't matter how much money is magiced into existence. All it does is circulate around making jobs and creating real wealth.

218:

»Coal plants are even more discomforted by shutting down than nuclear. «

Coal is, as you correctly term it "discomforted", because it is only a matter of economy.

With Nuclear it impossible, because the laws of physics stand in the way.

To get around the laws of physics, you would have to build approx five times peak-capacity in a range of reactor-sizes, so that you can regulate by running a subset of them at 100% while the rest are at 0%.

219:

Poul-Henning Kamp said: it is only a matter of economy.

Well, in the end, everything is only a matter of economy.

If you shut down a coal plant the molten clinker freezes to the boiler tubes and walls. Some poor grunt has to climb inside and chip it away by hand and clean everything out before you can restart. 3 days to a week of work. I don't know if you can call freezing a law of physics, but it is a fuck load of work that you can't skip.

Ramping the burn rate up and down wrecks the boilers. Is thermal expansion a law of physics? I don't know, but again, when the boiler tubes split you have to shut it down and plug that tube at both ends and clean all the shit out again.

The practical upshot is that you don't ramp coal plants up and down or stop and start them if at all possible.

220:

Can you find a link or explain a bit more how that self-borrowing is explicitly inequality-exacerbating? I'm thinking it's tied into the anti-MMT arguments that if the government uses too much productive capacity the whole economy suffers, but you seem to rule that out at the end. Obviously the limiting case of the government self-borrowing 10x last year's economy in order to usurp 90% of the productive capacity would be exciting, but if we just increased the government share of the economy from 30% to 40%, say, and the extra 10% was borrowing rather than tax... then what? Does it necessarily have to increase inequality the way giving that money to private banks (shareholders) does?

221:

Sorry, or did you just mean "it's also the reserve bank creating new money"? Coz yes, they do it too, and that effectively becomes part of general government spending which can do whatever the government likes to inequality.

222:

The "N" in LNG (and CNG) is actually more or less a synonym for methane. LPG tends to mean (rarely) ethane, and more commonly propane and/or butane. It's not that unusual to see frosting on propane and butane tanks on a frosty morning. This can give a vague indication of the gas level.

223:

EC
Corollory of that is that Nuclear IS a long-term solution {Especially for baseload} - but - because it's long-term, it should have been started 20+ years ago ......

Nile
Yeah, fucking 'spoons & Tim Martin - I won't drink in a spoons, nor will many CAMRA members, because of this.

AlanD2
And, of course you have "goldbugs" { "Satoshi"? } & others demanding a return to the gold standard, because it's "not FIAT money" - which is complete bollocks, of course.
Which reminds me - how is/are "Crypto" currencies doing & how long before the whole scam crashes?

224:

You're saying the laws of physics make ramping nuclear plants up and down impossible, have you told the French? They've been running at least some of theirs in load-following where they can adjust between 30-100% for several decades.

225:

Moz said: Sorry, or did you just mean "it's also the reserve bank creating new money"?

Yes. That's all I meant. The money so created can be used for good or evil at the government's whim.

226:

paws said: This can give a vague indication of the gas level.

Best way of checking the liquid level is to pour hot water down the side of the tank. Then feel the side. The liquid draws the heat away quickly, so the transition from hot above to cold below is the liquid level. No need to wait for unusual weather.

227:

But every need to get closer to a bulk tank than you're normally allowed under UK laws.

228:

How easy it is depends a lot on the type and size of the reactor.

Large AGR style graphite cores are particularly I'll suited to rapid changes, and that describes most of the current UK plants.

229:

Really?

Weird laws of the world...

230:

I suspect many of them are mimicking the behavior of TPTB, many of whom take the social shortcuts of judging people by melanin content, religion or income, avoiding the chore of evaluating on a case by case basis, and alienating theirselves from the majority of the world. Gets to be a bit of an issue in various ways when they start viewing other human beings as inferior (See most of this thread), and worse when law enforcement picks up the attitude.

231:

Suspect he may be interpreting a different scale. But didn't say that, so hohum.

232:

Damian said: different scale

Oh, yeah.

233:

"With Nuclear it impossible, because the laws of physics stand in the way."

It's a matter of design more than physics. Naval nuclear reactors can be shut down and started up readily enough, and can be throttled rapidly when running.

234:

LPG tanks like this

Lighthouse Beach Holiday Village https://maps.app.goo.gl/iksoRvsHfYzA4z4i9

feel like bulk to me.

The big bulk LPG tanks tend to be underground, or indeed actually just ground. The ELGAS bulk facility in Sydney is literally a hole. They dug an artifical cave 130m under Port Botany. So I don't think you'd see frosty sides.

Kinda looking forward to what paws comes back with.

235:

Like that yes, but in a fenced compound, and no way would there be trees that close.

236:

oh, noes! Cue the revolution! Peace, prosperity, and beer!

237:

I suspect many of them are mimicking the behavior of TPTB, many of whom take the social shortcuts of judging people by melanin content, religion or income

I won't disagree with that. I'm an immigrant, but being British I never get hassled by the very people who think my Canadian-born nieces should "go back where they came from".

It's particularly obvious when the hassler has an accent that identifies them as an immigrant themselves. I'm by no means good at identifying accents, but RP English is soooo obviously not Canadian. And even in Alberta we don't have Texas drawls…

In any case, what many of the "Freedom" protesters wanted was the freedom to be nasty to people who weren't like them, whether in skin pigmentation, religion, or sexual orientation.

238:

It's entirely possible that, since the dollar is the world's reserve currency, American decisions to print lots of dollars as a response to the pandemic are simply rippling around the world, with every other economy responding to that (or not, as they choose).

It's possible, yes, but is that what we're seeing? From what I can gather, economists are attributing current inflation to restraints in the supply of commodities – particularly crude and staple crops such as wheat – as demand-driven inflation was already waning late in 2021. In the link, economist Paul Donovan also explains why he doesn't think labour costs are a factor right now either (wage rises aren't inflationary unless they outpace productivity).

Donovan also argues that the solution for inflation right now is do nothing, the problem will resolve itself. But if that's going to take too long, the UK government is in a position to warn industry leaders of potential blowback. "Ease up on the price gouging, or the tide of public dissatisfaction is going to turn hard against you." Unlikely under a conservative administration, I know, but the mounting instability you describe is going to find an outlet somewhere and most businesses wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of it.

239:

Oh, OK, so we're thinking of roughly the same thing. Just as you can see, ours fend for themselves. The big ones like this (well, anything over 90 kg) tend to have gauges on them, but they might be hard to read if you can't get to the tank. The hot water trick works up to 250 kg tanks that I've tried, but I don't know if it would work on these bigger ones.

240:

how is/are "Crypto" currencies doing and how long before the whole scam crashes?

The crash actually started a few months ago: BtC dropped below $20K per 'coin and crypto exchanges are going bust at a frightening rate as it turns out they were all ponzi schemes leveraging one another.

It coincided with the energy price spike -- it became unprofitable to mine cryptocurrencies using proof-of-work and a lot of folks tried to convert their holdings into hard (fiat) currency simultaneously.

Ethereum might survive: they just conducted a long-planned switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake which in theory decouples the currency from runaway energy consumption.

241:

Naval nuclear reactors can be shut down and started up readily enough, and can be throttled rapidly when running.

Yes, but they're usually an order of magnitude smaller than civilian power reactors, and use HEU as fuel rather than LEU or MOX. So there's a lot less hot material actually reacting, and it's much easier to dump waste heat when you're entirely immersed in an ocean.

In practice you don't design a civilian reactor to throttle like a submarine because the fuel is vastly more expensive (and can be used to make weapons if it's stolen) and ideally a civilian reactor should deliver power constantly at peak output, or as close as possible: to run it at low power is an inefficient use of resources.

242:

It's possible, yes, but is that what we're seeing? From what I can gather, economists are attributing current inflation to restraints in the supply of commodities – particularly crude and staple crops such as wheat – as demand-driven inflation was already waning late in 2021.

Do I believe this?

Well, the news on floods, droughts, and fires makes me think that food prices would be the problem. So I googled "bumper crop 2022" and find that prices for US corn, soy, and wheat are currently tanking due to...bumper crops. This won't entirely make up for the Ukraine wheat shortage. But remember that Third Horseman quote in 201? People have been price gouging in disasters since probably before Biblical times.

Then I thought about oil prices. There's always a story in the news about how gas prices are going up due to "crude oil shortages" or "manufacturing problems hobbling plants at key times." Thing is, if you google something like oil or gas price over time, it has this totally bizarre pattern: when there's a push on for Republicans to win in US elections, gas prices spike, going back to around 2008. It's completely magical how disasters just seem to come out of nowhere in time for politicians to make arguments about why democratic policies are failing.

That is, of course, a USian point-of-view, but I'm not buying what this revered senior economist is saying.

243:

»Naval nuclear reactors can be shut down and started up readily enough, and can be throttled rapidly when running.«

And precisely for that reason are naval reactors designed to have much, /much/ higher excess reactivity available, so they (almost always) can overcome Xenon-poisoning.

The main design-elements are the use of HEU and more compact core geometries.

But "Excess reactivity" is just another way of saying that you will not live to tell about "that one time I pulled the control-rods out too far".

See for instance Chalk River, or SL-1. (Recommended reading: INL's pdf-book "Proving the Principle". SL-1 is chapter 15)

In designing civilian reactors, it has always been an explicit goal to have the smallest possible excess reactivity, preferably none at all. Chernobyl became a problem because the control rods had graphite tips, ("negative void coefficient") and that caused "excess reactivity" over unity.

Designs have even been proposed with "negative excess reactivity", working as "energy amplifiers" with an external particle-accellerator providing the input. One of these designs infamously assumed that one could suspend 13 tons of molten lead in a dewar-beaker.

244:

»You're saying the laws of physics make ramping nuclear plants up and down impossible, have you told the French? They've been running at least some of theirs in load-following where they can adjust between 30-100% for several decades. «

No, they are not.

They are running the fleet of nuclear reactors load-following, not the individual reactors and that is part of the reason electricity in France is not cheap, but the existence of other sources, primarily hydro, has prevented it from becoming so expensive, that it would be "too cheap to meter".

245:

The practical upshot is that you don't ramp coal plants up and down or stop and start them if at all possible.

A friend/neighbor worked for a major utility on such things.

You run nuclear 100% until you have to fix something or refuel. You run coal almost the same way. You spin up and down natural gas. If a modern plant that can happen in hours or even less.

Side question. As we move off of coal for electrical power, what happens with the production of drywall/gypsum board?

246:

But every need to get closer to a bulk tank than you're normally allowed under UK laws.

You don't have propane tanks in rural back yards for the house and/or other buildings?

247:

»If you shut down a coal plant the molten clinker freezes to the boiler tubes […]«

Depends a LOT on the specific design.

Most of the Danish coal-plants have had "Benson" design, and they only cleaned the kettle once a year, despite being fully load-following.

But ultimately, it is just an economic question: You can make any technology work, even solo, if you are willing to pour enough money into it.

248:

Boiling water reactors can run up and down between about 60% and 100% power output without problems. The BWRs owned by Commonwealth Edison/Exelon in Illinois varied their output over that range to follow the time-of-day load for years. ComEd joined the PJM Interconnection so they could run the reactors at higher output all the time, selling their overnight surplus into the US East Coast market.

249:

But ultimately, it is just an economic question: You can make any technology work, even solo, if you are willing to pour enough money into it.

So the USA can do this, but maybe not the UK so much, at least right now? From what I've been reading, mass action to get the water treatment and sewage handling stations working again is rather higher on the list than constructing a shiny new fleet of reactors using whoever the New Management would choose to hire for that job.

Perhaps the UK needs biomass-fueled generators, using the crowd-sourced Wickerman design, set up to power Westminster and financial centers connected thereto? Or are the emissions-control sections of those designs still being worked out? Such things might help ameliorate the aspects of climate change that are causing crop failures, if you believe the "past performance" part of the prospectus.

250:

»Boiling water reactors can run up and down between about 60% and 100% power«

Yes BWR's have a bit more range than PWR's in this respect, primarily, as I understand it, from the different fuel geometry they have.

But I would be surprised if they did it with all reactors every night ? Didn't they use some kind of "turnus" so each reactor only reduced every other or every third night ? Otherwise their control-law would get hideous.

251:

From what I've been reading, mass action to get the water treatment and sewage handling stations working again is rather higher on the list than constructing a shiny new fleet of reactors using whoever the New Management would choose to hire for that job.

I suspect as people get colder with higher power bills there will be a clamor to fix THAT over the sewage issue that is happening downstream or off the coast.

252:

240 - Agreed; as another point of comparison, do you store "portable" LPG tanks, say 5 to 40 kg, in cages like we do? All this is covered under the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) and associated regulations.

247 - I think you're misinterpreting me, or possibly I'm being insufficiently clear? You, as a casual passer by, would not be allowed to walk up to an LPG tank and tap on it, but I, as the owner or manager, am allowed closer access to read the contents gauge.

253:

»So the USA can do this, but maybe not the UK so much, at least right now?«

France can build reactors (... "eventually" as they say in Finland), and will probably continue to do so, as a matter of national pride and nuclear submarines.

At this point in time, UK cannot build a nuclear reactor, neither technically nor financially. Hinkley Point C is a french reactor built for chinese money.

USA can, in principle, build a nuclear reactor, except all the big hard parts will have to be manufactured in Japan or France, since no forges in US are certified any longer. But nobody trusts USA to do so, so at best they manage to sell the drawings to a "joint venture". Westinghouse is for al intents not a US company any more.

China builds nuclear reactors, and have the money and ideologically driven regulation to continue to do so, but their initial plans have been scaled waaaay back, because wind and solar is just so much cheaper and compatible with the approach to quality assurance in chinese manufacturing.

Russia can probably not build a nuclear reactor right now, due to sanctions.

254:

Semi-serious question: who's building the reactors for the Columbia-class US missile subs? Two are in design, with up to 14 on order.

255:

Hmm. Let me remind you of fusion power, Josephson junction computers and weak-force (if I have it right; I forget the classical name) capacitors; there are others that I forget. This issue is almost certainly much more tractable, not least because serious research has been minimal for many decades, but it's not clear how to proceed.

256:

The UK is rich enough to build nuclear reactors, but abandoned the skills a long time ago.

In the UK, biomass reactors were originally hyped to be carbon-neutral, as they would use grain straw etc. As many of us predicted, they got permission, and now burn wood pellets, often from non-sustainable forests. They wouldn't help more than a little, even if done right.

257:

»Semi-serious question: who's building the reactors for the Columbia-class US missile subs? Two are in design, with up to 14 on order. «

It is not very clear precisely who does that, the closest I have been able to figure it out is that various companies supplies parts but that somebody under DoE autority is responsible for the actual design and DoD is responsible for the operation.

Either way, it has very little in common with building civilian power reactors.

258:

»The UK is rich enough to build nuclear reactors«

Well, that depends what kind of "afford" we are talking about.

Could UK build a nuclear reactor if it gave it top priority and made everything second priority ? Yes, of course they could, just like North Korea did.

But can UK build a nuclear reactor for power production without making it a matter of national emergency ?

No, they can not.

See Hinkley Point C financing for proof.

259:

"And even in Alberta we don't have Texas drawls…"

There was a bizarre inflection point in the late 80s, on the arrival of 'New Country', where many of the people I had grown up with in Alberta spontaneously developed a southern drawl.

A fellow whom I'd been through 12 years of school with, who had mostly worn ACDC and other 'metal' shirts suddenly started sporting boots, snap shirts and a string tie while spouting drawled homilies. He was not receptive to my incredulous mockery (which is why I have a deviated septum).

260:

Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 1:

I almost want to say 'well, the last one to leave turns off the lights', but as it is, it seems likely that there won't be any electricity for the lights anyway, so the lights will be off way earlier than that.

What about those in such dire financial situations that they can't leave?

261:

"who's building the reactors for the Columbia-class US missile subs?"

Bechtel. The reactors have the designation S1B, meaning first submarine reactor built by Bechtel.

262:

Greg Tingey @ 104: *You analysis is generally good, but: "And all countries where energy is the major industry are politically unstable by nature" - Britain 1815-1914 - I think not.

During the Industrial Revolution energy was not the major industry of Britain. We also had iron works, steam trains, cotton mills, name it. Of course all of these things were fired by coal, but merely digging coal out of the ground was (AFAIK) never anywhere near 50% of GDP.

Meanwhile in Russia resource extraction is around 60% of GDP. I'm not sure how much of that is energy and how much is metals etc, but it still dominates the economy. In a resource extraction economy there is only one path to wealth and power, and that the resource industry. Control of that industry is control of the country, and never mind the people. That's what makes such places so unstable.

Having said that, Charlie posted a nice list of instabilities in Britain during that time frame. Britain was not, by modern standards, a stable country because it was still emerging from a comparatively strong monarchy to modern parliamentary democracy. Other countries didn't get it right and had revolutions. (Actually, the UK had one by proxy over the other side of the pond). But a different roll of the dice could have meant that any one of Charlie's list became the spark for a revolution.

264:

Pigeon @ 101:

[Me]: "This is a new opportunity for the world to rethink how it does things."

We've just had one of those, with the plague. The response has been to [change nothing].

I wasn't talking about the Tory party. No, they aren't going to change until they've lost a couple of elections.

Compare with the Labour Party in 1979. They had just overseen a crisis, and their response was "more of the same, because the crisis shows we haven't been doing it enough". They were steamrollered by Margaret Thatcher, who's message was "The crisis shows that the old polices aren't working and we need to try something different".

Now the situation is reversed. We have a crisis: lots of threads are coming together into a perfect storm. The Tory party is now the one saying "more of the same, because we obviously haven't been doing it enough". Now we need the Labour or Lib-Dem equivalent of Mrs T, who can present a new way forward.

BTW, before someone says "That's Jeremy Corbyn", no it isn't. Corbyn isn't proposing anything new: he wants to resurrect the same 1970s Labour policies that led to the Winter of Discontent, as if the last 50 years had never happened. Mrs T's policies were not standard Tory party policies, any more than they were Labour policies. She came in with a radical new set of policies that were fundamentally different from what had come before from either side.

Meanwhile it took the Labour party 10 years and two electoral failures to realise that the 1970s were over and were not coming back. Hopefully the Tory party is now going to do the same, and for the same reason.

265:

Not exactly. Robert Reich noted, in 2019, "As Wall Street bankers and corporate executives take home record bonuses, the wages of most Americans have barely budged. Since 1985, Wall St. bonuses have increased by 1,000 percent. By comparison, if the minimum wage had grown at the same rate, low-wage workers today would earn a baseline wage of $33.51 an hour."

266:

Here's a modest proposal: long time ago, in Model Railroader, I saw that there were plans for emergencies to simply bring in half a dozen locomotives (diesel electric), and use them to provide literally megawatts of power, until power plants could be brought back on line.

Build large nuclear power plants in ships, and then dock them at cities. Easier to build (std. production facilities), and, if anyone actual *gave

a sh*t about security, easier to secure. Sail them back for refurb/refueling.

* Note that no Irish children were harmed or threatened in this post.

267:

You, as a casual passer by, would not be allowed to walk up to an LPG tank and tap on it, but I, as the owner or manager, am allowed closer access to read the contents gauge.

In the US propane tanks for heating houses are NOT required to be in a cage. They do have to be certified and are made of fairly heavy stainless steel. And I'm guessing come with expiration dates like the ones we use for outdoor grills and such. But I was in a house for sale in a subdivision (in the burbs) where all the houses had a tank next to the back of the house. These were about the size of a 55gal oil drum on a stand. Lots of rural houses in the US have larger propane tanks in the "back yard". Some buried. Some not. And anyone on the property can walk up to most any of these.

If they will let you go to zillow or redfin real estate sites, pick a city or area like mine (RDU or Raleigh) and use the key word propane. You'll get a lot of hits.

268:

Yes BWR's have a bit more range than PWR's in this respect, primarily, as I understand it, from the different fuel geometry they have.

For the reactors ComEd has, the 60-100% range comes from running the recirculation pumps at different speeds. From everything I have read, at times ComEd ran the power output of their individual BWRs up and down using this method on a near-daily basis.

269:

Westinghouse is for al intents not a US company any more.

Westinghouse IS a US company. But they sold off their nuclear bits to Toshiba (I think) a few decades ago. I only paid attention as their nuclear division was HQ's a mile or so from where I lived at one time.

A lot of the nuclear work force in the US is now in the eastern NC area. NCSU keep graduating engineers and they keep getting jobs designing plants that someone is slowing building somewhere else.

270:

What Labour needs is someone to stand for MP, and campaign on "I'm going to fight to renationalize the railroads, nationalize electric power in the UK, and tax the f*ck out of the financial industry. And enforce existing anti-money laundering laws."

I would, of course, if I saw that contribute to pay for their security, and body armor.

271:

55 gal oil drum size? I've never seen a propane tank that small for house heating, maybe for cooking. The one pictured on this page https://www.dorroil.com/propane/propane-tanks/ is probably what we bought for the immobile home, when I moved to TX in '86 - 550gal. We'd have to get it filled two-three times a year, depending on the winter.

272:

There was a bizarre inflection point in the late 80s, on the arrival of 'New Country', where many of the people I had grown up with in Alberta spontaneously developed a southern drawl.

I was visiting Toronto on a somewhat regular basis for a few years in the early 80s. The locals talked about adopting a US movie western drawl when dealing with French speakers. Especially if in Quebec. Otherwise the French speakers seemed to loose their hearing. This was at the height of the Quebec separatist movement.

273:

That's nonsense. Hinckley C is costing only about 0.7% of GDP. You do NOT need a national emergency to spend that sort of money. The government regularly waves a wand and conjures that amount up (despite saying that it can't afford critical projects that cost 0.1% as much). It's hard to believe but the UK is still a very wealthy nation.

If you were to say that the entirety of the UK's governance and economics is already a national emergency, I would agree with you, but that's a separate point.

274:

That's not how they would be destroyed - look at what happened to Corbyn, who stood on a similar platform.

275:

Oh, but I forgot: reverse Brexit.

276:

Vineyard @ 122:

If I remember correctly a report from ages ago, Charles once planned to use the name "George" when he gets crowned.

I believe his full name is "Charles Philip Arthur George (Windsor?)", so why not Arthur II?

277:

Partly because the sequence of regnal numbers begins with Willie the Conk, and kings before him don't count, especially ones who probably didn't exist. But mainly because everyone would take the piss.

278:

It's a very funny thought - Prince Charles claiming to be Arthur - but the jokes were all written in the early 1970s, starting with "Run away!"

279:

"It is extremely fortunate then that the current political heads of the UK and the US absoluetly in no ways whatsoever suffered any forms of harm at their boarding schools that they might then have spent decades trying and failing to work through in public. So that’s a relief. Just imagine if they had suffered harm there. What a mess we might all be in then." - Paul M. Cray

I found this piece of superior sarcasm - verily, the perfect champagne of sarcasm, here:

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/

280:

There was a bizarre inflection point in the late 80s, on the arrival of 'New Country', where many of the people I had grown up with in Alberta spontaneously developed a southern drawl.

I moved east in 1986, and haven't noticed that on trips back (which only amounts to a week a year).

Not disagreeing, just noting that it doesn't match my experience. Fortunately, from the sound of it :-/

281:

Since 1985, Wall St. bonuses have increased by 1,000 percent. By comparison, if the minimum wage had grown at the same rate, low-wage workers today would earn a baseline wage of $33.51 an hour."

And if minimum wage earners were free to basically set each others wages, they would be at least that high.

I think it's Brin who refers to the CEO class as a circle of 5000 golf buddies who sit on each other's boards and take turns approving each other's contracts and bonuses.

282:

Well, yes. In the novel I'm currently looking for an agent for*, I simplify by referring to the trillionaires (not the ones who are in, then lose a lot, and are out) as the 400, echoing old NYC.

* Actually, that depends - with the shuttering of Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press, I, and about 200+ other authors, are out of print. HOWEVER, Toni Weisskopf/Baen, are considering "rehoming" us. And I was put in touch with her directly, and if she likes 11,000 Years, I may have a good chance of selling the next novel.

283:

What Labour needs is someone to stand for MP, and campaign on [good policies]

The problem is that none of those are Labour policies, so while an individual could certainly run with them, it wouldn't be as a Labour candidate (unless they were able to effect Labour policy change within the party prior to standing). Running as an independent would be possible, or running with one of the other parties whose policies do reflect these values, most likely Green I guess.

284:

Re: 'Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister for a couple more weeks ... he's been holidaying in Greece.'

Who with? ('With whom?' for the Brits.) And has anyone checked whether the UK version super secret 10 Downing Street documents are still there and make sure that he hasn't/won't take anything with him that he shouldn't?

I ask cuz for the longest time BoJo's been the embodiment of a made-for-the-UK version of DT right on up to the orange hair. (Ability to quote Latin is what makes BoJo electable-for-PM.)

285:

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote in part at 7.36 on August 24, 2022:

But nuclear power cannot be modulated on a daily basis. If you reduce the power output of a nuclear reactor to 70% for some hours, you will either have to shut it down or run it flat out 100% for approximately 72 hours, in order to keep the control domain stable. find me /any/ nuclear power reactor in the world, which modulates its production on a daily basis.

Seth Grae of the Nuclear Security Working Group appeared on BBC's INSIDE SOURCE and noted Zaporizha's No. 5 & 6 reactors were running at 50% capacity today and the past few days. But, that must be impossible.

286:

For those of you concerned about the work required to bore transport tunnels, do I have good news for you!

https://newatlas.com/energy/earthgrid-tunnel-boring-robot/

A plasma tunnel borer! Science fiction come to life! Tunnels across the USA! Under the Pacific to China!

287:

Re "Propane and Propane Accessories"

4.5 and 9 kg nominal size LPG cylinders are treated like any other object that's "worth nicking". The places with "Swap & Go" keep the tanks in a cage to prevent casual theft. Often right next to the 250 kg tank that they use to fill customer tanks that isn't in a cage.

Home LPG is divided into two. There's swap on demand. You have two 45 kg tanks. Between them is a switch. When one is empty, you switch to the full one and call the gas people. They come and swap the empty for a full. Obviously they need access, but there can be "arrangements" for that so it can be behind a locked gate.

Then there's fill on schedule. You have a tank that's 45 kg or more. The guy comes around on a schedule, so there has to be constant access. The tank must be less than a certain number of metres (that I used to know and have now forgotten) from a public road, or a driveway rated to carry a certain number of tonnes (that I used to know and have now forgotten, but it's a lot of them). Obviously that's so you can drive up with a heavy truck that has a hose, and fill a stationary tank. Which also means that anyone can just walk up to them (like that tank in the caravan park I linked to)

In both cases the tanks must be prevented from falling over (earthquake) or floating away (flood). That's a chain with a clip in most cases. Fire isn't an issue. Tanks have over pressure vents. If there's a fire big enough and close enough to the tank that it starts to vent, the house is already burning down. A squirt from a fire hose cools the tank and it stops venting, or the firies just ignore it.

288:

Re: 'It's hard to believe but the UK is still a very wealthy nation.'

The UK may be wealthy on paper but an increasingly large part of the wealth it reports in its GDP actually gets sent/belongs to people outside the UK. Money that doesn't get circulated within an economy doesn't do that economy much good. (In fact, this speedy movement is counterproductive -- it's basically a sleight-of-hand balance sheet trick.)

Noticed that there's some new legislation about foreign owners having to register their purchases of UK homes. Will be interesting to see how various parties respond. In some Canadian cities it was discovered that foreign owned multi-unit residences were sitting empty during a housing shortage. The foreign owners were waiting for prices to go up before selling - they didn't buy rental properties to rent out but to flip. (Lots of Canadian commenters here - they can fill in the details.) I think something similar is happening with the financial sectors in some economies.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/1/uk-enacts-ownership-register-for-property-held-by-foreigners

289:

A plasma tunnel borer! Science fiction come to life! Tunnels across the USA! Under the Pacific to China!

Yes, what could possibly go wrong?

I mean, I can just see them using a plasma torch on the London Clay while burrowing under the Thames and pumping water out furiously. It'll be fun! Plasma and dirty water mix in so many exciting ways.

And when they want to enlarge the LA subway next to the La Brea Tar Pits, I'm sure that using plasma torch cutters around the petroleum seeps will be an absolute blast.

Sincerely though, thank you. I needed that!

290:

A plasma tunnel borer! Science fiction come to life! Tunnels across the USA! Under the Pacific to China!

Or London to New York.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_(1935_film)

Caught this on TV on a bad weather Saturday a few years back.

291:

At this point in time, UK cannot build a nuclear reactor, neither technically nor financially. Hinkley Point C is a french reactor built for chinese money.

Not true. The UK can build reactors. Trouble is, they're military ones for the submarine fleet -- build rate is roughly one per 1-2 years.

Rolls-Royce's proposed design for a small modular reactor is, AIUI, a scaled-up version for civilian use. But they haven't built any of those yet.

What the UK lacks is the capacity to build EPRs, PWRs, or large civil designs, including the gas-cooled designs (Magnox/AGR) that they relied on back in the day. Everyone involved has retired, the last AGRs came on stream more than 30 years ago.

292:

From here, it doesn't seem like the Tories wish to do anything but cling grimly to the wheel all the way to the rocks.

293:

In some Canadian cities it was discovered that foreign owned multi-unit residences were sitting empty during a housing shortage.

True. Also Canadian-owned ones as well (or partly Canadian-owned, corporate ownership of nested numbered corporations being intentionally opaque).

The more I learn about REITs, the more I think they shouldn't be allowed.

294:

“I mean, I can just see them using a plasma torch on the London Clay while burrowing under the Thames and pumping water out furiously. It'll be fun! ”

I’m not seeing a problem here. I mean, heat, clay -> pottery. You’d only be tiling the tunnel anyway, so win! Plus big machine waving light sabres around - what more could you want?

And of course it’s a perfect use case for a small modular reactor to power it. Double win!

295:

I’m not seeing a problem here. I mean, heat, clay -> pottery. You’d only be tiling the tunnel anyway, so win! Plus big machine waving light sabres around - what more could you want?

Nothing. You're right. London clay incidentally is what the brownish bricks of London are made out of so...Tunnel lined with brick? Why not? I'm sure we can figure out how to make pottery with plasma swords and wet clay. It'll be fun

296:

make pottery with plasma swords and wet clay. It'll be fun

I can't wait for the movie to come out so I can see what happens. Please, no spoilers.

The original article said:
72 plasma torches to drill a 1-meter (3.3-ft) bore. In its low-power state, with each torch consuming 500 kW, ... 40 megawatts. ... the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW.

I'm thinking they might want a steam* turbine on the tunnel entrance to recover some of the waste heat. The hole is only 1m across and they make steam pipes that big. It'll be fine.

The scary thing is the "full size" one pulling 1.2GW. Not only will the "small nuclear reactor" powering it actually be quite large, the ducts carrying the cooling fluid in and out will be quite busy too. I wonder if they could use the liquid sodium from the reactor as the cooling fluid?

  • rock vapour is steam, right?
297:

Before anything else ...
Panthalassa

timrowledge
IIRC H Beam Piper had plasma tunnel-borers ("terrenes"?) in 3 sizes: Snap, Crackle & Pop (!)

Tim H
You noticed- but I think the crash may come next spring, without waiting for a GE ....

298:

»Seth Grae of the Nuclear Security Working Group appeared on BBC's INSIDE SOURCE and noted Zaporizha's No. 5 & 6 reactors were running at 50% capacity today and the past few days. But, that must be impossible. «

No, that's perfectly possible.

What is not possible is changing that power level to any other power level you like, at will, at any time.

The possible "trajectories" depend on the precise core geometry (ie: how it is built, how it is loaded, and the burn-up of every cubic decimeter of fuel.), and the history of neutron density in those cubic decimeters for the last three days.

The general outline of the problem is that you can always regulate down, but only in surprisingly narrow "lanes" can you regulate up and have it happen, and happen in a way you will feel comfortable with.

In addition there are secondary limitations arising from limits on temperature changes on individual parts, and limits on temperature differences between different parts of the reactor etc.

A good search term is "Axial Shape Index"

299:

Plasma cutters sounds like a good idea. I've used small plasma cutters and they're great. They even work underwater. The ones I've used use burning to make the plasma, but electric ones exist. You can cut a hole in rock very easily. The drilling speeds they claim sound quite possible.

300:

If you're running out of things to grumble about, SpaceX and T-Mobile have agreed to put cell towers on Starlink V2. So your ordinary mobile handset will work as a satellite phone. I'm sure there's some reason why this is a terrible thing.

301:

If you allow the reactor to be brought down in power at very short notice, how quickly could you bring it up to 100%? Are we talking minutes / hours / days?

Just wondering how much on site battery capacity would be required in order to make a nuclear plant as throttleable as a CGT plant.

302:

Have you tried making blind holes with a plasma cutter? That's something normal metal cutters try very hard to avoid because the blowback is extremely messy. I have no experience of doing it deliberately, put it that way :)

I'm thinking the rock cutting one is possibly closer to a plasma drive or thermic lance than a commonly available plasma cutter, where the actual cutting is done by a jet of plasma rather than by turning the substance to be cut into plasma.

I do wonder whether the tunnel machine works by using a torrent of coolant to turn the vaporised rock into fine grains that can be pumped out of the resulting tunnel, rather than using conveyor belts like a conventional tunnelling machine. But either way it does seem like using prodigious amount of energy to save time, and the product will be hot rock rather than just rock.

303:

If this works as promised, you could dig a deep hole anywhere* and get geothermal energy at a fraction of cost of nuclear. * best location would be near existing coal plants, so you can reuse the steam turbine.

304:

Probably most/all of people here is aware that Chernobyl incident was due to an borked experiment where they were testing how fast they could increase the produced power (if I remember well, they had to postpone the start of experiment, when they had to run the reactor at reduced output, because the grid needed more power than initially planned, but then when they changed the crew in control room, the next shift followed the original power ramp, increasing too fast the power. The final error was to try to damp the reaction with the control rods, but the tip of the rod in that type of reactor is inert, so it displaced cooling media, pushing the reactor to supercritical stage).

305:

Reading the original article (I know! I know!) they talk about fracturing and spalling the rock rather than simply vapourising it, which is slightly less insane.

Presumably the plasma softens up a surface layer that is then scraped away in the usual manner with reduced wear on the cutters. Seems over complicated to me though.

306:

Although the service via Starlink will be for low data rate services only. Users will have SMS, MMS, images and maybe video clips but no real time voice or video. Voice should be available "eventually".

307:

I've made blind holes with a thermic lance, but underwater, so blowback was cold, mostly, I ended up with little holes burnt in my wetsuit, but not in me.

308:

David L @ 246:

Side question. As we move off of coal for electrical power, what happens with the production of drywall/gypsum board?

I dunno. Maybe build a new coal burning plant (with all the environmental controls needed to capture the pollutants) dedicated just to producing the raw materials needed for manufacturing drywall/gypsum board ... and if it produces a bit of electricity as a by-product, sell that on the open market?

309:

Rocketpjs @ 260:

"And even in Alberta we don't have Texas drawls…"

There was a bizarre inflection point in the late 80s, on the arrival of 'New Country', where many of the people I had grown up with in Alberta spontaneously developed a southern drawl.

A fellow whom I'd been through 12 years of school with, who had mostly worn ACDC and other 'metal' shirts suddenly started sporting boots, snap shirts and a string tie while spouting drawled homilies. He was not receptive to my incredulous mockery (which is why I have a deviated septum).

I don't think you can actually get a deviated septum from a punch in the face. That sounds like a traumatic nasal fracture (trust me, I know the difference from having had both).

Side note - and I apologize if it's too soon to go off on a tangent - but day before yesterday I decided to put on an actual shirt, you know the kind with buttons & pockets & collar & have to be ironed and all that. I can't remember the last time I wore one, but it must have been before the beginning of Covid. Felt weird.

310:

timrowledge @ 287:

What would really be Science Fiction Kool would be if they could somehow fling the melted rock outwards & compress it to create the tunnel's lining all in one go.

311:

That is unfortunately true, and has been government policy since Thatcher. I have never seen any good figures on how much and the changes over time, though.

312:

In the case of clay and chalk, that's a complete waste of time - they can be cut using a knife, so even ordinary borer cutters have long lives. The main problem is embedded flint, especially in chalk.

313:

Start modestly: Scotland to Ireland (via the Isle of Man) or north to south island of New Zealand :-)

314:

Oh, but I forgot: reverse Brexit.

Can't be done.

There are two or more parties to any international treaty and the UK pissed off the other parties in the EU beyond all reason by the conduct of the post-referendum Brexit negotiations.

Scotland and NI will probably be allowed to rejoin on a fast track basis. Wales might well be allowed in, some way down the line. England? English nationalism was the driving force behind Brexit, and other nasty nationalisms (Hungary, PiS in Poland) are giving the EU indigestion, so there's no way England will apply for membership -- or be allowed in -- while the Tory party or its heirs are still a feature of politics on these islands.

315:

Charlie Stross @ 292:

At this point in time, UK cannot build a nuclear reactor, neither technically nor financially. Hinkley Point C is a french reactor built for chinese money.

Not true. The UK can build reactors. Trouble is, they're military ones for the submarine fleet -- build rate is roughly one per 1-2 years.

Rolls-Royce's proposed design for a small modular reactor is, AIUI, a scaled-up version for civilian use. But they haven't built any of those yet.

I had a thought a while back about how you could take a number of the kind of reactors that power submarines and build them into power barges anchored off the coast. In addition to providing electricity, the cooling system could be used to supply fresh water by letting some percentage of the salt water boil and condensing the steam.**

Don't ask me how this would work because I'm not an engineer (so from my point of view it's all underpants gnomes), but I'm pretty sure this is an engineering problem and real engineers could figure out how to make it work AND be cost effective.

**Maybe a MASSIVE engineering project to pump the condensate inland many, many miles and just dump it into the headwaters of the Colorado River. Use several of those plasma boring robots to create tunnels to the Muddy River NE of Las Vegas (feeds the Overton Arm of Lake Mead) and into the Green River near the Flaming Gorge Reservoir ... and let nature handle the distribution from there

It could be a multi-year project creating a lot of jobs and injecting money into the economy ... like the way the CCC & public works like Hoover Dam did during the depression.

... and before you criticize, remember this is a SciFi Blog ... the dreams our stuff is made from. Maybe one of our problems today is we don't think big enough because the banksters can't figure out how to extract a profit from Blue Sky ideas.

316:

If you're running out of things to grumble about, SpaceX and T-Mobile have agreed to put cell towers on Starlink V2. So your ordinary mobile handset will work as a satellite phone. I'm sure there's some reason why this is a terrible thing.

So Musk has decided to do for radio astronomy what he's done for optical astronomy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone

I'm assuming that the NSA is OK with this plan or it wouldn't be happening (although given how often Musk ignores regulations in almost Trumpian fashion he might have ignored some quiet warnings).

317:

I had a thought a while back about how you could take a number of the kind of reactors that power submarines and build them into power barges anchored off the coast.

Russia is/was doing exactly that, for remote mining installations on the Arctic coast. Too far away for a grid hookup to be practical, no roads or railway access, so a floating barge with reactors was ideal. Not just for power, also for municipal district heating during the long Siberian winter.

318:

"If this works as promised, you could dig a deep hole anywhere* and get geothermal energy at a fraction of cost of nuclear. * best location would be near existing coal plants, so you can reuse the steam turbine."

That's the idea. Deep geothermal is the best idea for helping to deal with global warming, if we can create the boreholes. It is also envisaged using microwaves:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25533992-500-millimetre-wave-beams-could-give-us-access-to-deep-geothermal-energy/

319:

Robert Prior @ 294:

The more I learn about REITs, the more I think they shouldn't be allowed.

And the management should be taken out & shot before being broken on the wheel and drawn & quartered.

320:

they talk about fracturing and spalling the rock rather than simply vapourising it

But they do the former via some of the latter. The process is very much built around heating rock dramatically. This is heating up the front of the rock so fast that it expands and breaks off the still-cool back of the rock.

So sure, you're not getting all of the rock out as vapour, but the amount of power going in suggests that you're definitely getting some of it out that way. And the number of jets on the front of the machine makes me think any chunk even 10cm on a side is going to get tangled up in the machine (they show a 1m diameter cutting head with 70-odd jets on it). So the output will be gravel or sand rather than the chunky bits you get out of a current-edition TBM.

321:

The more I learn about REITs, the more I think they shouldn't be allowed.

What have the Real Estate Institutes of Tasmania done to you?

Show me on the doll how they hurt you...

322:

JBS @ 316:

I apologize if "before you criticize" came out the wrong way. It is NOT aimed at our host.

It is a generalized comment about some of the naysayers who comment here. I realize some of my ideas may be impractical from real world standpoint (particularly those ideas that won't immediately, directly profit the rich & powerful), but dreams should be big.

Reach for the stars & maybe someday you will make it to the planets ...

323:

»If you allow the reactor to be brought down in power at very short notice, how quickly could you bring it up to 100%? Are we talking minutes / hours / days?«

The major problem is Xenon-135 poisoning, and it has a half-life of nine hours, so that gives you the order of magnitude, but it is trickier than just that.

One of the tricky issues is that when you run a reactor at fractional power, it essentially means that you have only been using a limited central volume of the reactor-fuel.

That means that you have normal Xenon-135 buildup in that central part but not in the periphery. When you then try to increase power, you get a situation where the central part of the core has lower activity, because the Xenon eats neutrons, surrounded by a shell with /much/ higher activity, where there is no Xenon eating neutrons. (And no, it is not a simple spherical situation, it depends on fuel geometry and history.)

As an example, the regulations in Belgium allow a reactor to ramp down at <1%/min to 70% percent, and stay there for up to six hours, after which it must either be shut down or brought back up up to 100% (@ 1%/min) for at least 72 hours. They can do this at most five 5 times in a rolling 12 month period for load-following purposes.

This is why the just approved-ish new "small" reactor design i USA consists of five or six small reactors in a common pool: You can crudely load-follow by turning one up to 100% in the morning, and another down to zero at night, in a weekly-ish rotating pattern.

324:

»So sure, you're not getting all of the rock out as vapour,«

Even though they have thought about temperature, as evidenced by the flippant labelling of random parts of machinery as "tungsten", I am pretty sure they will also get their electronics, cameras and LED-lights out as liquid or even vapour.

I particularly like the "camera" they have placed all the way out front: What kind of lense material will they use in an environment ?

325:

I could ask our technology development group, but only at the risk of getting laughed right out of the room.

The proposed technology is a re-invention of ancient methods, dressed up by tech entrepreneurs with surprisingly bad graphics skills. This is how mining and other tunnels were driven through rock before the invention of explosives - build a wood or coal fire, retreat, come back in a couple days when the canary (or mouse / other small animal) remains conscious and repeat.

It would be spectacular when this equipment encounters groundwater. For a short period, anyway, until the explosion and collapse of the tunnel.

326:

REIT: Real Estate Investment Trust

Since the UK is infested with them, and since all y'all might have a wee bit of a housing crunch that squatting might solve in the foreseeable future...

I'd simply suggest that right now is an excellent time for entrepreneurs to get busy writing guides to where UK REIT properties are, what state they're in, how full or vacant they are, and other details that restless types might want to know about. If you hurry, you might get it in press just as the demand ramps up. And you do want it in paper copy, because I have a sneaking suspicion that such information will get taken down if posted online.

After all, an empty building owned as a tax dodge, owned by an investment trust controlled by who knows in whatever country, is simply an unused resource. Can a physical human demonstrate ownership with papers and deal with desperate squatters? It might become a question worth raising. Possibly more than once. Heck, if squatters promise to pay taxes in exchange for free title, the local government might even see it as a win-win.

Just speculating of course, because this is obviously about an alternative fantasy world. In our world, everybody respects asserted property rights as a matter of course.

327:

the management should be taken out & shot before being broken on the wheel and drawn & quartered

I assume you're thinking of non-fatal shooting? Otherwise it rather defeats the purpose of the rest…

329:

Kneecap them, Provisional IRA style.

They used to shoot them through the kneecaps -- permanently disabling and extraordinarily painful -- but decided to save bullets and use a Black and Decker drill instead.

330:

Charlie
Can't be done - unfortunately true.
BUT, once the tories are out, we could & should start reparing fences & re-making friends & re-joining those "bits" we can do - like the Scientific, Technical & Cultural schemes we stupidly rejected.
I think we could re-join the Customs Union, which would help enormously?

Re. your last bit - IF we get electoral reform, thus freezing the splintered remnant of the tories out, then in 10-20 years, maybe.

331:

If you think that Blairite Labour will reverse a significant amount of the Conservatives' damage, you weren't paying attention during Blair's rule. And Labour are even more set against useful electoral reform than the Conservatives. I shan't live to see an improvement, and you probably won't.

332:

I consulted my tame expert, who said that several government departments do have estimates of how much goes abroad, but they aren't going to be published as none of their definitions/assumptions of abroad (and, to a lesser extent, GDP) are the same, and none are objectively justifiable.

333:

32: you need a new nightmare? read up on how Haiti had to buy itself out of the French Empire; wrecked itself economically and never quite recovered before decades (generations!) of internal political blunders turned it into a failed state;

CHARLIE STROSS:

frankly your listing of what's coming to UK as crisis-of-the-month is optimistic; I've been looking closely here in US and my listing of American shitstorms includes all of yours plus:

== worsening climate; as bad as we’ve seen it, gonna get so much worse; oranges growing in London and Montreal by 2030; pineapples in Madrid and Miami by 2040; Mexico City and Phoenix abandoned by 2050; Dallas and Houston melting by 2060;

== climate refugees; especially when Mexicans flood northwards as farms fail and starvation sets in; refugees of at least 5% of 129 million, if we are lucky, could be 8% or 10%; then there’s ever more destabilized South America, at least 5% of 423 million; where to warehouse and feed 24 million refugees when the US is drying out and crops are failing?

== rising food prices will lead to malnutrition; which in turn after a brief delay will lead to (preventable) nutrient deficient triggered illnesses; actual shortages and/or fear of shortages will lead to panicked buying and hoarding; wheat flour will not be found in stores; ditto powdered milk;

== unionizing will trigger response by CEOs; intimidation and crackdown and leg breaking and data breaches and SWATing, etc; google “pinkertons” if you need a reminder of what CEOs have done previously;

== shortages of cardiac medication; impossible to get treatment for mental illness and/or addiction; nurses burn out leads to forced overtime (70H/W) of those not quitting/retiring; stress of treating long covid; crashing new waves of unique variants of covid; GSWs on the rise; malnutrition on the rise; domestic abuse on the rise;

== resistance to Green New Deal; Saudi Arabia will desperately seek to prevent California from outlawing fossil fuel cars in 2035; ditto Big Oil; massive bribery of state legislatures; buggering up court cases; moonless nights sabotage of EV charging stations; shortages of lithium-nickel-etc will trigger further thuggery-warlordism-chaos in Africa;

== drama ‘n tramua leading to ‘great literature’; there's already a brisk niche for CLI-FI that's not just SCI-FI but mainstream; "Love in the Time of Cholera" & pirates-centric soft porn becomes romance novels set in midst of economic & ecological collapse;

== next recession unemployment will hit 15% as lay offs trigger further downturns; also when the next wave of covid hits; after massive wreckage from hurricanes; inevitable bank collapses; mega-corp belt tightening; major point of failure illustrated by Florida’s FUBAR’ed unemployment insurance, folks are going to end up starving;

== grid failures; folks already building home windmills/turbines leveraging alternators bought from junkyards; 0.8 to 1.3 KW/H might seem silly if you have USD$0.20 KWH electricity with 99.7% reliability but when it worsens to 75% (40%?) reliability or costs USD$0.60 KWH (USD$0.85?) not so silly; given lots of lay offs there will be plenty of idle hands available;

== water shortages; going to be a lot of thoughtful folk installing thousand liter below ground water tank filled from roof gutters; everyone ought get accustomed to shorter showers sooner than later; you ought consider a shallow plastic bin to stand in whilst showering which then gets bucketed into toilet; 10 liters double used per person per shower; == violence in general; with wacky American centric fetish for guns leading to daily (not weekly) body pile ups; GSWs are nasty requiring lots ‘n lots of follow up care; medical insurance companies will soon set higher deductibles for anyone who fails to duck ‘n cover on theory it’s a ‘lifestyle choice’ not staying alert to possible gun attack whilst at the shopping mall;

== teachers quitting and/or striking due to accumulative misery + low pay + loyalty oaths + censorship + violence (students) + violence (parents) + long covid + new waves of covid

== schools burning down because of improperly installed emergency heating (winter) or direly need cooling (summer) due to lousy maintenance and worsening climate;

== the Republican Party has decided better to tear down the entire economy and wreck democracy and abandon millions to starvation-homelessness-illness rather than lose too much more power; theirs is an opposition to any significant change because at this point all changes in technology-culture-economics weaken them; a political party so narrowly fixated on its own perceived status losses it is hamstrung in proposing policies which would go out and actually operate government effectively;

== in any rational system of governance, such as over on Earth-2, any of these crisis would qualify as needing a lot of deep thought and possibly, a “Manhattan Project” level of commitment and funding; because each one of these crisis qualifies as a society-wrecking shitstorm; so it would would lead (over on Earth-2) to a loud gnashing of teeth, howling of aggrieved special interest and painful soul searching and rejiggering of global commerce networks and inter-nation consensus; but it's clear that no matter how many children go uneducated-underfed-poorly-medicated still not impetus strong enough to dig down to implement wide ranging changes; too many have chosen to hold onto the status quo ante with (naive) expectation if the monster (monsters!) in the corner of the room can be ignored long enough it (they) will die of loneliness;

...and now I gotta go buy a new bottle because I’ve finished slow sipping this cheap arse vodka long before I got done listing all the shitstorms likely to hit in 2023 and definitely will have smacked down by 2030;

334:

RE: punishing people who build and control REITs. If you want such people to be useful...

--Dose them with MPTP to give them stage 5 Parkinsons.

--Surgically install deep brain stimulators, which use electrical signals to counteract the total loss of dopamine production. At least it works in some people.

Then put them to work undoing the mischief they've caused.

The catch here is that deep brain stimulators have to be adjusted fairly frequently. An improperly adjusted stimulator will leave them a quivering mess, which might incentivize them to work for you in hope of continuing something faintly resembling a normal life.

Currently there's a choice: with the older model stimulators, you go to the neurologist's office and get it adjusted, but getting an appointment takes weeks to months. Which is unpleasant. To get around that, the newest models are internet enabled, so that the doctor can adjust the implant remotely, during a telemedicine call.

And to answer your question, no, I have precisely no idea what kind of security they have on these systems, or whether it's possible to do a firmware upgrade on an implanted unit. Since I'm intensely cynical, I assume that, like most such devices, they have no security features now, and they'll only start installing security features when patients get hacked en masse and held for ransom.

The other problem with this is that, eventually, the stimulator and accompanying meds are going to fail, leaving them in final-stage PD, with all that entails. So almost certainly this would be banned as cruel and unusual punishment in jurisdictions that have such laws.

So yeah, maybe kneecapping? That's more temporary.

335:

Several of the UK teams were deliberately disbanded and older members given "wheelbarrows of money" to retire early.

I think QMC lost its department of Nuclear Engineering in the late 80's.

The pool of expertise in the UK is now pretty much in one town and employed by one company.

336:

There was actually a Twilight 2000 module centered around the “power a town with a nuclear sub” idea

https://twilight2000.fandom.com/wiki/The_Last_Submarine

337:

"I particularly like the "camera" they have placed all the way out front: What kind of lense material will they use in an environment ?"

Gas in a rotating tube?

338:

We have almost all of those, plus some of our own. The original post didn't cover EVERYTHING.

339:

There was actually a Twilight 2000 module centered around the “power a town with a nuclear sub” idea

There is historical precedent for this. Back in 1982, the US Navy seriously floated the idea of powering the Island of Kauai after hurricane Iwa knocked out all power on the island, including to the water pumps. The plan would have sent 1500 kW into the island grid, and they actually sailed the sub into the harbor in preparation (the sub was based in Oahu, so not a long voyage).

Ultimately the idea was shelved because it would have taken too many workers to connect the sub to the main island power plant, and the local power company wanted those people doing repairs instead. The Navy ended up bringing in a bunch of portable generators to power parts of the island grid until the locals could get everything repaired. AFAIK, that's been the standard Navy playbook in disaster relief ops ever since.

340:

»Gas in a rotating tube?«

Bell Labs did a LOT of work on gas-lenses before fiber-optics happened, and one of the main intangible problems was turbulence, and they were speculating about installing a cooled 2" pipe clear across USA to cope with that.

I dont think you will get a gas lens working at temperatures where you have to use tungsten :-)

Also, what protects the sensor from random fragments blasting through the gas lens ?

And the obvious pinhole is not the way to go, because that will get clogged in no time.

To me it sounds like they pointed a plasma-torch at a rock, looked at each other and yelled "We're RICH!!" without ever having heard about, much less understood the terror in Stefan-Bolzmann's Law at high temperatures.

341:

To me it sounds like they pointed a plasma-torch at a rock, looked at each other and yelled "We're RICH!!" without ever having heard about, much less understood the terror in Stefan-Bolzmann's Law at high temperatures.

Yes, I completely agree with you that Stefan-Boltzmann is horrific. That T4 term sprouts teeth and tentacles if you get it just a little bit out of its preferred environment.

To be fair, this is in the same class of August science story as electro-gravitic aircraft engines from the 1950s, and the "Kraken's fossil garden" of a few decades ago. It's a fun story, it's August, they got in the news and probably made a prop for cheesy sci-fi and another mining scam. What's the harm? Heck, maybe they'll get hired by the Boring Company.

342:

EC
Agree that it's currently Labour's policy, BUT - the rules change, the moment Scotland becomes independent - that locks a permanent fascist ( oops, um, "tory" ) majority into England & Labour need to look into that future, don't they?
Will they? Before the next election with an independent Scotland, that is.

Howard NYC
To add to which, there's the little matter of a Nebraska school board ignoring a "constotootonal right" { A free press } Here
- here the tory party is doing the same
... has decided better to tear down the entire economy and wreck democracy and abandon millions to starvation-homelessness-illness rather than lose too much more power; theirs is an opposition to any significant change because at this point all changes in technology-culture-economics weaken them - spot on, same here.

Grant
I assume the US was behind that?

343:

»That T4 term sprouts teeth and tentacles if you get it just a little bit out of its preferred environment.«

I was quite surprised to find it on my bedroom floor.

Floor-heating primarily works through radiation and thus (T1⁴ - T2⁴).

The first thing you do with your bedroom is fill most of the floor with a great big insulated radiation absorber to lie on, which is very far from ideal.

344:

> ships with reactors to provide shore power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH-1A

MH-1A was the first floating nuclear power station. Named Sturgis after General Samuel D. Sturgis, Jr., this pressurized water reactor built in a converted Liberty ship was part of a series of reactors in the US Army Nuclear Power Program, which aimed to develop small nuclear reactors to generate electrical and space-heating energy primarily at remote, relatively inaccessible sites. Its designation stood for mobile, high power. After its first criticality in 1967, MH-1A was towed to the Panama Canal Zone that it supplied with 10 MW of electricity. Its dismantling began in 2014 and was completed in March 2019.

345:

oranges growing in London and Montreal by 2030

Hahaha nope.

To grow something, the climate needs to be stable. If every 5 years Montreal gets a massive cold snap in the winter, your orange trees are so much firewood.

My section of the world is nestled between 3 Great Lakes, so we may1 get some temperature & precipitation buffers that other places won't get. But we can't feed everyone.

Honestly, if we get to 2040 without too many state extinctions (failed states, except eventual recovery cannot occur), I'll be surprised. What I expect to see is large chunks of the world going the way of Somalia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Or the way Syria was going pre-Russian intervention.

1 But probably won't.

346:

Re the many posters talking about plasma cutting and how it can't work.

Fill the tunnel with water.

No worries about camera lenses (though I don't know why you'd want one). No worries about ground water. No worries about melting the TBM. No worries about removing spoil if you pump enough water in at the face and let it flow out. No worries about explosions. No worries about undiscovered tar pits catching fire.

347:

I thought this might amuse some of you. And it's actually a positive story about a Florida man!

The Florida man [Chaz Stevens] plans to “flip bureaucracy 180 degrees and use its weight against itself” by papering Texas with Arabic-language posters bearing the motto.

“We’re going to donate hundreds of Arabic-language ‘In God We Trust’ posters to schools in Texas, flooding the public school system with our Arabic IGWT artwork,” he wrote. “Don’t fight the man; let the man fight himself.”

Initially he planned to donate just Arabic signs, but then realized that other languages would also be useful.

“Future artwork will not only include Arabic, but also Hindu, Spanish, Chinese, and perhaps African dialects,” Stevens told CNN.

The law, Senate Bill 797, was passed last year and requires schools to display such signage if it is donated or “purchased with private donations,” as The Texas Tribune reported.

https://www.al.com/news/2022/08/florida-man-sends-arabic-language-in-god-we-trust-signs-to-texas-in-wake-of-new-law.html

348:

u need to listen to the soothing predictions of peter zeihan

349:

BUT, once the tories are out, we could & should start repairing fences & re-making friends & re-joining those "bits" we can do

i think people would need to know that the tories were out and not coming back, and much as i might like to fantasize about them being used for large-scale lamppost decoration or whatever i think that would be part of a path to a very different world

350:

i always felt the idea that the provos did that out of frugality a little weird, were they really that short of ammo?

i imagine a drill would make a much cleaner hole too, even if u wouldn't enjoy it much

belfast hospitals was said to have the most experienced orthopedic surgeons in the world around that time

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-36093680

351:

thass a shame, i was fond of that kraken

352:

i think people would need to know that the tories were out and not coming back, and much as i might like to fantasize about them being used for large-scale lamppost decoration or whatever i think that would be part of a path to a very different world

I might suggest that, in honor of King George IX ascending the throne and the tories being disempowered, that they follow the hallowed tradition of persecuted religious extremists of yore and board leaky ships for the New World. Georgia in their case, or possibly south Florida would welcome them, I'm sure.

And then you could welcome in a bunch of refugees from Ukraine to take their place in England. That way, both groups (emigrating and immigrating) would feel they'd ended up in a better place than they'd left.

353:

thass a shame, i was fond of that kraken

To be fair, I got the date wrong on the kraken, it was October 2011 (Halloween!) when Prof. Mark McMenamin came out with his idea that 30 m krakens existed in the Triassic.

I admire him. He's a deep time paleontologist, and he's managed to be both crazier than I am (!) AND to get tenure at a respectable college (!!). I first read his Hypersea, which is one of those books I put next to The Aquatic Ape and The World Until Yesterday as probably more useful for SFF worldbuilding than for high quality research.*

*Just to be clear, there are plenty of books that can have decent research AND be good for SFF worldbuilding. These are off on the psychedelic fringe, shall we say.

354:

Can a physical human demonstrate ownership with papers and deal with desperate squatters?

In Australia at least the cops will only intervene if there's violence or threats of it. Which can be amusing when you see the owner invited to sit in the back of a cop car until they calm down. Friends of mine have had everything from "the boys" turning up to encourage them out to a nice lawyer coming round to let them know the development timetable and suggest that it would be easier for everyone if the place was vacant by {date six months away}.

Community squats are subtly different in that they tend to be very public and no-one really wants to fight with the owners. Unless it's a protest squat where the whole point is to prevent demolition by occupying the building. Those tend to collapse through police raids, either through the owners claiming drug sales etc or just through the owners being an arm of government.

Before you get too excited about systematically squatting absentee-owned properties it would pay to look around your local anarchist and squat online communities to make sure you're not duplicating work that's already being done.

355:

this might amuse some of you

I am laugh out loud amused. Even thinking about this reply is making me smile. Inshallah!

356:

Bismillah! An excellent beginning!

And with text recognition on phones, it's child's play to ensure that yes, it does say 'in God we Trust' (rather than the Arabic for 'The Governor of Texas is a horse's necktie.')

357:

with text recognition on phones

Even that can be dubious because there's a lot of similar languages and scripts. My Farsi/Persian T shirts looked so much like bad Arabic that I ended up putting the Arabic text underneath much smaller so people who only read that language would look at the small text and realise the big text wasn't a fuckup. The only OCR systems I've been able to find have all decided that it's Arabic and have failed to translate it accurately as a result.

It might work just because they're ONLY using very popular languages.

Conceptually it's a bit like the "ye olde english" problem, where thorn is a real letter that has been replaced by the pair "th" in modern english but maroons don't know that so say "ye oldy english". It's common enough that it's kind of not really wrong any more (descriptive linguistics does not exist only to annoy pedants, that's just a happy side effect. lol).

358:

»Even that can be dubious because there's a lot of similar languages and scripts.«

Even without the text-recognition there are problems.

In Nordic languages "dag" means the same as "day" in English.

But we also have a more specific word "døgn" which means "24 hours (counted from midnight)".

Because all machine-translations take a detour via non-nordic languages, "døgn" invariably gets translated to "day".

(I've bugged Peter Norvig about it, but so far no improvement.)

359:

»No worries about melting the TBM.«

Water would probably just make everything worse, because it is so much better at transfering heat.

If you look at the wattages they casually throw around and do the math on how much water you would need, I think you can just leave all the plasma stuff out of it, and just drill your tunnel with the water-jet.

Which btw, has been done, but it is not an ideal process either, because you get a very fractured wall and risk pushing water under high pressure places you dont want it.

360:

It may be a little early, but if Scotland joins the EU and is better governed and a better place to live than England, have you thought about what you want for your border/immigration policies?

As I recall, folks here were expecting (talking about?) food riots in the UK to start immediately after Brexit was first going to be implemented. So far, the results have been bad, but not that bad.

I believe it's easy to predict disaster, but hard to predict the effects of people who are working to prevent disaster-- they don't always win, but they can at least take the edge off.

361:

H @ 363
Curiously enough ..... about the time that some of the religious nutters were heading for what became the USA ... a different set of persecuted refugees arrived in Britain - some of my ancestors, the Huguenots. Who enriched us enormously, not just with money, either.
A hopeful sign?

362:

to make sure you're not duplicating work that's already being done

Not sure how organised squat-hunting is communities like the one you describe, but in my world it seems more ad hoc (although clever for that). I've seen suggestions about using census data to identify likely long-term empty premises, which you'd then verify by casing in person passively for a few weeks. This is at the level of people coming from the left who are elected officials in some capacity and posting on their Facebook feeds.

363:

358 - Well, IME "ye olde", as in say "ye olde tea shoppe", is a cod attempt to imbue a false sense of being older than it actually is on a business. So pronouncing it as "ye olde" is a snark at the business owners and not a lack of education on the part of the speaker.

359 - I see your point, but in English "day" usually means "a period of 24 hours from midnight to midnight" unless the context is otherwise.

361 "have you thought about what you want for your border/immigration policies?" - With apologies to the resident Finns (they'll see why):-
A Scots border guard sees Achmed the mad terrorist and an Englishman advancing Northbound on his position. Which does he shoot first?

Achmed, because business before pleasure.

364:

Poul-Henning Kamp said: If you look at the wattages they casually throw around and do the math

4 cubic metres/second doesn't seem like an outrageous amount of water to supply. That would swish the spoil out nicely at about 35 km/h assuming the area of the tunnel is a bit less than the full metre circle due to the pipe and power cables.

So apply 40 million watts to 4 million grams of water per second, you're applying 10 W to each gram per second. So that's 10 J into each gram. So a bit less than 3 degrees temperature rise.

365:

Back in the 2000's indymedia.org and a bunch of similar sites were also linked to a bunch of other anarchist stuff, including some very organised squatting collectives. What was interesting to me was how even squatters who were very much outside those circles often dropped in to see what was happening and exchange info. The Herd sang about a famous Sydney squat at one stage:

31 in the shade and I can't understand
How I feel like the only man left in Iceland

Iceland was a woman-only squat overlooking Sydney harbour, site of some memorable parties.

My impression from some of the social media stuff I'm still linked in to is that those hangouts still happen and the politics is the 20 years later version of the stuff I'm familiar with.

This isn't "every squat is known to some central web", but more like "political squats tend to be politically active". If you're just looking at drug users and occasional breakins by homeless people then there's probably still no meaningful organisation. But if you were looking to, say, organise tracking of vacant properties owned by absentee landlords you might be surprised at how far down that path people already are.

There's huge amounts written by political squatters, from local howto's to political tracts. And of course songs, like "let's lynch the landlord" (apparently squatting even happens in the USA)

366:

Given what I said in #117, I don't see Scottish independence much before 2030. Given their record, Labour will be totally disorganised for 5-10 years after that, and the currently dominant Blairite wing will try to keep it tracking the Conservatives (fascism, monetarism, Europhobia and all). It is at least as likely that some other party will eventually arise as they will even try to oppose those.

367:

Your view of labour is so wrong as to be laughable - round here at any rate

368:

»4 cubic metres/second«

And how do you propose to keep your drilling robot from being pushed and washed out of the tunnel, from the combined force of the nozzle recoil and counterflow ?

And again, if you are going to use 200kW to pump water anyway, just drill the tunnel with that and forget about all the tungsten

369:

Moz @ 322:

The more I learn about REITs, the more I think they shouldn't be allowed.

What have the Real Estate Institutes of Tasmania done to you?

Show me on the doll how they hurt you...

I'm not completely sure how they've hurt me so far, other than driving up prices and causing my property taxes to go up ... plus I'm sure my other taxes are higher to compensate for the tax breaks they get.

But mainly they just irritate the fuck out of me and increase my base ANGER level by calling me multiple times per day to "make me a cash offer" on my property.

The phone is right here on my desk, and the ringing is SO ANNOYING I have a hard time tolerating it long enough for the answering machine to pick up. And maybe once in a blue moon the call IS important to me ... my doctor's office, family member or one of my few remaining friends, so I can't help myself from picking it up.**

Asking to be put on their "DO NOT CALL" list doesn't seem to do anything, so now I've taken to asking them if their mother is proud that they've chosen a career swindling old people out of their homes. Alternatively, I ask where EXACTLY they are calling me from (street address) so that I can visit them in person to make a counter offer.

I don't like being so angry all the time, but just when I'm finally regaining my cool, another asshole is calling to try and swindle me.

** Just had a thought ... maybe I could move this computer to the desk in my bedroom and put my Photoshop Computer here on this desk? ... leaving the phone in here so it will mute the ringing. I'll have to think about that.

370:

Robert Prior @ 328:

the management should be taken out & shot before being broken on the wheel and drawn & quartered

I assume you're thinking of non-fatal shooting? Otherwise it rather defeats the purpose of the rest…

Well, they shouldn't bleed out TOO SOON after being shot.

371:

Charlie Stross @ 330:

There's a discount tool store here that has a really good price on a "20V Cordless 1/2 in. Variable Speed Hammer Drill".

372:

Howard NYC @ 334:

Just one nit-pick ... by the time pineapples will grow in Miami, Miami will probably be under the Atlantic Ocean.

373:

Heteromeles @ 340:

I wonder if Congress would consider funding a nuclear powered "Hospital Ship" à la USNS Mercy or USNS Comfort? Give it a couple of submarine style nuclear reactors and wire them up so that all you need to patch them into the local grid is pull a cable down to wherever they're docked from the nearest electrical sub-station.

Would require minimal diversion of local workers from disaster recovery efforts to provide power until the local power plants can be put back on line.

374:

Heteromeles @ 353:

Thanks a lot. That's what the south-eastern U.S. needs, more privileged right-wingnut assholes. Why don't you take 'em to California instead.

375:

We could always ship them off to a piece of British territory where they all love Thatcher and think she was really great.

The Falklands.

376:

This has been coming for forty years.....some countries had a long term plan in 1980....and some countries haven't got a clue about the phrase "long term plan". Evidence -- GDP numbers 1995 to today: - UK GDP has doubled. Hoorah! - China GDP has increased 17 times.

So...readers here might like to find out about how others manage to implement (successful!) long term plans. And it's a good read: - "Deng Xiaoping: The Man who Made Modern China", Michael Dillon

Just ask yourself: Suppose UK GDP was seventeen times larger in 2022 than in 1995, would anyone be worrying about the NHS?

No......I didn't think so!

377:
Achmed the mad terrorist

Dude.

Not cool.

378:

Thanks a lot. That's what the south-eastern U.S. needs, more privileged right-wingnut assholes. Why don't you take 'em to California instead.

Um, because, with the Colorado River heading towards running dry, we're probably within a decade of having tens of millions of people emigrating from here.

Ditto the Ogallala region in the Central Plains. And the Pacific Northwest is going into bipolar drought-fire/flood-fire mode, so I'm not sure how many more people it can take either (it only holds a few million).

At least the South Florida real estate industry would be happy to sell to them. They're used to dealing with retirees, after all.

The good news is that it's even odds whether Tory expats will get their citizenship before they pass on, so likely all many will do is contribute all their money to local economies. That and buy up dwellings of people who want to up and move to safer places. So there's that.

379:

UK GDP has doubled. Hoorah! - China GDP has increased 17 times.

i mean...it's easier to do that if u start from a really low baseline, and the latter figure may well include a certain amount of malinvestment

380:

I wonder if Congress would consider funding a nuclear powered "Hospital Ship" à la USNS Mercy or USNS Comfort?

It's a good question. My inexpert take is that a nuclear ship would require a few things to work, including a functioning port and a functioning local power substation. The problem, with hurricane relief at least, is that waterfronts normally take the brunt of it, so bringing in a big power plant might require a lot harbor repair first.

The second problem I see is that it's a single centralized solution to a highly dispersed and idiosyncratic disaster. With one big power plant, you've got to rebuild the power grid before it helps everyone, while helicoptering in a bunch of portable generators gets some power where it's needed fairly rapidly. This is analogous to what's going on in California, where there's a push to help everyone who can afford it be able to unhook from the power grid for days at a time. The grid itself is a major cause of big fires, and its owners want the ability to shut parts of it down during fire weather so they won't have to pay out another billion or more in damages.

The third problem I see is security. Military power is an essential part of the necessarily three-pronged approach to disaster relief that includes providing food, health care and shelter, and security for everyone*. Mooring a big, unarmed, nuclear power plant in the middle of a harbor is going to pin down a lot of security people protecting that system.

The fourth problem I see is that it's an expensive, special-purpose asset. A floating nuclear station might only be useful in disasters, and otherwise it's a floating target. It's not useful in a conflict.

As I noted, I think the model of having a lot of smaller generators that can be moved anywhere makes considerably more sense. They can help power a relief effort in a messed up village, no matter what messed it up, or they can power a fire base during a war effort, so they're not sitting around idle most of the time. And if they're destroyed, it's not a major disaster.

Anyway, that's my thinking. I'm sure I missed a bunch of important points.

*This is why I like the Four Horsemen as a mnemonic: disasters mess up food supplies and health care, and inevitably the local troublemakers try to take advantage by causing civil unrest. Unchecked, this results in a lot of people dying. The effing cavaliers all ride together, so start a war, and famine and disease show up. Crops fail, and disease and civil unrest follow. Get hit with a pandemic, and there's food shortages and civil unrest, even in places of real abundance (as we saw during the early pandemic stages). We humans seem to be really good at further immiserating ourselves during disasters. That's why sending in the Marines to guard the Red Cross and MsF crews is so critically important.

381:

Howard NYC @ 334:Just one nit-pick ... by the time pineapples will grow in Miami, Miami will probably be under the Atlantic Ocean.

Point of order, but they can grow pineapples in Miami now. I could grow them in San Diego, if I wanted to devote that much space to a single plant (they're about four feet across). For me, space and especially water use make them problematic, but climate doesn't.

That said, if I wanted something big and spiny taking up that much space, I'd grow an artichoke. At least they produce more than one edible part at a time, even though I prefer pineapples.

382:

There are many places you can grow things, but not very well, and the limit is very often NOT the lowest (or even average) temperature. The UK couldn't grow sweetcorn or grapes commercially (outside greenhouses) until they developed short-season varieties, for example, and lots of things will grow here but not fruit (e.g. Acca a.k.a. Feijoa). The difficulty is usually the lack of autumn sunlight or a dislike of cool, dark, damp winters. Climate change will alter what can be grown, but most simplistic predictions are just plain wrong.

http://www.u-r-g.co.uk/faqclimate.htm

383:

My inexpert take is that a nuclear ship would require a few things to work, including a functioning port and a functioning local power substation.

It also needs a flow of cooling water. Subs/Carriers in port don't typically generate much waste heat. But at power out in the ocean they use the ocean as a heat sink.

To generate lots of power in a port they need flowing water that isn't too hot.

There's that tale of a US nuclear sub having to shut down due to squids in a harbor in Australia.

384:

"The grid itself is a major cause of big fires, and its owners want the ability to shut parts of it down during fire weather so they won't have to pay out another billion or more in damages."

It seems to me that it would make more sense for them to pay out their nother billion or more in making the grid not shit, so it doesn't keep setting fire to things. It's funny how most countries seem to be able to have electricity without setting fire to themselves with it, but somewhere supposedly rich and technologically advanced like the US doesn't.

385:

»It's funny how most countries seem to be able to have electricity without setting fire to themselves with it, but somewhere supposedly rich and technologically advanced like the US doesn't.«

To be a little bit fair here, most of the countries you compare with have more utility-friendly geography and geology than USA.

That's not to say that the US grid (and much else infrastructure) isn't shit, it absolutely is, but it's not as easy to fix as many engineers from other continents seem to think.

386:

At least the South Florida real estate industry would be happy to sell to them.

Darn right! They've got to sell all that land before it goes underwater...

387:

It seems to me that it would make more sense for them to pay out their nother billion or more in making the grid not shit, so it doesn't keep setting fire to things. It's funny how most countries seem to be able to have electricity without setting fire to themselves with it, but somewhere supposedly rich and technologically advanced like the US doesn't.

To be fair, most countries aren't well developed and don't have big grids. Remember, we're WEIRD on this site, not normal.

I agree tha the US has serious grid issues, and for what it's worth, I think being able to shut off the grid without killing people actually needs to become the default in California, because fires, floods, and earthquakes are our reality.

That said, if you have insufficient bile in your system, you need some schadenfreude, or you just like disaster porn, google Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) along with such phrases as "criminal", "felony", "menace", "fire", "bankruptcy", "gas line explosion," or "Paradise fire." See also https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pge-california-wildfire-safety-pushback/

388:

It seems to me that it would make more sense for them to pay out their nother billion or more in making the grid not shit, so it doesn't keep setting fire to things. It's funny how most countries seem to be able to have electricity without setting fire to themselves with it, but somewhere supposedly rich and technologically advanced like the US doesn't.

I could say some things about sewage systems .... but we'll let that pass for now.

Utility issues in the US, especially electrical power ones, have weird politics. You have the total free market folks who want to extract the last penny of profit (with Wall Street on the only pay attention to the last 90 days) from whatever is done. Then you have the (to exaggerate extremely but not completely) tree hugging side who says turn it all off except for renewals and we'll figure out the shortages as they occur. And then the advocates for the poor who want no power rate increases to pay for things like grid upgrades. (The rich should pay for such things....)

So we get advocates for the poor (mostly D voters) in some ways arguing for coal plants to be kept running and no grid upgrades as that's the cheapest way forward. At least if you outlook is year to year.

So we also get 100 year old transmission lines that sag down and hit trees that are supposed to be cleared from under the lines but aren't always. (Cue the local screams from my neighbors when the power company tree cutters show up around here for just local lines.)

And you get dried brush that catches when a transformer way out in nowhere goes tits up and starts a local fire that in the right conditions starts a big one that kills people. Substation are out in the middle of nowhere because people don't want them nearby. And the area appeared green grassland when sighted. Now (22 years in) it is dried brush.

And on and on and on.

Oh, did I mention that what makes sense for San Diego, may not make sense for Chicago, or Raleigh, or Bend Oregon, or ....

389:

There's that tale of a US nuclear sub having to shut down due to squids in a harbor in Australia.

The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on the coast of California uses water from the Pacific for cooling. The plant is suffering from increased intermittency due to jellyfish blooms that clog the water intakes.

390:

Very true. The commercial district of my home town in SW Fla. starts going underwater with just one meter of sea level rise, at which point Senator Rick Scott undoubtedly packs up his tent and moves to his Montana holdings, as Runway 5 of the airport (APF/KAPF) and the road to it also would be submerged.

391:

Utility issues in the US, especially electrical power ones, have weird politics. You have the total free market folks who want to extract the last penny of profit (with Wall Street on the only pay attention to the last 90 days) from whatever is done. Then you have the (to exaggerate extremely but not completely) tree hugging side who says turn it all off except for renewals and we'll figure out the shortages as they occur. And then the advocates for the poor who want no power rate increases to pay for things like grid upgrades. (The rich should pay for such things....)

Speaking as an environmentalist who's been dealing with wildfire issues for years, that's not cool.

Most of what I've been dealing with for awhile now is litigation trying to keep more houses from being built in high fire areas, because most of these disasters are predictable decades in advance. Oddly enough, in California, the environmental groups are the ones at the forefront of trying to keep everybody safe from fire, and your stereotype is offensively wrong. In Paradise, for example, the Sierra Club was the group fighting against the development because of the fire risk. They lost, and it turned out they were right. And they weren't right by accident. Conflagrations tend to recur in the same spots, so if you build in those areas, those buildings will be at risk.

As for renewables, as a country, we've got a choice right now: fossil fuels, which make the problem worse, nuclear power plants, which are built and run by companies like PG&E (see my previous post at 388), or conservation and renewables. Guess why we like the last option? It's not that it's perfect or that solar and wind don't have problems (I've got stories, trust me), it's that the scale of the problems are small enough that we might conceivably deal with them.

And again, my problem with nuclear power is less the technology, and rather more that companies like PG&E (which is a convicted felon) are the ones building it. Centralizing critical power infrastructure under their control is something I put in the same category as re-electing IQ45, and for many of the same reasons.

392:

One comment on the whole question of what to do about electricity generation in the UK.

Going all-in on one thing is a bad idea, because you get a single point of failure. Even worse when you go all-in one one thing using the same technology - like a massive fleet of small nuclear reactors from one company. That's a problem when you find a critical design flaw in 60% of your generating capacity.

My personal preference is a mix that prioritises renewables - enough to power the grid to 150% at peak sun and wind. Nuclear for baseload (even though I dislike it, it does one job well), some natural gas that mostly stays mothballed, and whatever works for storage.

I did get involved with some of the work on this about 14 years ago, when the previous labour administration was having a big push on renewables. Battery storage was discounted then because, rough calculations, it would double the price of electricity.

Final thought. Reducing demand is a thing, and it does appear to be happening. According to grid.iamkate.com demand has gone down about 20% in the last decade.

Of course, none of this helps right now. The next two years are going to be shit. It does mean that the conversation around energy policy and energy security may be more informed in the future, with people accepting higher than standard bills to do investment in the grid and avoid a repeat of the current situation.

393:

I hate to have to give you cause to be even more depressed ..but ..I've just come across this in The Torygraph ... " Nicola Sturgeon can’t be left to wreak any more havoc on the UK economy

There is no reason why the devolution settlement should be regarded as sacrosanct Matthew Lynn 27 August 2022 • 12:00pm " https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/08/27/nicola-sturgeon-cant-left-wreak-havoc-uk-economy/

394:

I think, Charlie, that we will be very lucky if we get to the other side of this mess with merely the fall of a few nation states. My pessimism has two roots.

First is climate change. The public seems see sea level rise to be the most salient danger. It isn't. What may destroy civilization is the failure of agriculture. (H/T to Graydon Saunders). The US corn crop supplies 10% of humanity's calories. Imagine a heat dome, similar to the one that parked over British Colombia last year, over Iowa at corn silking time. Imagine that we lost the entire crop (unlikely, but this is a thought experiment). 10% of 8 billion is 800 million. Billions will starve, a couple of hundred million will die. International trade in food will halt. Possibly all trade stops. Governments fall. Welcome to the apocalypse.

Secondly, the Enlightenment is over. The dream that reason would let us understand and then control nature failed. Neither relativity nor quantum mechanics are reasonable. Then we have Heisenberg who showed us that there is a limit to what we can measure, Godel who showed that mathematics has holes in it, and Turing who showed that there are limits on what can be computed. The comfort that the common purpose of the Enlightenment gave people is gone. The social contract (an Enlightenment idea) that held democracies together is gone. I live in Virginia. I think it is time to dissolve the Union.

395:

just got word from a buddy, she'll lend me her e-copy of "The End of the World is Just the Beginning"

so... thanks for yet more nightmare fuel

396:

Arnold
Can't read that - "Telegraph" is behind a paywall .....

397:

"Neither relativity nor quantum mechanics are reasonable."

I'm missing something here. What does the word reasonable mean in this context? Both make predictions that are born out by experiment. I understand that they are not simple and non-intuitive, but who said the universe would be simple and obvious?

And isn't that a pretty narrow definition for "The Enlightenment" you are using there?

398:

You're certainly right about agriculture, both because more places will be hot, and because at least for the first few decades we won't have dependable weather - I'd assume that rainfall/temperature will eventually fall into as predictable a pattern as we had in the 1980s, but between now and then we'll have pure randomness as weather patterns rearrange themselves: A rainless hundred degrees in April during year one, a foot of snow in April on year two, the right amount of rain to grow a crop in April on year three, and enough rain to wash our seeds away in year four; randomize and repeat after that. In a hundred years we might again be able to again predict "the right amount of rain" for a particular place, but the first eighty years will be bozo rules.

I think you're wrong about The Enlightenment. Or maybe you're wrong the wrong way about The Enlightenment. "Enlightenment" ideas of science are more than good enough to save us from global warming. But the real failure of The Enlightenment is that it's failed to spread. In particular, it's failed to spread to the greedy, and it's failed to spread to those who want a doctrine (the religious, speaking simplistically) rather than an understanding of science.

399:

As a pointless aside, there has been orangery at Hampton Court for a very long time. Yeah, its under glass but it does survive...

400:

Re: '... they aren't going to be published as none of their definitions/assumptions of abroad (and, to a lesser extent, GDP) are the same, and none are objectively justifiable.'

Thanks! - Although I haven't been looking that long or hard (because this type of data is usually fairly easy to find) your comment does explain this UK gov document: non-specific to the point of meaningless apart from noting that the UK has burned its bridges wrt financial exports to the EU.

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06193/SN06193.pdf

BTW - the value of the financial sector - past and future - keeps changing with every report as noted in the above report.

Also - like the oil sector (in the US) - the financial sector in the UK is divied up in such a way that the gov can add up or report on separate components to highlight or downplay this total sector's importance depending on the mood on the street.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments/articles/uktradeinservicesbyindustrycountryandservicetype/2016to2018

What I'd really like to see is some readable data re: the impact of trade policies on actual human beings instead of on corporations. Sorta as described below:

https://ourworldindata.org/trade-and-globalization#the-conceptual-link-between-trade-and-household-welfare

I haven't read all of the posts yet so if anyone already posted similar info - apologies.

401:

BTW - the value of the financial sector - past and future - keeps changing with every report as noted in the above report.
The money "made" (actually more like commission gathered) by the financial sector is a percentage of the value traded. Since the value traded is a variable, it naturally follows that the commission gathered varies, even if the commission rate charged is a constant percentage.

402:

Coal, gas etc plants cost more to produce more power, so throttling them makes sense. Fission plants don't, do they.

Given a lot of excess power, finding a non-urgent job to do with it seems sensible.

I've assumed electrolysis, blowing up a series of old-fashioned gas tanks with H2, and running that out through gas-turbjnes or diesel engine generating sets as needed. And feeding some of it to gas mains while we still do that.

But boiling water or shoving it through reverse osmosis membranes would work, it doesn't matter what the rate is st any minute as long as the reservoir gets topped up.

Industrial processes, not my area, but surely some are driven proportionately by electricity. Occasionally you might pay someone to make more Aluminium, eg

403:

Horrible suggestion:

Mining bitcoins as the basis for your nation's currency! After all, the more nuclear reactors you're running flat out, the more money you demonstrably have ...

404:

The short story I'm currently noodling on has the protagonists planning their garden with the assumption that a percentage will be unviable. Pretty much a direct crib from classic forms of agriculture, where peasants and others would plant a variety of crops in a variety of places every year so as to ensure that some of them would thrive. Optimizing for resilience rather than profit, especially since excess profit would generally be 'taxed' by the local notables anyway.

Best case, your wheat and everything else grows enough to get you fat. Lesser case, your wheat fails for whatever reason, but your millet and other grains or tubers make it. Maybe your chickens and fish and goats help fill the gaps...

Not optimal agriculture if you are trying to maximize yields. Optimal agriculture if you are trying to minimize risk, a different measure. Acoup.blog is a great read for that kind of thing.

This year the 'standard' when to plant what rules were utterly useless given what actually happened. I am assuming this will continue.

405:

Re: 'Since the value traded is a variable, it naturally follows that the commission gathered varies, ...'

Understood. However the reports in question keep changing the 'reported values' for previous years, i.e., their definitions keep changing with the weather.

And yes - per the last report it looks that when they say 'financial services exports' they mean mostly stock trades.

With the British pound likely to take another hit because its leaders continue to shrug off their historically most reliable trade partner (EU) for a better chance at competing and trading with the US, I wonder whether the tax rates on the resulting US-trade-partner dominated financial sector will be adequate to cover the UK's foreign debt (most of which is payable in US$) esp. considering that US power-player orgs usually ask and get tax exemptions. Doubtful that the US would bail out the UK gov't if this happened.

Heteromeles @335 - re: 'Surgically install deep brain stimulators,...'

Maybe the neuroscientists can figure out where to place the electrodes so that these opportunist will finally grow a conscience (which necessitates having functioning empathy & compassion).

BTW - this looks like it could be a major game-changer wrt helping with plant-based food supply. They're already planning on doing a follow-up test on another ag product. (The article is paywalled.)

'Soybean photosynthesis and crop yield are improved by accelerating recovery from photoprotection

More soybeans by light management

Plants protect themselves from too much sun by dissipating excess light energy. Unfortunately, the switch from dissipating light energy to using light energy for photosynthesis is not as nimble as the clouds moving across the sky. De Souza et al. applied a bioengineered solution that speeds up accommodation by nonphotochemical quenching in soybeans, a widely cultivated and essential crop. In field trials, seed yield increased in some cases up to 33%. —PJH'

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adc9831

Not sure whether it was you that commented that the Saudis are going to keep trying to push their oil in order to keep their economy afloat. Nope - they don't have to, they've already expanded into other industries enough that they aren't as dependent on oil as some of the other oil producers. And they've been weaning themselves off oil for about 20 years now.

Charlie @ 404: 'Bitcoin'

Danged - and I was just about to comment that it's not clear whether crypto was part of the 'financial services exports' package. Wonder what that production cost/exchange rate will be counted in: number of deaths due to heat/cold?

406:

I'd say the problem with the Enlightenment is that it was massively hypocritical, in that it supported science when it empowered the few (colonial masters) and enslaved and degraded the many. It stood by while the wealth of the world was sucked towards Europe, and cooked up rationales for why all this was just right, just, and in the natural order, while shutting up even late Medieval scholars who said that all humans were created equal.

Now the sciences that were spawned by all that wealth and privilege are saying we fucked up big time, lied, and burned through most of a 350 million year-old accumulation of fossil fuels. And, predictably, some of the white males who inherited the most from all this are now screaming that "The Enlightenment is over, because They are telling us not to do what we've been doing for the last 300 years. And we have to keep doing what we were doing, because that is the Natural Order of Things! White Men On Top In All Things!"

So anyway, the Dark Enlightenment seems to be a movement to continue the worst aspects of The Enlightenment under a new, fashionably rebellious, name.

Pfui.

Incidentally, if you want some idea of what comes next, I wrote a little book about that a few years ago.

407:

I use Bypass Paywalls Clean as an extension to Firefox which I use as my web browser. It gets past the Torygraphs paywall quite effectively. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/

408:

to devote that much space to a single plant (they're about four feet across)

Pineapples, like other bromeliads, clump and can grow pretty haphazardly if allowed. But growing a single fruit is actually pretty easy and doesn't need anything like such a large patch of garden (they grow in pots just fine). Not that thirsty either, they need drainage and for the soil to dry out between waterings. Around here the trick is usually to harvest the fruit before something else does (and perhaps to be tolerant of a couple of bite marks in the skin).

There are pineapple plantations all over SE Queensland, including the one around the Big Pineapple, something you might perhaps compare with commentary like Eco's Travels in Hyperreality. Pineapples are in the lexicon of images that represent Queensland culturally, on a similar level to cane toads and more than bananas or sugarcane.

409:

there's plenty on the youtubes to whet ur appetite, and he's very (or at least relatively) sanguine about the prospects for america, everyone else is buggered tho

410:

Rocketjps
... classic forms of agriculture, where peasants and others would plant a variety of crops in a variety of places every year so as to ensure that some of them would thrive. - AND - this is different from what I do on my allotment, every year, in what way?

Arnold
Any idea if that works on anything other than firefox?
{ Which I'm not using, but could }

411:

"- AND - this is different from what I do on my allotment, every year, in what way? "

No idea. What does your allotment have to do with my short story, or the point I was making for that matter?

I'll try to assume you know I wasn't actually talking about your allotment, or anyone else's garden plot, because otherwise ???

My point is that agriculture as currently constructed functions mostly as a series of monocultures and their risks offset by a global supply system that theoretically protects against a single crop failure. Obviously profiteering and other issues warp the model, but that's basically the current model.

A new/old model would be much more like your allotment, and even more like the medieval peasant farming of the past, though hopefully with some modern science applied. Multiple crops in multiple locations with the primary goal of avoiding starvation, and profit only being a secondary (but desirable) goal.

412:

Re: 'A new/old model would be much more like your allotment, ...'

Yeah - let's go retro and bring back small-scale agriculture. In fact, I'd like for basic ag (food security) to get written into community infrastructure. Food production is even more basic than roads, sewage, water treatment/distribution, street lighting, fire & police departments, etc.

I think that in the US/Canada agriculture needs an image make-over from something that can only be done in vast fields using enormous farm equipment that's owned and operated by big ag to something that can be easy enough for anyone. Hell - we did it with computers!

413:

Tim McDermott said: The public seems see sea level rise to be the most salient danger. It isn't.

Nor is it an accident. Much of the climate change campaign has focused on it, excluding all other effects. And who benefits from a concerted messaging that the only bad effect of climate change is rich people will lose their waterfront property?

The fossil fuel lobby isn't dumb. Ruthless, but not dumb. I'd say that up until about 5 years ago more than 90% of the climate change action information I got from the mainstream press was either directly from or based on fossil fuel industry propaganda centred around sea level rise.

414:

Horrible suggestion: Mining bitcoins as the basis for your nation's currency! After all, the more nuclear reactors you're running flat out, the more money you demonstrably have ...

If you want more sensible alt-finance ideas, I'll give you two.

1) Change your economy around to run on carbon offsets, meaning your financial system is based on the amount of carbon it sucks out of the air. This is a booming field. John Oliver provides a thorough primer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0

B) One way to do this is by planting fast growing crops, and using the durable goods produced by them as a form of carbon storage. Personally, I think hempscrip and flaxscrip would be perfectly cromulent forms of these. The currency itself is based on the living crop (e.g. it is a crop future issued by a local farming co-op against the crops produced by its members), while investments are made based on durable products made with it, whose value depreciates over time. Slowing that depreciation is the way to riches. Obviously I didn't think of this myself.

415:

AND - this is different from what I do on my allotment, every year, in what way?

Depends on your allotment. Is it a single patch, or do you have a patch on the floodplain, a patch on the hillside, a patch…

Before agriculture was 'rationalized' it was common for farmers' fields to not be contiguous, and often in very different soils/drainage/sunlight/etc.

416:

When we were kids, we used to be afraid of the dark...

...But since we grew up, recent electricity bills make us afraid of the light

417:
  • the reports in question keep changing the 'reported values' for previous years*
    Ah, that's different. Do they actually state reason(s) for changing the reported values; anything, even if obviously spurious?
418:

Rocketjps
Yes - a wide variety of crops - & every year, some do well, others not so much or fail ... but I always get something, because I'm spreading my bets. This year, raspberries are useless - not enough water in the drought, but the Chinese pear tree's fruit "set" at just the right point & I'm about to make Pear-&-Lime jam. Peas did very well to start with, but I can't keep the watering up for a late crop, but pole & dwarf beans are well-loaded. I expect the spud crop to be "adequate", but not a lot ( again not able to water enough ) Record tomato crop, which last year got blight, badly - & so on.
- Rbt Prior
HERE - from internal evidence photo was taken in Feb/Mar 2012. ( ish )

Coming back to the "Horsemen" { See # 201 } ...
Some people say "John" was writing during Domitain's reign, but others prefer the end of Nero - specifically
The year of the Four Emperors - CE 69.
There would have been planty of war, starvation & price gouging going around.

419:

You and your enormous tracts of land...

I've got 600m2 including house, and the soil is dodgy as fsck so I'm reluctant to grow root vegetables at all. But the good news is that now it's warming up again stuff is growing. Even the kikuyu died off in my raised beds out the front, it was just horribly English weather here for a while. But I mowed some of the silverbeet, weeded round the bok choi and mints, pruned/ate some of the lettuce and murdered a bunch of cherry tomato plants (they won't fruit properly until summer, they just produce little red bags of mouldy water). I should buy some more seeds.

420:

Two points to bear in mind:

  • The Telegraph these days is the mouthpiece of the Tory collective subconscious -- saying the quiet part out loud. (It was once -- maybe 40 years ago -- a reasonable centre-right broadsheet newspaper, like a more staid version of The times. Those days are long gone, and today it's a mouthpiece for the sentiments behind the ERG and their friends.) So what the Telegraph op-eds say is what the right wing of the Tory party is thinking about but not willnig to say in public yet.

  • The Conservative and Unionist party always hated the idea of devolution with a livid, fiery passion and campaigned against it, most recently in 1998; they're instinctively centralizing and devolution undermines that agenda. Worse: ever since Thatcher Scotland has been on an increasingly divergent political course from England, voting in centre-left governments even as England slewed towards the ever-harder right. The existence of the SNP government in Scotland is an implicit reproach to the conservative hegemony in England, especially as the Scottish NHS -- even on a funding formula that is more or less chained to that of England -- does less badly. Look at our water, for example. (Better quality, cheaper, less sewage dumping. Guess what? Scottish Water is still state-owned.)

  • Anyway: the nonsense about "wreaking havoc on the UK economy" is the usual bullshit, a ginned-up attempt to deflect attention from their own failure. It's a pretext that could plausibly be used to reverse devolution, though, and they're testing the waters.

    And what this means is that tf the Scottish people don't vote for further autonomy in 2023, the Tories won't give them another chance. It'll be game over for even the tenuous autonomy that comes with devolution of powers, and we'll be dragged down with England and Wales.

    421:

    You refer to The Enlightenment as if it was some predesigned process or a person. It arose from the writings of a disparate group of writers and philosophers who thought the world could be a “better” place. As you would expect, it got bounced around on the Brownian motion of life, development and invention you find in a society where there is a written language, international trade and monied individuals with sufficient spare cash to occasionally subsidise some interesting scientist/philosopher/writer. People picked and chose the aspects they liked and their local laws permitted.

    Its hard too see why you would expect an amorphous mass of ideas and concepts to miraculously stop people from being avaricious arseholes. In the dog-eat-dog world of the 1700s, where life was hard, short and painful, with thousands living on the streets, I’m not surprised that those who could acquire great wealth, did so.

    But I’m really not sure how you attack the western nations for becoming ocean going industrial powers without implying that westerners are somehow different to everyone else. They simply took guns to what had previously been a knife fight. If, by chance, the roles had been reversed and the Chinese nobility had been fascinated by the Greeks and undergone an industrial revolution earlier than us, do you think for a second that things would have been better? Given the Chinese have nationalism/xenophobia that makes the UKIP/The Mail look like amateurs, its hard to imagine them sparing a lot of thought and concern for a bunch of ignorant nomadic tribes wandering Europe – look at how they treat the Uyghurs today. Similarly, India with its caste system.

    The west, for whatever reason, went industrial and built a technical/scientific infrastructure that allowed it to dominate the world for a century or so. It became the area with the biggest stick and grasped it. Thats how people are. To say The Enlightenment failed is cherry picking. Most countries have democracy now because of it. Scientists just produced vaccines for a pandemic with a 3% mortality rate in 12 months. <6M died. It could have been hundreds.

    Life is very different to the 1700s, but theres still no cure for being an arsehole other than the people around you.

    422:

    I like the implication that Greg Tingey is a mediaeval peasant, displaced in time :-)

    He is, of course, right that growing a variety of crops is the key to ensuring that at least some succeed, almost irrespective of the year, even on a very small scale and a single plot. I do it too, cultivate only about 160 m^2, and very much notice the effect.

    423:

    Even 40 years ago the "Daily Telegraph" was at least informally nicknamed the 'Torygraph' for its politics.

    424:

    I agree with your last paragraph. The current lot's reaction to a "yes" vote will be more 'interesting', though. My crystal ball shows political conflict and generalised chaos, and then does dark.

    425:

    Pigeon @ 376:

    That ... could be ... acceptable

    426:

    A yes vote by Scotland would trigger an instant constitutional crisis -- and an existential one for the Tories.

    The proposed Scottish vote is a consultative, non-binding referendum -- just like the Brexit one. But the Scottish parliament is officially a full parliament, that at its inauguration reinstated the Scottish parliament that last sat in 1706.

    If there's a majority vote to leave the UK, and the Scottish parliament moves to put that into effect, then not honouring it calls into question the legality of Brexit.

    What do the Tories want more -- Scotland or their precious Brexit?

    Based on previous polling, their voters prefer Brexit to keeping the Union intact.

    So the logical outcome would be for the Tories to grudgingly accede to the will of the people -- then engage in a vicious constitutional knife-fight to make independence as painful as possible for the Scots, even before it happens, in hope of provoking a vote to reverse the referendum outcome and re-merge with England.

    But I used the words "logical" and "Tories" in the same sentence, and right now the Tories are haring off after a utopian (for Little Englander values of utopia) project in defiance of all logic and the reality on the ground.

    So the actual outcome is probably highly erratic, and sensitive to starting conditions (i.e. internal party election politics within the 1922 Committee among the possible leadership contenders because losing a Scottish Independence referendum would be as much a career-ending move for Liz Truss -- who is already quite unpopular within her own parliamentary party -- as the Brexit referendum was for David Cameron).

    427:

    Pigeon @ 385:

    "The grid itself is a major cause of big fires, and its owners want the ability to shut parts of it down during fire weather so they won't have to pay out another billion or more in damages."

    It seems to me that it would make more sense for them to pay out their nother billion or more in making the grid not shit, so it doesn't keep setting fire to things. It's funny how most countries seem to be able to have electricity without setting fire to themselves with it, but somewhere supposedly rich and technologically advanced like the US doesn't.

    I'm not sure you understand how capitalism actually works here in the U.S.

    IF a utility company hires contractors to upgrade the grid for a billion dollars, they're actually going to have to pay them (unless they're Donald J. Trump).

    OTOH, if they leave their shoddy grid in place and it sets the state on fire, it will be YEARS before the lawsuits work their way through the courts and the present management will be long gone (ALONG WITH ALL THE MONEY) before anyone has to pay the piper

    ... assuming that once the court renders judgment the utility company doesn't just declare bankruptcy to get out of paying.

    428:

    Precisely. Truss and several likely members of her cabinet have said they will not accept independence, but we know how little such pre-election verbiage means. There will be infighting within the Tories, and a victory for the 'no independence' camp (in the Tories, of course) following a convincing "yes" vote will enrage much of Scotland. You can guess what the SNP's and Scottish public's reaction would be better than I can.

    One possibility is that they would organise a UK-wide referendum on the matter (with no national results being published), and try to rig it the way they rigged the alternative vote one. I can't see that being a great help, whichever way it goes.

    429:

    paws4thot @ 402:

    How does moving "ASSets" back & forth and charging each other commissions actually GROW the real economy?

    I understand basic banking services makes it easier to trade goods & services and grow the economy at the bottom level, but how do all these "derivative financial instruments" do anything but suck everything out?

    430:

    Moz
    Not that enormous. A standard plot is approx 300m2 ( "10 rods" )
    I have an undersized plot + half a plot of irregular shape, making a plot-&-a-quarter total.
    Apart from onions, I do not buy vegetables, at all ... & at this time of year, I'm running a surplus & giving stuff away, on top of storing ( usually by blanch/freezing ) food for the winter & hungry gap.

    Charlie
    The utter failure of water privatisation suggests that renationalisation, without compensation, under the Sale of Goods Act ( Water companies & their products & effluents are: "Not of Merchantable Quality" ) should be done, but it's not going to happen, is it.

    What do the Tories want more -- Scotland or their precious Brexit? Love it, but do "their voters" STILL want Brexit & will they do so in 1 or 2 years time, as the collapse continues?

    431:

    SFReader @ 413:

    I think that in the US/Canada agriculture needs an image make-over from something that can only be done in vast fields using enormous farm equipment that's owned and operated by big ag to something that can be easy enough for anyone. Hell - we did it with computers!

    It should be possible to have agriculture on both the large scale and on a small scall (and on any scale in between) ... like we do with computers.

    432:

    paws4thot @ 418:

    •the reports in question keep changing the 'reported values' for previous years*
    Ah, that's different. Do they actually state reason(s) for changing the reported values; anything, even if obviously spurious?

    I know that with U.S. government economic reports they're often released with incomplete data (because the reports are SCHEDULED for release on certain dates and the people submitting data are not always on time).

    So as time passes the government agencies will revise the numbers for earlier reports to reflect late arriving data.

    433:

    But I’m really not sure how you attack the western nations for becoming ocean going industrial powers without implying that westerners are somehow different to everyone else. They simply took guns to what had previously been a knife fight. If, by chance, the roles had been reversed and the Chinese nobility had been fascinated by the Greeks and undergone an industrial revolution earlier than us, do you think for a second that things would have been better? Given the Chinese have nationalism/xenophobia that makes the UKIP/The Mail look like amateurs, its hard to imagine them sparing a lot of thought and concern for a bunch of ignorant nomadic tribes wandering Europe – look at how they treat the Uyghurs today. Similarly, India with its caste system.

    Actually there's massive evidence that the West is different and nastier.

    The Chinese invented gunpowder (9th century) and guns (10th-11th century). And cannon. Until ca. 1600 they had the best guns. Go check out the Mighty Ming Military blog for a rundown of all the gunpowder weapons they used. China invented things that were essential to the expansion of the West, including paper, printing, gunpowder, and magnetic compasses.

    Look up Ming Treasure Fleets. They sent seven fleets into the Indian Ocean over 60 years before Columbus, and instead of establishing a slave trade, they gave up, partially because of internal politics, but also because they apparently didn't think the trips were profitable.

    Up until the Industrial revolution, most of what China wanted from the West was silver for currency. Otherwise, their internal products were so much better that, well, why bother trading? Even into the 19th Century, the European powers had to force China to accept Afghani opium as a trade item, because Europe (especially England) was running a massive trade deficit importing tea and silk.

    The paranoia currently expressed by China is well-earned, because of their experience with the Opium Wars, the resulting Tai Ping Rebellion (biggest civil war in the history of the planet), Boxer Rebellion (Europe invading), WW1 (Japan getting colonial rights in China from Europe for acting Western), Japanese invasion and WW2 (caught between the Soviet Army, the Japanese Army, the UK and US), and Communist revolution (western philosophy that shredded centuries of local culture and art).

    If you'd been through that, you'd have a problem with the cause of it too, no?

    The odd thing is that I'm not pro-China. I've heard the Chinese imperial system cited as among the most corrupt in human history by people who have reason to know, and I do know that much of southeastern Asia was peopled by people (Tai/Thai, Hmong/Miao, etc.) who originally lived as far north as the Yellow River and were systematically pushed out of China. I like Taoism a lot, but it's Chinese counter-culture, not Chinese culture.

    That's just how people are.

    Arguably that's how they've learned they have to be when sharing a planet with us.

    The west, for whatever reason, went industrial and built a technical/scientific infrastructure.

    ACOUP indirectly covered this topic last week, with a post on why the Romans didn't undergo an industrial revolution. The key point here is that agrarian civilizations sprang up spontaneously and independently all over the globe, with the earliest in Sumeria and last in the Hawaiian Islands. The more you know about human-plant interactions, the less surprising this is. Even the Australian Aborigines arguably farmed, although this part was buried by white Australians who were colonizing under the rubric of Terra Nullius (aborigines being animalistic gatherers who didn't improve the land, so it was okay to displace and/or kill them).

    Conversely, the Industrial Revolution started precisely once, in the UK. So it's not "for some reason," it's about British imperial politics and temporarily having enough coal to give into the temptation of running an expansionist empire off of it, and everyone else copying perforce.

    The nasty question, again, is why China, which also was using a lot of coal for salt and iron production, didn't go industrial? They remained merely the world's most advanced agrarian civilization until they were forced to industrialize literally with a vengeance in the twentieth Century.

    It's a nasty question, because British industrial-powered colonialism arguably forced the rest of the world onto a path of burning through a 300 million year accumulation of fossil fuels and unmined ores, setting up the mess we're in today. Much of the discussion about farm tech above boils down to how civilizations can successfully devolve back into agrarian systems, given that the latter support 90-99% fewer people per acre. We need so radical, breakthrough inventions to even slow that decline.

    So I'll end by flipping it: why were the British and Europeans so uniquely nasty*? When faced with similar opportunities elsewhere, people didn't take them. It's not that non-English people are sweet and kind (slavery, warfare, and corruption are globally ubiquitous). Nor are they stupid. It really looks like, outside the Anglophone world, most people have different priorities, and adopted ours grudgingly after they were invaded by us or by people using our tech and principles. And they adopted our "civilization" often for sheer survival.

    *And yes, now it's US culture, not UK culture. We're so gun and violence mad that we've got, not just the top military in the world, but the top two militaries in the world (US Navy and US Army). Last week, when Biden put money towards paying down student loan debt, one of the howls of outrage came from conservative militarists, who screamed that student loan forbearance was one of the chief draws for recruiting warfighters, and with "historically low recruitment" currently, how were they going to keep recruiting soldiers if Biden made college more affordable? Ponder the insanity of this for a moment, given how much bigger the US military is than any other military on the planet.

    434:

    Greg Tingey @ 431:

    What do the Tories want more -- Scotland or their precious Brexit? Love it, but do "their voters" STILL want Brexit & will they do so in 1 or 2 years time, as the collapse continues?

    Observation from outside, but I believe it has been well established here that they want BOTH, and think they can get it.

    OTOH, "their voters" might not be as badly hurt by the failures of Brexit as those who didn't vote for them will be, and I see no evidence they give a shit about those others.

    435:

    Yes. As he said a while back, Brexit is a religious matter, and cannot fail (it can only be failed).

    And it's not just THEIR voters, but nearly a third of Labour voters - and a majority in two thirds of (what were then) Labour-held seats. That is why Corbyn and Starmer could not and cannot come out as against Brexit and hope to get elected. There is plenty to blame the Tories for without blaming them for things for which Labour is equally to blame or other defects of the sheeple.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48039984

    https://ukandeu.ac.uk/labour-voters-and-the-brexit-conundrum/

    There is a typo. in this - it should say "On the other hand 68% of 2017 Labour voters had voted Remain (not Leave) in the referendum."

    436:

    I thought the acoup article made a good point which was it wasn’t really about gunpowder it was about coal and steam

    That was the real reason why European powers reached the level of dominance they reached

    So it’s not really fair to say “other peoples has the same opportunity and failed to take it”. Because they didn’t.

    As far as gunpowder and the Chinese, the big win that gunpowder offered was against fixed fortifications (castles). The Chinese used packed earth construction for walls and gunpowder just wasn’t effective at knocking those walls down, hence the lack of it really changing the game in the east. Acoup has a good article on that as well.

    However I also agree that many world cultures were not as expansionistic or aggressive as European cultures were. Some were. But not all. China was mostly on the less expansionistic side at least during the periods where china was united. I think this was mostly that keeping china united was basically a full time job and expansion was likely to derail that not aid it.

    437:

    Conversely, the Industrial Revolution started precisely once, in the UK.

    A lot of things came together at once. And like in some other situations, the first one in so many cases wins. (I got exposed to this when drafting/editing standards. It was great to fill in the holes and ambiguities with my company's preferences.)

    Once the industrial revolution started somewhere, it basically steam rolled over anyone else getting started. One side effect of the industrial revolution was it shrank the world so there was less independence of action and thought around the world.

    438:

    This is pretty good for getting past paywalls - https://archive.ph/

    Copy your URL into the lower search box and hit search and it will bring up stored captures. Occasionally it will capture the paywall, so you may have to open a few to get the goods. It's also less reliable on smaller news sites. Here's the Torygraph article found using it

    439:

    do "their voters" STILL want Brexit & will they do so in 1 or 2 years time, as the collapse continues?

    A majority are now opposed, with serious buyers' remorse even among those who voted for it.

    There is a hard core of absolute support that seems to be around the 25-30% mark who will not listen to any arguments against it -- you could promise them a nuclear war and they'd stil be "but SOVRINTEE!!"

    These people are not rational. Alas, the Conservative Party membership are over-represented among them.

    440:

    Sounds like a very familiar set of numbers.

    441:

    Industrialization took of where it did because the UK had coal, knowledge.. and labor shortages.

    The UK had really high wages for a pre-industrial economy when industrialization took of. That is not a coincidence! China generally had labor ground under foot hard enough that early-stage mass production just did not save that much in labor costs, and besides, labor kept at starvation wages do not make for much of a mass market.

    In other words, it wasn't the UK's sins that made it strong - it was its virtues. That that strength then got put to empire building purposes is a horrible episode in history, but the empire was not the fundamental cause here.

    442:

    If there were to be a second referendum on Scots Independence ..splitting up the United Kingdom? It would not, in my opinion. be done on the same basis as the last IndeRef. Rather an independence for Scotland..Splitting Up the UK ... would be done an a basis of the Entire UK voting on Breaking up the UK with every qualified voting citizen of the UK having a vote , just like a UK General Election. Why not? "England Ireland Scotland Wales all tied up with donkeys tails ?" This for centuries? And an Independent Scotland decided on the basis of voters being resident of Scotland at a predetermined date just doesn't sound to be either fair or equitable. I'm not resident in Scotland, but have ancestry going back to several generations of Highland Scots fleeing poverty in Rural Scotland to poverty in the industrial North East of England ..why should You have a vote on Scottish Independence when I don't? No,it just wont do on a basis of elementary justice. And, since I have thought of a way that the Torys could hold a referendum on splitting up the UK - not that they are likely to hold such a referendum , and the Labour Party would need to be insane to announce before the next General Election that they would hold an independence referendum, and thus condemn themselves to subservience under Tory Governments in the remainder of the UK forever? It would seem quite likely the the Tory tacticians have already thought of my very wonderful General Referendum/Election of splitting up the United Kingdom only if the entire UKs qualified electorate had a vote ..after all they are ever so much more cunning and clever than me.

    443:

    Only 52% think it was a mistake, though 12% don't know. In addition to the hard-core supporters, there are probably about 10% who support it but are not swivel-eyed loons.

    444:

    429 - Liz 2x4 statements mean precisely nothing.

    430 - Where did I say that banking commissions actually make money, never mind growing the real economy?

    436 - I don't blame either the Con Party (aside from Scamoron and Mayhem), or the Liebour Party for WrecksIt; I blame the Little Ingerlundshire sheeple.

    445:

    OK. I give up.

    Liz 2x4

    What is the 2x4? In the US it almost universally refers to a size of lumber used in construction.

    446:

    It would not, in my opinion. be done on the same basis as the last IndeRef

    Wrong: there's legislation on the table in Holyrood and a Supreme Court case asking for a ruling on its legality without Westminster's say-so.

    If the SC says "nope, you need Westminster's backing", there is a Plan B: snap general election (for the Scottish parliament) with a one-clause manifesto for the SNP (and probably the Scottish Greens, who are also pro-indy) saying "If elected with a majority of the vote we will declare independence".

    The latter -- the election side of things -- is clearly within Holyrood's competence, although what happens afterwards is unclear (it instantly throws the UK into a constitutional crisis, though).

    Scotland's status as an independent nation is no more England's business than the UK's membership of the EU was the business of any other EU member state.

    447:

    Specifically, I think, the size of lumber used to construct a truss in a wood-framed house.

    448:

    In the US it is a stand in for the most typical size of lumber. 2x4 inches of variable length. Although most exterior walls are now framed with 2x6 lumber instead of 2x4. 2x4 is still used for interior walls.

    And to make it more confusing it is a "nominal" size. Some time a century or two ago it was the rough sawn dimension. Then it shrank a bit every few decades as a "finished" dimension. My built in 1961 house has some that are 1 9/16 x 3 9/16 but anything you buy now is 1 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches sanded with rounded edges. (Which means I can't buy an interior framed door kit and have it work without adding a bit of wood somewhere in the jamb.) All of this drive my neighbor nuts when he's in England working on home improvements for his daughter's home there. He has to multiple conversions in the home centers to deal with what he thinks he wants to buy.

    But what is "Liz 2x4"?

    449:

    446 - 2x4 stated in 448 above (smaller dimension first so it's clearly not a vehicle drive configuration); it is also thick, as in "a thick plank", as in the saying "%person is as thick as 2 short planks".

    447 - Pretty sure that's correct; less certain on whether my list vote should be SNP or Green if my constituency vote was SNP.

    450:

    Oddly enough, in California, the environmental groups are the ones at the forefront of trying to keep everybody safe from fire, and your stereotype is offensively wrong.

    I should have said exaggerated instead of extreme.

    I like what you have to say and what you are trying to do. But you are looking at it all from a point of view of not killing a few million people with a quick bad decision or putting the food supply in the toilet or whatever. You understand that big decisions have big effects. Many times very large second, third, forth, etc.. order follow ons.

    My point was that the power situation with transmission lines and all kinds of power issues is very different along the coast and forests of California compared to me in North Carolina and someone in the Chicago area. All of the situations have warts. But this calling things technologically backward by some on this blog is just dumb and ignores the 100+ years of decisions (good, bad, terrible) that got things to here.

    As to my broad comments about environmentalists. I'm really getting tired of AROUND WHERE I LIVE dealing with the faux liberals AND conservatives who take "principled" stands that are really a cover for "Please go away and do your thing somewhere else." But will not even discuss the why of where we are or the effects of their single issue demands.

    Conservatives AND liberals and environmentalists or whoever who will actually discuss things past the slogan, I'm there. But they seem to be in short supply around here (NC) of late.

    If you really want me to start ranting we can talk how zoning is going to get much of our city government thrown out of office this fall and replaced with people who in no way shape or form can do what the pitchfork and torch crowd want done. (Restrict new housing and stop the rise in housing costs but don't stop businesses from hiring or relocating here.)

    451:

    I thnk you might be surprised how many of the English would vote for it. They have, after all, been systematically fed the lie about Scotland being an economic drag on England.

    452:

    “Actually there's massive evidence that the West is different and nastier.”

    Really?

    Sounds to me like the Teasure Fleets were a clear case of intimidation, extortion and aggression. Because a fleet of 200+ ships with 27,000 men on board says friendly diplomacy to me.

    Hey, the King of Sri Lanka isn’t paying tribute. Yep, lets kill him.

    Vietnam’s ruler has changed. Lets invade.

    Someone has overthrown the Sultan of Samudera, so lets kill the new guy and reinstate the bloke that grovelled sufficiently.

    Yeah, suzerainty for all! The Krays Twins and Mafia could have learned something.

    As for slavery, when you have millions of peasants, 2 million slaves already (Qing Dynasty) and lots of countries nearby paying protection money, how many more slaves do you need?

    And the west is to blame because Mao and a lot of his thuggish mates acted like, well, thugs? Come on!

    The west has had its share of psychos and nutjobs, such as the pious Vasco De Gama, Torquemada plus Hitler and chums, but we certainly don’t have a monopoly.

    454:

    ... I'd assume that rainfall/temperature will eventually fall into as predictable a pattern as we had in the 1980s...

    While our new global weather - driven by global warming - may eventually have a predictable pattern, it is unlikely to be a pattern that most people like. It is more likely to be a pattern that kills large parts of humanity in one way or another... :-(

    455:

    Re: 'Do they actually state reason(s) for changing the reported values; anything, even if obviously spurious?'

    Nope - not that I could see. I checked a few reference docs - circular/self-citing, no data. Reads like an E-Suite PPT presentation on a decision that's already been made: conclusions, next to no data.

    Here's what the Disclaimer at the front says:

    'We have published it to support the work of MPs. You should not rely upon it as legal or professional advice, or as a substitute for it. We do not accept any liability whatsoever for any errors, omissions or misstatements contained herein. You should consult a suitably qualified professional if you require specific advice or information.'

    Basically: 'We've no idea what we're saying and you can't hold us accountable for anything we've said.'

    Would be interesting to find out whether there's any pattern in whatever 'corrections' were made to past reports.

    JBS @430:

    '... but how do all these "derivative financial instruments" do anything but suck everything out?'

    Agree!

    If most trades are exclusive to only two players (stock markets) such closed positive feedback loops can inflate stock values faster. Or, less often, this can end up in a death spiral. (I have a vague feeling this gets tangled in with exchange rates and foreign debt but not sure how.)

    432: re: Ag

    Yes - whatever size best fits the local circumstances now and under the worst likely GW/CC future scenarios.

    Seriously, I think it's time we grew more of our crops indoors - the weather's too unreliable. And I think gov'ts should encourage tech/sci research across small-medium-large 'alt-ag' whether it's to boost production/nutritional values of traditional recognizable foods or something else. (DARPA gave us the Arpanet and just last year they mentioned that they're currently working on a food security for troops project called 'Cornucopia'. Oh yeah - the article below says they're looking for orgs/unis to help them with this research.)

    https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2021-12-02

    456:

    Liz Truss is a candidate to succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.

    457:

    Scotland's status as an independent nation is no more England's business than the UK's membership of the EU was the business of any other EU member state.

    I get the impression that to a lot of English view the UK and England as interchangeable, and don't really consider Scotland et el to be really separate entities.

    458:

    'd assume that rainfall/temperature will eventually fall into as predictable a pattern as we had in the 1980s

    That may take a very long time. Our climate has been unusually stable/predictable for several thousand years — taking a long view it's been wildly variable for more time than it's been predictable enough for agriculture.

    459:

    Alan, I'm not sure there's any way to know how the weather patterns will settle down, but you might well be right.

    460:

    I'd assume that rainfall/temperature will eventually fall into as predictable a pattern as we had in the 1980s...

    I seem to recall papers asserting that the last few thousand years have had much more stable weather than is typical, and that's the whole story about why agriculture suddenly became possible. If we push the climate into a new equilibrium, there's no guarantees it will be that stable.

    461:

    I thought the acoup article made a good point which was it wasn’t really about gunpowder it was about coal and steam/That was the real reason why European powers reached the level of dominance they reached/So it’s not really fair to say “other peoples has the same opportunity and failed to take it”. Because they didn’t.

    While I agree on steam and coal, I disagree that China didn't have the opportunity. IIRC, they were using coal in salt and iron-making, and they're the first people to invent reciprocating cylinder pumps. So it's less clear why they didn't invent rotary steam engines.

    As for spinning technology, they basically invented the spinning wheel probably before Alexander the Great lived, and they were using treadle looms in the Han dynasty before the western Roman Empire fell, so far as anyone can tell. Silk production is actually easier to mechanize, and people have been dinking with it and improving it since people started weaving silk cloth about six thousand years ago.

    So yeah, if some Chinese sage had figured out how to turn heat into radial motion with enough force to power a spinning wheel, I'm quite sure they would have gone for it. Why no one did is probably one of those James Burke failed connections things involving Chinese geography and dialects, or something.

    As for why no Chinese cannons, ACOUP blew that one. Yes, the Chinese used forts, but almost none of their enemies did. The ones that caused them the most heartburn (and two dynasties) were the Mongols and the Manchus. Big, heavy cannon are worse than useless on the steppe, and the Chinese deployed a bunch of smaller, portable artillery against the Mongols. And forts.

    No, the problem with Chinese firearms is that they had no national or even provincial armories. Any general going out to raise an army had to work with local smiths to arm his recruits with whatever they could make. The 16th Century military genius Qi Jiguang (worth reading about) wrote a whole series of treatises on how to fight with mixed arms using levied soldiers. His firearms manual (never translated into English) apparently has logistics considerations, including how to plan for a 20-30% critical failure rate in whatever guns the local smiths produced. His mixed arms formations include places for people firing guns, rockets, fire lances, bows, and cart-mounted small cannons, because any missile weapon was better than none.

    This is the weird thing about China. They invented firearms, they used firearms, the technology was ubiquitous within China, yet they didn't spend centuries optimizing firearm designs the way the West did.

    This isn't the only example. The Chinese basically invented "katanas" back in the Song Dynasty. The Japanese swiped the idea from the Chinese. They spent a long time perfecting those swords, while the Chinese forgot about them, until Qi Jiguang had to deal with Japanese pirates wielding katanas. He handed them their heads (literally. Once he got his formations working, they regularly massacred Japanese forces with minimal losses), and captured katanas showed up in Chinese weapons manuals (including Qi Jiguang's cold arms book, which has been translated) for awhile thereafter.

    That's what I mean about it being more than happenstance that western European nations seem to be more focused on optimizing violence than are others.

    462:

    I'd assume that rainfall/temperature will eventually fall into as predictable a pattern as we had in the 1980s...I seem to recall papers asserting that the last few thousand years have had much more stable weather than is typical, and that's the whole story about why agriculture suddenly became possible. If we push the climate into a new equilibrium, there's no guarantees it will be that stable.

    I dealt with this in Hot Earth Dreams, although thanks be to Gaia, it looks like we can't produce quite as extreme a temperature spike as I used in that book.

    Anyway, the short answer is yes. It's likely that by, say, 2500 or possibly 2800, the climate will have stabilized at something more akin to the middle Miocene than what we have today.

    I should point out that stability is relative. Areas like Australia and California are pretty bad for agriculture absent massive irrigation systems. Due to local effects amped by El Nino, we get droughts and floods pretty regularly. Whether El Nino is possible in a hothouse Earth I don't know offhand (I think it may not be), but where oceans start sloshing hot water back and forth, the climate becomes less predictable.

    The longer-term problem is that what we now consider good soils won't necessarily be under what we'd consider good climates, and vice versa. For example, a bunch of Siberia and central Canada might have climates suitable for agriculture, but the boggy soils they have won't be. Growing crops in peat using only muscle power is going to be tedious at best.

    Anyway, the nasty problem isn't the new state (what I called the Deep Altithermal in that book, because it will likely last tens of thousands of years). The problem is the big temperature spike from now until around 2300. During that period, climate will change rapidly and continually, first up, then back down, before settling at a degree or two higher than we have now.

    That spike is the extinction-maker, and we really want to keep peak heat as low as we can possibly get it. That's why it's worth dealing with all the inconveniences right now, because gone is gone, and that could include a lot of species we'd sorely miss*, even though some humans are likely to survive.

    *Including wild species, like bats that eat mosquitoes...

    463:

    That's what I mean about it being more than happenstance that western European nations seem to be more focused on optimizing violence than are others.

    they were kind if into optimizing other stuff too, like shipbuilding

    violence may have had a bigger payoff admittedly

    i sometimes imagine it as being part of the cultural momentum (and i'm not claiming that's a well-defined term) of the renaissance - we've "caught up" to the ancients, now what else can we do?

    464:

    "That's what I mean about it being more than happenstance that western European nations seem to be more focused on optimizing violence than are others."

    Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, suggests geography. Specifically, the geography of Europe encouraged division into many petty fiefdoms, with almost continuous hostilities somewhere or other, with whoever thought they might wind up losing looking for ways to improve their chances.

    In the other main cultures, the geography was more friendly to a central authority, which might well see its own military systems as adequate to the task, while improvements could well be taken advantage of by rebels.

    JHomes.

    465:

    Yes, I'm a bit surprised that Acoup doesn't mention iron-making, when that of course was a major requirement and also relates to the biofuel shortage, which he does mention. Iron-making was held up by the difficulty of getting enough charcoal to smelt it with until Abraham Darby figured out how to do it with coal, and then it was suddenly much easier (and all the more so with coal, iron ore and limestone often all occurring in the same area, so crappy transport didn't hinder the manufacturing side of things much).

    Of course there's a long way to go between being able to make iron and being able to reliably make good iron in quantity; the chemistry is complex and obscure, and the temperatures required aren't practical without some really good furnace kit. Ancient iron-making always had the principal problem that you could barely manage to melt the bloody stuff, which severely restricted both the basic quality of what they managed to make to start with, and the things they could then do with it to make it better. Making good quality stuff required a LOT of work; it's hard to experiment when you have to work your arse off just to keep things going as they are. It's also pretty hard to understand and interpret the results without some understanding of chemistry, and the more quality you wanted the more you were dependent on the ironworks of certain particular regions where the chemical composition of their ore happened to be just right to let them get a good result even without advanced refinement techniques.

    Once you get steam engines involved with it things get a whole lot easier. You can do things like provide a really good blast for your furnaces, and mechanise the handling of all the hot and heavy stuff. At around the same time, chemistry was developing rapidly and becoming a scientifically useful branch of knowledge. So now you had both a process which was more amenable to experimenting, and the means to understand your results. Consequently the quality went up by leaps and bounds and soon mass production of steel became possible.

    466:

    There is a hard core of absolute support that seems to be around the 25-30% mark who will not listen to any arguments against it -- you could promise them a nuclear war and they'd stil be "but SOVRINTEE!!"

    We've got them here in the U.S. too - the MAGAs and QAnons. But for most of them, it's "but my GUUNNNS!!!".

    467:

    Seriously, I think it's time we grew more of our crops indoors - the weather's too unreliable.

    It's time we started manufacturing our food. Inorganic feed stocks going in one end and steaks (or whatever) coming out the other...

    468:

    Ramp up the technology using homeless people?

    469:

    i sometimes imagine it as being part of the cultural momentum (and i'm not claiming that's a well-defined term) of the renaissance - we've "caught up" to the ancients, now what else can we do?

    Or you could put it down to having to live under the control of a few, rather large, authoritarian families with really dysfunctional familial relationships fighting out who owns what. They've learned the hard way that love always comes with strings and conditions, that the only safe relationships are transactional ones with subordinates, and that the only way to have these safe relationships is to have the power to create them at will.

    The rest follows, including what tech gets nurtured and bought, and what gets suppressed.

    China is, of course, authoritarian. They seemed to have preferred to buy off threats as often as kill them off, probably on the notion that it's cheaper, even in the long run. The treatment of North Korea by the nations surrounding it is a modern example of this, but they bribed many others, including the Mongols. This approach may be complementary to the way they generally treated military power.

    470:

    Seriously, I think it's time we grew more of our crops indoors - the weather's too unreliable. And I think gov'ts should encourage tech/sci research across small-medium-large 'alt-ag' whether it's to boost production/nutritional values of traditional recognizable foods or something else. (DARPA gave us the Arpanet and just last year they mentioned that they're currently working on a food security for troops project called 'Cornucopia'. Oh yeah - the article below says they're looking for orgs/unis to help them with this research.)

    So battery cages for egg-laying hens don't do it for you? Industrial production of a number of foods has been indoors for decades. Everything from mushrooms to hydroponic vegetables to tilapia, poultry and pigs. And don't forget breweries.

    I'd point out that growing "microbes for food" is a great concept, until you remember that the best exemplars are beer and vegemite. In general, working with algae and microbes other than yeast in vats is an effing pain in the ass, because contamination is probable and cleaning solutions tend to be (sub)lethal to the person cleaning the vat, so long as the PPE works. That came from talking to people with extensive experience in algal biofuels...

    The real next step isn't microbes, it's insects. If you can battery farm crickets using whatever plants you can grow outside, you have a great food supply. The advantage is that, if you have 100 kg of crickets farmed, you can process 95 kg of crickets, and the other 5% will just lay eggs to replenish the 95 kg lost. If you try to remove 95 kg of meat from a 100 kg pig, you've got one dead 100 kg pig with no replacement.

    Besides, farming a protein source using random plants grown outdoors is a proven technology. Leafcutter ants have been doing it for around 50 million years, so I think it's sustainable, at least at small scale.

    471:

    Interesting tidbit re: iron. I recent got hold of McNaughton's The Mande Blacksmiths, a research book (I think his PhD thesis) on the African blacksmiths he studied and apprenticed to. Worth finding a copy if that's your thing.

    Anyway, the Mande smiths all use imported steel because it's less work than smelting their own, but parts of Mali, Niger, and that area are dotted with the remnants of old clay smelting furnaces. They smelted a lot of their own iron, well into the 20th Century.

    One thing the smiths note is that hand-smelted iron has a fair amount of slag in it, and a lot of carbon gets worked in as it gets heated up in the charcoal forge. The odd result is that tools forged from traditional iron acquire a hard crust (slag and high carbon iron), that tends to hold a good edge, while the interior is softer. Conversely, commercial steel is free from all the crud, but tends to not hold edges so well, because it's homogeneous throughout. As a result, the smiths now make more money sharpening and re-edging tools than they used to.

    If I had to guess, I'd suspect that Roman iron tools and weapons may have worked on a similar principle of effectively case hardening.

    Another aside is that the forges typically use 2-4 pot bellows, forcing air into the charcoal. This being West Africa, they play the bellows in rhythm (or even polyrhythm), and some smiths can put on quite a show while keeping the charcoal hot.

    Fun book for smithing nerds or the curious.

    472:

    My point was that the power situation with transmission lines and all kinds of power issues is very different along the coast and forests of California compared to me in North Carolina and someone in the Chicago area. All of the situations have warts. But this calling things technologically backward by some on this blog is just dumb and ignores the 100+ years of decisions (good, bad, terrible) that got things to here.

    Still catching up. Yes, I completely agree with you on this. 60 Minutes rebroadcast a story on dangers to the grid tonight. Someone called it "the most complicated machine on the planet" with three major sections and thousands of little parts owned by separate companies. Whether the North American grid or the Internet is the biggest machine on the planet? Hard to say.

    473:

    The rest follows, including what tech gets nurtured and bought, and what gets suppressed.

    i thought suppression had a so-so track record in europe, as if u managed to suppress something ur rivals would often develop it and use it against u

    If you can battery farm crickets using whatever plants you can grow outside, you have a great food supply.

    lotta customer resistance to overcome there

    the qanonites have appended "eat bugs" to the "own nothing, be happy" future they believe the elites are planning for them (but not themselves)

    474:

    Okay, I object to this every time you bring it up... but "only muscle power" is not a reasonable assumption. Humanity is never, ever going to abandon electricity. At a minimum, hydro power will always be used, and mechanizing agriculture is going to be way up on the uses it gets put to. (... and now I am imagining a village with a hand built dam, and a kilometer of wire that gets moved around on poles to power the electric "tractor"... )

    475:

    (... and now I am imagining a village with a hand built dam, and a kilometer of wire that gets moved around on poles to power the electric "tractor"... )

    So where does this kilometer of wire come from? Not to mention the other kilometer or so in the tractor motor windings and the generator windings. And the precision engineering in the gearboxes, turbines and other bits of engineering? These aren't things that the village blacksmith can produce.

    But if you have a wire factory and a gear factory then that implies more machines which have to be produced somewhere, which implies more big infrastructure to support it. As you follow the logic along, you find yourself looking at major industrial centres with highly skilled specialists, and the infrastructure to support them and the management structure to organise them, and the control mechanisms to manage the managers, and you are right back where you started.

    There is a book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter. The book itself costs about £30, but a good summary of the main points, plus counter-arguments, can be found here. The basic idea is that societies solve problems and increase production by increasing their complexity: skilled specialists emerge who are more productive than the unskilled, and civil services evolve to manage the resulting complexity, leading to more complexity. Over time the marginal benefits to complexity decrease as all the low-hanging fruit are picked, and eventually the curve turns negative: increased complexity cannot pay for itself. However the complex state still attempts to maintain itself via military or ideological control, leading to still further increases in complexity which cannot now be sustained, and so the society "collapses", i.e. it suffers a radical decrease in complexity.

    What you (and others) are proposing is a radical decrease in complexity, aka collapse. However coming up with a managed plan for this will have to confront the resulting decrease in productivity and lifestyle, and how to persuade people to accept it. Compare that to the current "crisis" of high fuel costs and A&E queues, and bear in mind that what is being proposed here is a vastly bigger change down. Your electric-agrarian village isn't going to feature heating in any form beyond a log-burning fireplace, and as for modern health care, forget about it. A wooden splint to immobilise a broken limb is going to be about the limit, along with some willow bark tea to help with the pain.

    476:

    This is where the magitech fabricators come in... /s

    477:

    AlanD2 @ 468 THINK about what you just said - that is, by definition, impossible. All our food contains Carbon & is, therefore "organic" - an inorganic, non-Carbon feedstok will be indebile & probably undigestible. Grrrr.....

    Pigeon Which suggests that the invention & propagation of the Parallel Motion for steam engines was the critical take-off point? Shortly followed by first mass-produced items, 1804/5 {M I Brunel}; early colliery railways 1758-1816 {Trevithick, Hackworth etc}; "Railways" as we think of them 1825-30 {Stephensons}...... After which there was never any turning back.

    H I would bet that the entire electric grid of Europe is bigger - after all there are Britain/Norway/Fance interconnects & it goes all the way to Zaporizhzhia (!)

    478:

    I suspect that a lot of us foreigners look at news like this:

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/aug/28/hms-prince-of-wales-breaks-down-day-after-leaving-portsmouth

    and think "Yup, that's UK for you..."

    So could UK build a nuclear plant ?

    Maybe a better way to phrase that question would be:

    How far away from it, would you prefer to live, if they did ?

    479:

    Poul-Henning Kamp said How far away from it, would you prefer to live, if they did ?

    Wouldn't worry me (apart from the disruption of living near a building site). I'd be long dead before it started up.

    480:

    With truss pratically certian now to be our next (awful) PM maybe "Selsdon man" will be her next plan?

    "Selsdon Man is not just a lurch to the right. It is an atavistic desire to reverse the course of twenty-five years of social revolution. What they are planning is a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality." -- Harold wilson

    https://everything2.com/title/Selsdon+Man

    481:

    Guns, Germs and Steel has numerous errors of fact (*), and many of its speculations are, at best, implausible. The Industrial Revolution started before coal replaces wood and wood charcoal, and definitely depended on the revolutionary scientific advantages of the previous century. One can also reasonably ask why that did not happen in the Islamic world, centuries earlier, as well as China and elsewhere. No, I don't know, though I would guess a succession of chance events. But it is codswallop that the opportunities were not available elsewhere.

    (*) One of those is the statement that other places did not have all of the mineral resources that Europe had. Well, Zambia/Zimbabwe has coal, iron, copper and more. The reasons that it did not proceed the same way are understood, and were social, not geological.

    482:

    You mean that he SERIOUSLY expected things to fit in off the shelf? In England? Boggle. Almost all of the UK's housing stock predates the modern standards, most predates the existence of a single, national standard, and a great deal dates from when everything was hand fitted (even if not hand-made).

    Dammit, our house dates from 1930, the doors and windows are not a modern standard size and the internal locks are hand-made (yes, really).

    483:

    Steam engines for pumping water were a lot older, equally important, and were first proposed in 1606, but didn't appear until 1698. I suspect that the slow adoption was due to the lack of adequately good iron- and metal-working), and so depended on a lot of other, small advances. That was true for computers, bicycles and many other inventions, too. I see it as a gradual change, without any well-defined starting point.

    484:

    No, I don't know, though I would guess a succession of chance events. But it is codswallop that the opportunities were not available elsewhere.

    Major reason may have been that the earliest prototypes of steam engines (or any new technology, really) are often WORSE than what you can accomplish by throwing enough slaves or horses at the problem you are trying to solve. Horses and manual labor have to become sufficiently expensive in order for something like steam engine to start looking attractive.

    485:

    I think one of the things that held China back was its social structure.

    People were often locked into a caste. If your parents were slaves, sex workers, merchants or other of lowly status, that was where you stayed.

    Also, if the local government wanted work done for them, they had to do it and there was no guarantee of payment later.

    Meanwhile, anyone in any way related to the emperor lived a life of extreme luxury and never had to raise a finger.

    The society was hugely corrupt and pretty much stagnant for 2000 years. Looks like the best bet for a quiet life was keep your head down, be deferential and find joy in your family.

    Its interesting to speculate what they might achieved if they had adopted a less rigid structure and its not surprising that ideas they invented were refined by others.

    486:

    David L @ 446:

    OK. I give up.

    Liz 2x4

    What is the 2x4? In the US it almost universally refers to a size of lumber used in construction.

    I had to think about it for a while, but I finally got it - What size lumber do you use to build a TRUSS?

    Also, when I google TRUSS, I discover you could also call her Liz Hernia, but that might be considered impolite.

    487:

    A 2x4 isn't nearly thick-enough to build a Truss!

    488:

    Just in case anyone is interested. The internal doors date only from 1930, not somewhere that might use use previous-era technology, are 79"x32", and that doesn't match any of the currently available non-standard imperial sizes. I can assure you that pre-1900 ones are even less predictable!

    https://www.doorsuperstore.co.uk/help-and-advice/product-guides/doors/uk-door-sizes-and-conversion-chart/

    489:

    It wasn't actually money - it was that the hand pumps weren't really up to the job, as mines got deeper and wetter. I can't say whether the problem of wet, deep mines was specific to the UK or not.

    490:

    As I remember it the 1606 proposal was a free-piston engine with a lot of potential for having trouble with sealing and/or friction that would have been hard to deal with. But it would have been a cracker for the nominative determinism.

    491:

    Your final paragraph is the first abuse of her name that occurred to me.

    Another possible connection is with "truss" as in the pattern of girders used to make a bridge, specifically the variant known as the Pratt truss.

    492:

    459 - That's a reasonable impression of a lot of the English.

    478 - Unable to find a "M I Brunell" at your dates. There is a Mia Brunell Livfors, but she's Swedish and still alive.

    470 - I actually do live just over 20 miles from a UK nuclear power plant, and closer to CSB Faslane.

    493:

    Acoup advanced a theory for why steam power didn’t take off right away, basically early engines were so inefficient that you had to be in a place where coal was literally lying around on the ground for them to make sense over muscle or water power.

    Like pumping water out of coal mines

    Then, you had to be in a place where underground coal mines made sense

    An island that had deforested itself

    His thesis is really that it took an odd and unlikely chain of events to get over the initial inefficiency curve, events that didn’t occur in china or elsewhere

    494:

    You mean that he SERIOUSLY expected things to fit in off the shelf? In England? Boggle.

    I guess I wasn't clear. Born in Scotland, grew up a lot in Hong Kong. Split time for a few decades between England and the US now mostly in the US. Long enough to currently mostly think in feet and inches. But was back in England visiting new grandson and working on home improvements and having to mentally flip between inches and feet and mm and cm.

    495:

    Coal mines were not the only deep, wet UK mines - there were also tin, copper and lead.

    496:

    Also, when I google TRUSS, I discover you could also call her Liz Hernia, but that might be considered impolite.

    The "Truss" thing hit me later last night.

    In the US we don't call a 2x4 a truss. You can MAKE a truss out of 2x4s. But over hear a truss typically implies more than one bit.

    Over here we call a 2x4 a stud.

    Wander where you will with that one and Liz.

    497:

    The Great Orme copper mine is pretty dry (based on having been down inside it).

    498:

    steam power didn’t take off right away

    While steam power made a lot of things possible I think the real revolution was the concept of powered machine tools making better machine tools making better machine tools ...

    Power could come from water and in many cases was long after steam got good enough to power trains.

    499:

    People were often locked into a caste. If your parents were slaves, sex workers, merchants or other of lowly status, that was where you stayed.

    Take all that, add in armies marching back and forth, and it's an outsider's description of Europe until after WW2. Oh, and with industrialization, the hereditary serfs got thrown off their land and dumped in cities. Come to think of it, what you wrote is a good description, not just of the UK, but German lands, most of the US prior to the Civil War, and Latin America.

    So, in other words, what you wrote utterly fails as a description both for China as it was, and as an explanation for why the UK kicked off an industrial revolution. I mean, with all that cheap displaced labor caused by the Enclosure Acts, Britain should have been the last place to industrialize, not the first.

    As a comparison, Korea similarly had the nobles owning all the land, and until the 1960s it was regarded as the most backward country in Asia, "the Hermit Kingdom." Why was the history of the UK so different from Korea, when they both started in essentially the same place, mineral rich with a few rich landowners?

    Oh, and if you see the Ming Treasure fleet as a US-style operation to try to get the kingdoms along the Maritime Silk Road to set up a free trade zone under Chinese rules, it makes a lot more sense. China's weird way of doing this was a quid pro quo: if a king acknowledged the supremacy of China's emperor, the emperor in turn acknowledged the title of that king or potentate as a notional subordinate. Then every few years, the kings sent a tribute mission to the Emperor, the Emperor generously bestowed gifts to their loyal underlings, and during these tribute missions, a LOT of trade happened on the side. That's the system they tried to extend to the Arabian peninsula with the Treasure Fleets. The fight they got into in Ceylon was with a ruler who'd kicked out a Chinese ally and set up as a pirate king. If you don't defend your allies, what kind of imperial power are you?

    Anyway, too much bigotry toward China may not play so well around here. I'm not fond of the Chinese government, but I do have Chinese friends. The sooner you can seem them as people like us, the easier it is.

    500:

    You've collected an extra 'l' somewhere. Marc Isambard Brunel, father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

    501:

    Dryness of the Great Orme mines is one of the reasons it was already a deep mine back in the bronze age. The tin and copper mines around Dartmoor and down through Cornwall tended to be a lot wetter, bronze age operations around there tended to be panning downstream of lodes and limited shallow mining. Deeper mining had to wait until better pumps were available. No coal around though, and little wood on the moorlands, so engines had to be run on 'imported' coal.

    502:

    AlanD2 @ 468 THINK about what you just said - that is, by definition, impossible. All our food contains Carbon & is, therefore "organic" - an inorganic, non-Carbon feedstok will be indebile & probably undigestible. Grrrr.....

    I doubt most people would consider pure carbon - graphite, diamond, etc. - to be organic. Wikipedia has other examples:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Inorganic_carbon_compounds

    503:

    501 - Not me; I quoted the name typed in the post I referenced. I am familiar with Marc Isambard (MI) Brunel.

    502 - Agreed, although the use of Cornish tin and Welsh copper in the alloy was one way that trade between Cornwall and North Wales as far back as the Bronze Age was proven.

    504:

    Yes, and Acoup seems to have missed that. The more important use for early pumping engines was for Cornish tin mines, which were often very deep due to being ancient and working vertical-ish seams, even though that meant bringing coal in by sea and then hauling it up to wherever the mine was. Coal mines were part of it, but a lesser part of it because you've got much more choice of deposits to mine and they are usually a lot less deep. The necessary balance of arseache between hauling fuel in and chucking water out to make the idea worthwhile could arise through other circumstances than having lots of fuel already on site.

    Also, of course, a lot of the need to pump water out of mines was a consequence of the need to dig them deeper when people started using a lot more metal and coal, so that previously unaffected mines started getting beyond the point where alternatives to pumping were possible. This is most obviously the case where the original hole was on top of a hill and then they dug down below sea level, and the Cornish mines probably reached that point long before anyone else's did.

    Cornwall was a bit unusual, and in early times Germany was more important for developing mining technology than England was (indeed Elizabeth I brought in a load of German miners to try and industrialise the Lake District, which is why so many people from there are called Tyson). They seem to have been constrained by working around the limitations on available drainage methods. Papin, who reinvented the use of a piston, spent a lot of time in early German areas of mining and science, and I don't think it was inevitable that it should have been Newcomen who was the first to build a decently practical pump.

    505:

    Tin ore is heavy, which is why panning works. The first pumps were human powered, just like bilge pumps on ships, but I don't know when they were adopted.

    506:

    No you didn't; a direct copy and paste including the surrounding delimiters gives me:

    {M I Brunel}

    507:

    Heteromeles @ 462:

    While I agree on steam and coal, I disagree that China didn't have the opportunity. IIRC, they were using coal in salt and iron-making, and they're the first people to invent reciprocating cylinder pumps. So it's less clear why they didn't invent rotary steam engines.

    As for why no Chinese cannons, [...] Big, heavy cannon are worse than useless on the steppe, and the Chinese deployed a bunch of smaller, portable artillery against the Mongols. And forts.

    So yeah, if some Chinese sage had figured out how to turn heat into radial motion with enough force to power a spinning wheel, I'm quite sure they would have gone for it. Why no one did is probably one of those James Burke failed connections things involving Chinese geography and dialects, or something.

    The two are related. The moderate-precision metalworking technology needed to make good fitting pistons for low-pressure steam engines in the UK came from military canon manufacture research in France. And yes, its in Connections. Chapter 6, page 175 in the book, to be precise. Not sure where it was in the TV series.

    As for spinning technology, they basically invented the spinning wheel probably before Alexander the Great lived, and they were using treadle looms in the Han dynasty before the western Roman Empire fell, so far as anyone can tell. Silk production is actually easier to mechanize, and people have been dinking with it and improving it since people started weaving silk cloth about six thousand years ago.

    A better question is: why didn't someone think of using water power for that? Turning water power into rotary motion is much simpler than steam power. Maybe its just that the amount of energy needed for one spinning wheel was so low that nobody would dream of using a water wheel, and they couldn't imagine a machine doing the work of dozens of spinners in parallel. But yes, in an alternative history that might have triggered a Chinese industrial revolution.

    509:

    Interesting. The only tricky prerequisite for making a reasonably efficient (hand) pump is the ability to make a reasonly uniform tube. Wood has the problem that it swells unevenly with water, and pottery is hopeless. This would explain why effective hand pumps for mines seem to have predated steam ones by less than a century.

    https://www.pumpsandsystems.com/history-pumps-through-years

    510:

    " Wood has the problem that it swells unevenly with water, and pottery is hopeless. "

    Brass/bronze? I think it would be possible, might be an amusing amateur science project, to make a fairly uniform brass tube by several "primitive" techniques. At least uniform enough to be adequately sealed with leather gaskets.

    511:

    Troutwaxer @ 488:

    A 2x4 isn't nearly thick-enough to build a Truss!

    Ever tried to build a Truss out of bricks?

    512:

    I once got interested in how we got from crude wooden screws to Ramsden's accurate 125 threads per inch screws in the 1790s. Interestingly, it's basically a matter of toggling back and forth between two devices. Given a screw of certain accuracy, you can make a gear that's somewhat more accurate. Given a gear of certain accuracy, you can make a screw that's somewhat more accurate.

    513:

    David L @ 497:

    Pieces of 2x4 can be assembled into a TRUSS.

    A 2x4 pre-cut to a certain length (93" in the U.S.**) is a "stud".

    ** Just looked on Lowe's/Home Depot's websites and apparently they're now 92-5/8". Things have changed since I worked building houses in north Raleigh in the early 70s.

    514:

    And, if you search for M I Brunel on Wikipedia it returns Maria Christina "Mia" Brunell Livfors.

    515:

    For large enough spans of time and across enough distance, the effect of happenstance approaches 0. There is some objective reason the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe when it did, that we can be sure of. Whether we know yet what it was may be less certain.

    Another thing we can be certain of is that specific technologies do not arise of themselves. It takes an infrastructure to make an innovation profitable.

    A final thing we can be certain of is that all populations everywhere are roughly equally creative in the long run. If China didn't develop the innovation, we can assume it's because the infrastructure to promote it wasn't there.

    What infrastructure was that? How large was their pool of free skilled labor? How important was money and profit?

    Or, another way of posing the same question, what was China's economy optimized for at that time?

    516:

    Only if you expect it to do your thinking for you. If you select "Pages containing", it's the second hit (following that for I.K. Brunel).

    517:

    An especially blinkered attitude, given the extensive list of Chinese inventions during this alleged 2000-year-long period of stagnation. (A quick check on wiki gives "four great inventions": paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass. Plus a large number of others. This very blog has featured extensive discussions of the virtues of Chinese wheelbarrows and the possibility of their serving as the basis for a post-collapse transport network.)

    The funny thing is that there was a great deal of European fascination with China during the earlier parts of the Enlightenment: it was an advanced but non-Christian civilization, and so of great interest to the philosophes. Only later, as Europe extended its colonization did the contemptuous attitude develop. The Macartney mission of 1793 may have marked the turning point.

    518:

    If you can cast church bells...

    Of course you've still got the same basic thing that if you can make a pump barrel you can make a cannon, and vice versa. (And indeed bronze cannon existed right up until artillery started being made with steel, since it's not brittle like cast iron and therefore it was easier to be confident that the cannon wouldn't blow up in your face. Mostly for quite small ones as time went on, but it was also possible to make sodding huge ones that came apart for transport, which is another thing cast iron is less good for.)

    I think the thing is that for pumping out a mine, reciprocating a piston in a barrel by hand isn't going to come anywhere near the required capacity even for quite a little mine. Before the power was available to drive such a thing in large size and at reasonable speed, probably the nearest thing they used to a piston in a barrel would be a trunk pump; a square wooden vertical trunk and an endless loop of rope or chain going up the middle and down the outside, with plugs or bundles of rags fixed to it at intervals that would more or less seal inside the trunk for long enough to scrape a lump of water up it and out the top. They used this for bilge pumping on ships, and the Romans built one in the middle of London that got dug up a few years back. An alternative version had no trunk and used buckets instead of plugs, and then in turn there was the rigid version of the bucket version, ie. a waterwheel going backwards. All of these could easily be driven by some kind of treadmill or horse/ox gin, and achieve reasonable capacity, but with the limitation of not having all that great a lift, so you had to have several in cascade if you needed a lot of lift. So you'd have mines with a kind of staircase of huge underground caverns containing big backwards waterwheels to lift water up to the next level, until it got to a level high enough to be drained through an adit. Sometimes you even had an even bigger forwards waterwheel down there as well so you could use a smaller amount of falling water to power the thing. All these methods are also able to handle water with a lot of solid muck in it, which is useful both for a mine and for a bilge.

    The advantage of a piston-in-barrel type pump for a mine is that it's far more compact and simple to install without digging huge extra caves to put it in, and (as long as you strain the water) you can achieve both greater capacity and higher lifts (so you don't need cascades) with it, if you also have enough driving power in one place to handle that product of lift and capacity (which is another pump being driven backwards by steam) and good enough high-pressure plumbing to carry the output up the shaft (which is a load more barrels joined end to end without the pistons in them). So while being able to make one barrel does get you a pump, to keep your mine dry you need to be able to make lots of barrels just as easily - involving a similar amount of metal and cylinder-making as arming a few big ships. So it's a kind of all-or-nothing thing; until people have got far enough already to be able to swallow the all, they tend to prefer to put up with the nothing, and I think it was mainly as a result of making lots of cannon that they did get far enough.

    519:

    "Wrong: there's legislation on the table in Holyrood and a Supreme Court case asking for a ruling on its legality without Westminster's say-so." Well, lets see if that works ..in a Political Environment? An Environment that prevails today, one in which the Torys can declare ..See the Poor Scots are being abused by the Scot Nats ..who are deeply evil and also even more incompetent than us ?Two years to the next General Election in which the Torys are in need of an easily defeatable opponent? The Labour Party? Oh dear oh dear ..Labour do seem to be beating themselves about the ears in an effort to destroy the remnants of Corbynism , this in the new wave of militant labour union concerted strikes? Which are bound to find favour with the UKs electorate? So? In the event of a NEW Referendum on Scots. 'Independence' Under EU ? Hows about my ever so democratic proposal for a vote on Scots REf for everyone in the UK who is entitled to vote in a General Election? Is it a total non starter? If not why not? For I do consider that it is a line that the Torys could easily take in the unlikely event that they concede to another referendum on Scots Independence?

    520:

    "it's basically a matter of toggling back and forth between two devices."

    That's very interesting. Can you provide a pointer? Screws are important.

    521:

    The pipes need to be fairly long, and the main issue is efficiency. The other designs all need a lot more effort relative to the result. That ignores the fact that large caverns were not good news in mines before modern concrete etc.

    522:

    they're now 92-5/8"

    Getting deep into the woods here but with a single bottom and double top plate of 1 1/2" each that gives you 97-1/8" total which works for 8' (96") of drywall with a gap at the bottom and top. You put the ceiling drywall up first and the gap at the bottom allows for flooring with a different thermal expansion than the subfloor with the gap hidden by the floor molding. And they also stock 96" lengths.

    523:

    "Wrong: there's legislation on the table in Holyrood and a Supreme Court case asking for a ruling on its legality without Westminster's say-so." Well, lets see if that works ..in a Political Environment? An Environment that prevails today, one in which the Torys can declare ..See the Poor Scots are being abused by the Scot Nats ..who are deeply evil and also even more incompetent than us ? Two years to the next General Election? In which the Torys are in need of an easily defeat-able opponent? The Labour Party? Oh dear, oh dear ..Labour do seem to be beating themselves about the ears in an effort to destroy the remnants of Corbynism , this in the new wave of militant labour union concerted strikes? Which are bound to find favour with the UKs electorate? So? In the event of a NEW Referendum on Scots. 'Independence' Under EU ? Hows about my ever so democratic proposal for a vote on Scots REf for everyone in the UK who is entitled to vote in a General Election? Is it a total non starter? If not why not? For I do consider that it is a line that the Torys could easily take in the unlikely event that they concede to another referendum on Scots Independence? The thing is that, " "Scotland's status as an independent nation is no more England's business than the UK's membership of the EU was the business of any other EU member state." The thing is that Scotland is a nation within the United Kingdom..that's the way that it is. Scotland gave up its status as an Independent Nation outside of the UK long ago.. hundreds of years ago. Why should the Torys of the UK/or the Labour Party of the same, concede anything at all to the enthusiasts for Scots Independence? And if they did ..go MAD .. and concede to a second Independence Referendum? What's so very wrong with that being voted on by the entirety of the UKs electorate ..after all it does affect all of the citizens of the UK? That's the line that I would anticipate that the Torys would take in the unlikely event that they would agree to another referendum on Scots Independence ..and would the Labour Party disagree with this very democratic process..and thereby commit suicide as a party of Power in England? Its just speculation of course ... and we have loads of time until the next political catastrophe.

    524:

    » I suspect that the slow adoption was due to the lack of adequately good iron- and metal-working)«

    Many people misunderstand what James Watt's breakthrough was: He didn't really invent the steam-engine, he invented a steam-engine which /worked/.

    The most important bit is arguably "Watt's Linkage" which reduces leakage from the piston seal a /lot/.

    525:

    »That's very interesting. Can you provide a pointer? Screws are important. «

    There's a very good book on these topics called "How round is your circle", I cant remember if it covers threads and screws, but very interesting reading if you are into mechanical measurements and metrology.

    526:

    Do you mean mines or quarries? I've been "down" (more along since the entries were adits) several slate quarries.

    527:

    A better question is: why didn't someone think of using water power for that? Turning water power into rotary motion is much simpler than steam power. Maybe its just that the amount of energy needed for one spinning wheel was so low that nobody would dream of using a water wheel, and they couldn't imagine a machine doing the work of dozens of spinners in parallel. But yes, in an alternative history that might have triggered a Chinese industrial revolution.

    Turns out China had waterwheel technology around the same time they had spinning-wheel technology, ca. 500 BCE. So they had most or all of the pieces, but never assembled them.

    There are four possibilities here:

  • There's a small but critical change, like the seals Poul flagged in 525.

  • It is about politics or culture, like why Europe didn't adopt the horse collar or mold board plow until quite late.

  • It's down to missed connections and happenstance. China isn't the equivalent of England, it's the size and diversity equivalent of Europe. You could fairly easily imagine a bunch of disparate inventions at the far ends of Europe never getting together due to distance and language, and the same may have happened in China. Indeed, the Zhuangzi even has a parable about this.

  • Time travelers. China's failure to capitalize on its early lead in our timeline is due to malign influence from the future, which led to the arrant absurdity of England firing off the Industrial Revolution 2000 years later. Possibly English time travelers were involved? Anyway, this is a silly argument, until you look at the chain of missed opportunities and wonder how in the heck they had such bad luck as to miss them all. Maybe we should be wondering about enemy action, rather than trying to rationalize Chinese history as a combination of great genius and baffling idiocy.

  • The last would make a good story, anyway. People going back in time to prevent human extinction due to climate change brought on by an industrial revolution. If so, we're in a, erm, privileged timeline where climate change forces people to invent time travel to try to uncause the problem (???)

    528:

    I wasn't trying to say why the UK kicked off an industrial age, but merely suggesting a reason - restrictive social structure - why China did not.

    The fact I see the Chinese social structure up until communism as a potential contributing factor in the absence of a Chinese industrial revolution, does not make me a racist.

    Thats a bit of a stretch and I think some colleagues and the wife of one of my oldest friends would be a bit surprised. Bright, decent caring people mainly, one of whom introduced me to the joy that is mongolian beef with chilli brussel sprouts.

    As to the Treasure Fleets - I understand how they worked. I just see it for what it was - China had a similar area and population to that of Europe. I'm not arguing that what other countries did later, of a similar vein, was laudable.

    The fact I think China has been run by shits for 2000 years and had a very rigid structure, doesn't mean I dislike the people. Every country has nice people and every country has shits - quite often in power (we certainly have).

    I just wonder how high Faraday and Newton would have climbed if they had been born in China.

    529:

    I meant mines. Quarries are an easier task, I agree.

    530:

    De Marquis & others
    Let's get this straight: The Industrial Revolution occurred in ONE Country ( The UK ) - with France close behind, what a surprise.
    Why? I wonder ... the UK's "aristocracy" was not frightened of getting its hands dirty or being involved in "trade" ... the poster-boys for this have to be "The Dukes of Devonshire" who owned vast mining & quarrying interests & supported technical innovation, because it boosted their profits - hell one of the inner family of one of the Dukes was, himself a scientific enquirer & experimenter Henry Cavendish ....
    Or the (already) very rich mine-owners, who supported & encouraged a Mine-wright & engineer called Geo Stephenson to improve on existing works ....

    Grant
    Post-communism, the current Chinese/Han social structure is unchanged - keep your head down, hope for a quiet family life & hope that the Emperor/Head of the Party does not notice you ....

    531:

    For large enough spans of time and across enough distance, the effect of happenstance approaches 0.

    So you disagree with Steven Jay Gould on evolution, then?

    532:

    How so; you're still moving large quantities (of admittedly more stable) rock along underground tunnels, once you've dug the tunnels (or did you assume that I had a silent "open cast" before "quarry"?)

    533:

    Can you provide a pointer? Screws are important.

    If my notes survived the downsizing associated with a recent move, I haven't seen them. Sorry. The reference that was most useful was some a book on the history of machine tools published around 1920 that I got from university stacks somewhere through one of the library networks.

    534:

    If a 2x4 were thick as a brick you could probably use it to build a Truss.

    535:

    From the Wikipedia article:

    James Watt had tried unsuccessfully for several years to obtain accurately bored cylinders for his steam engines, and was forced to use hammered iron, which was out of round and caused leakage past the piston. In 1774 John Wilkinson invented a boring machine in which the shaft that held the cutting tool extended through the cylinder and was supported on both ends, unlike the cantilevered borers then in use. With this machine he was able to bore the cylinder for Boulton & Watt's first commercial engine, and was given an exclusive contract for the provision of cylinders owing to the lower tolerance between the piston and cylinder and the resulting improvement in efficiency by lowering steam losses through the gap.[9][10] Until this era, advancements in drilling and boring practice had lain only within the application field of gun barrels for firearms and cannon; Wilkinson's achievement was a milestone in the gradual development of boring technology, as its fields of application broadened into engines, pumps, and other industrial uses.

    While the main market for steam engines had been for pumping water out of mines, he saw much more use for them in the driving of machinery in ironworks such as blowing engines, forge hammers and rolling mills, the first rotary engine being installed at Bradley in 1783. Among his many inventions was a reversing rolling mill with two steam cylinders that made the process much more economical.

    John Wilkinson took a key interest in obtaining orders for these more efficient steam engines and other uses for cast iron from the owners of Cornish copper mines. As part of this interest, he bought shares in eight of the mines to help provide capital.

    About James Watt:

    In 1763, Watt was asked to repair a model Newcomen engine belonging to the university.[21] Even after repair, the engine barely worked. After much experimentation, Watt demonstrated that about 3/4 of the thermal energy of the steam was being consumed in heating the engine cylinder on every cycle.[22] This energy was wasted because, later in the cycle, cold water was injected into the cylinder to condense the steam to reduce its pressure. Thus, by repeatedly heating and cooling the cylinder, the engine wasted most of its thermal energy rather than converting it into mechanical energy.

    Watt's critical insight, arrived at in May 1765 as he crossed Glasgow Green park,[23] was to cause the steam to condense in a separate chamber apart from the piston, and to maintain the temperature of the cylinder at the same temperature as the injected steam by surrounding it with a "steam jacket".[22] Thus, very little energy was absorbed by the cylinder on each cycle, making more available to perform useful work. Watt had a working model later that same year.

    536:

    For large enough spans of time and across enough distance, the effect of happenstance approaches 0. There is some objective reason the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe when it did, that we can be sure of. Whether we know yet what it was may be less certain.

    I think people who have studied evolutionary theory or Black Swan theory would argue that the effect of happenstance approaches 1 over time. See the Chixculub impact, which was a once-in-a-billion-year event made far worse by where it hit (shallow ocean with sulfur-rich sediment). Or the Permian-Triassic extinction, where a massively large volcanic province erupted right under a carboniferous (meaning young) coal field and lofted massively more CO2 than it would have otherwise.

    537:

    Surely both are correct, at different timescales?

    This week is very sensitive to random events, but this universe is probably almost completely insensitive to them. Random stuff happens down in the noise, but barring some smart creature working out how to break the system there's going to be a flurry of hot excitement followed by a slow ramp into a stable state.

    I suspect it's also point of view: evolution is a long series of random events, most more or less benign, but some being significant enough to produce a new stable-ish state until the next random event changes things up. But tautologically, if you look at anything alive today the chances of one of its ancestors being killed by a random event before it reproduced is zero :)

    538:

    "The pipes need to be fairly long, and the main issue is efficiency. The other designs all need a lot more effort relative to the result."

    This is true, but they also lend themselves well to being made in the kind of size where one donkey or ox supplies the effort and it is transmitted through bits of wood. Having a separate low-density power source for each stage of lift keeps the stresses low and allows you to use low strength materials and imprecise construction, etc.

    My point is that there is a great deal of "all or nothing" about moving to a "proper" piston pump. Just making the pump on its own isn't very useful; you also need those long pipes and a decent enough power source to make it worthwhile, so one way or another you need to be able to make not just one, but hundreds of hollow metal cylinders able to withstand a reasonable pressure, in a variety of sub-types. As Kardashev implied, making one pump barrel to show you can do it is pretty feasible even with very primitive resources, but to actually make a useful installation you need to be able to mass-produce things like that, which is a different matter altogether and requires you to have a significant amount of capacity already.

    Once you have made the jump, of course, your pumping capacity leaps up an order of magnitude, and suddenly everything starts to take off.

    "That ignores the fact that large caverns were not good news in mines before modern concrete etc."

    That depends a LOT on what kind of mine it is and where. Coal mines tend to be more likely to be like that; the seams rarely have much of a dip to them, so you're mining out large (but usually relatively thin) horizontal layers, in sedimentary geology where adjacent layers are not always made of something reliable. You could say that half the trick of coal mining is not in the holding the roof up, but in the controlling the consequences of not holding it up, so all the ground movement when you let it fall in doesn't fuck other parts of the mine up.

    The tin and copper mines in Cornwall and the Lake District and similar places are very different. The ore bodies were formed by volcanic and hydrothermal intrusive processes going up fissures in the surrounding rock, producing mineralised regions shaped roughly like giant vertical Smarties. So the mines tended to be long, narrow and very, very deep. Stopes would extend vertically over several levels of the mine, with the continuity of upper levels being maintained by means of bridges and galleries as the extraction of the ore from lower levels left them hanging in space; entire ore bodies would be removed, leaving sodding gigantic caverns up to hundreds of metres in height and with really remarkably few lateral timber props to support the hanging wall.

    One of the main veins at Coniston crops out half way up the Old Man, above Coppermines Valley on the south side. They worked it up all the way to the surface, leaving a long, narrow and sinister-looking crack where the outcrop used to be. You can chuck a stone in and it's a long time before it hits, and an even longer time before it stops clattering about; and you're still only hearing it fall through the uppermost of three similarly-sized regions of what used to be connected open space all the way down to below the level of the lake.

    In a mine like that, if the veins were close enough to vertical you could simply use an old stope to put a backwards waterwheel in; even if you weren't lucky, the hole for one to lift water up a level would still be among the smaller of the holes you were digging.

    Underground slate quarries can also produce some impressively enormous holes. The surrounding rock is usually pretty strong and the hole you leave behind is more of a very rough dome or arch shape than anything; while you do sometimes get large chunks of rock in the roof suddenly realising that their upper boundaries are all fissures and the rock below them isn't there any more, like Wile E Coyote running off a cliff, having the whole lot fall in is something you generally don't expect unless the management have been ignoring the owners of the quarries next door telling them to sort their act out and stop taking the piss with extraction ratios for the last twenty years.

    As for waterwheels, people seem to find something about the old sites that invites them to put bidirectional electric ones there :)

    Mines vs. quarries is a terminology trap. The obvious conclusion from observation that a mine is all tunnels hidden underground with miners in, while a quarry is just a big hole out in the open with Doctor Who film crews in, is technically incorrect. The distinction is more along the lines of a mine being a source of something which is useful by way of chemical transformation, like ore or fuel, while a quarry is a source of something which is useful as it is dug up, with only physical transformation, like roadstone or slate. So you end up with a quarry that looks like a mine at Blaenau and a mine that looks like a quarry at Ffos y Fran. Although limestone for smelting iron or making cement still comes out of a quarry, and diamonds for wasting money on still come out of a mine, so it still isn't great.

    539:

    Sorry, it's almost exactly the opposite: normal reigns most scales, but extreme events tend to be highly unpredictable, random, or both. This is why Taleb's The Black Swan is so important, because it provides the rudiments of a theory for handling extreme events. He's a financier, and he noticed that the stock market is normally fairly predictable (in a statistical sense), EXCEPT that the biggest five changes caught everybody completely off guard, so that the people who came out ahead afterward did so out of luck rather than foresight.

    Mathematically, his point is that we have so few samples of truly big events that we can't properly estimate their frequency of occurrence or impact, pretty much by definition. So instead, we tend to model them using things like normal statistics, which make badly wrong estimates of how often rare, huge events happen, and things get worse from there. And example of this is the "1000-year flood." It's a few standard deviations off a mean rainfall year. Problem is, in California we used to get them at least once a century, but we've only had decent rain gauges under them for 150 years, so all our flood infrastructure is undersized...

    Black swans show up at all scales. If you look at what the astronomers are saying about galaxy formation and evolution, it's all about collisions, and the JWST shows these in action. When galaxies collide, gas clouds get rammed together and there are bursts of star formation. Without collisions, there are far fewer new stars. So our Sun is almost certainly here likely because the precursor to our modern Milky Way collided with another galaxy around 4.6 billion years ago, and our sun (and probably Orion's Arm) formed from the interactions among the stars within each galaxy.

    Similarly, we have our weird huge Moon almost certainly because proto-Earth was randomly impacted by Theia in a way that blew off of a lot of terrestrial crust but left it to form our anomalously large Moon. Had the collision happened differently, we might have ended up like Mars or Mercury, which apparently got hit too.

    On Earth, every mass extinction event has had a different cause and a different unfolding. Large Igneous Provinces are associated with some, but some of the largest LIPs aren't associated with any extinction. Location apparently matters a lot (a big LIP forming under a big coal field is bad news. Fortunately, thanks to humans, there aren't any more big coal fields). Some mass extinctions unroll over millions of years of bad luck (The Devonian), while Chicxulub unfolded over decades after the impact. If we humans cause a mass extinction, it'll be the first caused by a mammal, but it's possible that Archeopteris caused the end of the Devonian by being the first really successful genus of trees and thereby fracking up global nutrient cycling in a way that killed off all the first iteration amphibians and pushed vertebrates back into the water. This is speculative, but first forests show up, things go wacko a few million years later, climate craziness ensues, and it's a mass extinction. Now trees are a necessary part of the biosphere, so that won't happen again.

    That's the big stuff in evolution, and it's random, black swan, unpredictable non-repeating events.

    On the lower level with evolution, it gets pretty predictable. This is where Thompson's Relentless Evolution comes in. He talks about coevolution, what Gould called "microevolution." This is the survival of the fittest stuff, and it's all been very well documented, and generally has nothing to do with speciation or cladogenesis. It's all about what survives, how they pass on their genes and memes, and what happens next. This is the land of the Red Queen predator/prey, parasitism, disease, mutualism, competition, and so on. As with politics, this is normally about organisms jostling with each other. Change happens, but it tends to fluctuate around norms, rather than jump state.

    This is what I mean about the small being predictable. While we'll all die (a big change), day-to-day life is normally fairly predictable. Normal politics is often predictable, even though both sides are striving hard. Every once in a while, though, a Black Swan breaks through and changes things radically.

    Now the Industrial Revolution was a black swan. It wasn't predictable, and it's subject to all sorts of post hoc rationalizations. Why China wasn't where it happened is equally a Black Swan. The discussion we've had here is perfectly normal for a Black Swan debate, and you can see examples of similar things in Taleb.

    This is actually critically important. Prediction is only possible in normally behaving systems. Applying rules from normal life to black swan events, to quote Taleb, will fool you, quite badly. Similarly, post hoc explanations for why Black Swans happened may be correct or not, but they generally are totally useless for predicting what the next Black Swan will be. Since Taleb accidentally made millions in a Black Swan market crash and then spent years studying the phenomenon, I think he's probably right.

    540:

    Different problems.

    The condenser was an improvement to the Newcomen atmospheric beam pumping engine. In such an engine the force on the piston is always in the same direction; it pulls the beam downwards as it is sucked by the vacuum, then the weight of the pump rod pulls it back up again on the return stroke. So if you make the end of the beam a sector of a circle rather than just an end, and have a chain passing over the outside of it to connect it to the piston rod, you can easily be sure of having the piston move in a straight vertical line; it doesn't try to rock sideways in the bore, so the only bad leakage problem is from the bore being out of round.

    For the more efficient positive-pressure engine where the piston is pushed outwards by steam at above atmospheric pressure, and also for an engine intended to produce rotary motion rather than to reciprocate a pump rod, the flexible chain connection isn't suitable as it can't handle the reversals of force; you need a rigid linkage. But with a direct connection of the piston rod to the beam, the arc-of-a-circle motion of the end of the beam causes the piston to rock sideways in the bore and leak past the sides, so you need to convert the arc-of-a-circle motion into straight-line motion using some kind of rigid linkage.

    This is what Watt's parallel motion linkage did, and it was the first effective method making both rotary engines and positive-pressure engines possible.

    Or actually it's what it nearly did; it doesn't produce exact straight line motion, but the residual curvature is on a large enough radius that it doesn't matter. I still find this a bit of a shame, because there are several forms of linkage which do produce exact straight line motion without being more complicated, so it bugs me that he didn't use one of those instead.

    541:

    If a 2x4 were thick as a brick you could probably use it to build a Truss.

    If you want more slime*, it looks like y'all might have a Lizard Trustee voted in as UK PM, and there's a QAnon Queen of Canada who claims to be reptilian shapeshifter with magical powers, and who wants her Qnut followers to arrest police for crimes against humanity.

    What is it about lizard-people in Commonwealth right wing politics right now? Is the August heat drawing them out from under their rocks or something?

    *Now, if want an article about genuine, wholesome slime as a palate cleanser, check this one out. Politics gives slime a bad rap it probably doesn't deserve.

    542:

    Say you make a rough leadscrew, say by using a slow wood-turning lathe and moving the tool as steadily as you can by hand, so you do end up with a thread but it wobbles about and isn't all that even.

    If you then take something with a bit of compliance, like a block of wood with a chunk of felt on one side, wide enough to span several threads, and shove it against the threads while rotating the leadscrew, it will screw itself along with the compliance partly averaging out the irregularities of the thread, and move more evenly than a rigid follower tracking a single thread would do. So you can then synchronise a second lathe with the first one, and use that averaged motion from the rough leadscrew in the first one to guide the tool for the second one, to cut a second leadscrew with less irregularity than the first rough one.

    You then put the new leadscrew in the first lathe and repeat the cycle until you're satisfied with the result. Once you've made your first good one, you can then scale up or down from it with a pantograph mechanism to make any thread you like.

    There are of course lots of ways you could embody that principle in some other process, whatever's convenient, though I must say I'm having trouble imagining one where gears form a stage in the repeating cycle that still manages to be convenient. Cutting gear teeth to a profile that gives smooth movement is a pain in the arse, and I think I'd rather sort myself out with some decent screw threads first and move on to gears later.

    543:

    If I was making my first lead screw I think I'd start with cutting a triangle of paper. Then I'd wrap and glue that around the wooden dowel. Then cut along the paper edge by hand.

    But that assumes you've already got a lathe to make the dowels with. It's that possible without a good flat and screws?

    544:

    Yeah, dowels are easy enough, you can get quite good with an all-wood, handmade treadle lathe.

    Gears can be surprisingly easy for some numbers, just tedious. Draw a circle, bisect it, use the compass to divide it into 6 equal sections, divide each of those into two or three parts, repeat until bored. Now file away around each equally spaced point until you have teeth that more or less match your screw. A bigger circle with more teeth is better, and if you were game you might do quite well with 360 teeth or even more. Viz, more teeth engaged with your screw at a time.

    With a very even dowel and consistent thickness paper, cut a straight edge and wrap that round in a spiral. Roll your gear along the table making small indents, then use that to match the length of the piral to the tooth spacing. Have fun filing...

    545:

    FWIW ClickSpring on YouTube is reproducing the Antikythera mechanism using period-plausible techniques and it's interesting watching the collision between modern high tech tools and very basic handmade ones. He seems to say "I hand-made one gear using files etc I made myself, I'm going to do the other 20 using a lathe and gear cutter". Or possibly those are paid projects he does to fund the main one, you probably have to join his Patreon community to find out.

    My experience with this stuff is more at the "relentlessly modern, zero budget" end where I would occasionally have to modify scrounged parts or create them from scratch. Find a brass cylinder that clamps to the shaft, file it down to a gear that engages with the other parts. Which might as well be a cast lump with a hole in it as far as "basic but not primitive technology" goes (real Primitive Technology is "I have dirt, and trees. Go!")

    546:

    Para 5 info - Glasgow Green (park) is a real place, and exists to this day. We can't locate exactly where James Watt had his idea any more accurately than "crossing Glasgow Green" though as it's some 55 hectares in area.

    547:

    @Industrialisation:

    This reminds me of a really great post on Reddit, that I found some weeks ago, why it didn't happen earlier.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gikcoj/the_roman_empire_was_closer_to_an_industrial/

    548:

    Screws, etc
    Jesse Ramsden was very important in the scientific as well as industrial revolution(s) - follow the link!

    549:

    I had noticed the parallels between the Imperial Dynasties and Communism in China but the postings were long enough already... Lets just say the lifestyles of the party members are rather better than those below them. But with obvious costs:

    Mention Tiananmen Square and go to prison.

    Highlight sexual assault by a senior party member and vanish for months.

    Profess the wrong religion and be sent to reeducation camps/prisons.

    The fact a country has a law against "picking a quarrel" - a placeholder for dissent - with a 10 years sentence tells you all you need to know.

    Democracy may give us morons like Redwood, Truss, Johnson and Grayling but Xi is in a far more dangerous league.

    550:

    normal reigns most scales, but extreme events tend to be highly unpredictable, random, or both

    Well sometimes things just emerge from the background, but if there's historical data they can be predictable. EC might have his own comments to make, but Poisson distribution probability does come to mind. I would think that the issue with Black Swan events is not that they are unique so there are no historical examples, but actually exactly that they come from out of the blue rather than out of the background, so there's no associable data to study and we couldn't predict it happening again, even after it's happened a few times. Or it takes a new form of knowledge to study the new background the thing emerged from, perhaps.

    Even though there has only been one industrial revolution, can we now predict industrial revolutions in the now impossible cases of other ones emerging spontaneously? Maybe so, but we'll never know because it's become untestable. Even if industrial society goes away and has to emerge again, in that case there's no "us" to make the observation...

    551:

    I can't say whether the problem of wet, deep mines was specific to the UK or not.

    The article at ACOUP linked upthread argues that they were, specifically because Britain had essentially removed all the forest it could for agriculture by that time leaving a demand for coal that made those wet, deep mines profitable. And once you had a use case for a steam pump, right where you have endless coal to power it, incremental improvements make economic sense. I can't confirm that argument either, but it at least seems plausible.

    552:

    It's also nonsense.

    553:

    "Let's get this straight: The Industrial Revolution occurred in ONE Country ( The UK ) - with France close behind, what a surprise.

    Why? I wonder ... the UK's "aristocracy" was not frightened of getting its hands dirty or being involved in "trade" ...

    Or the (already) very rich mine-owners, who supported & encouraged a Mine-wright & engineer called Geo Stephenson to improve on existing works ....

    You're just kicking the can down the road. Why was the UK's aristocracy not frightened, while other's presumably were? Why were the rich mine-owners willing to support an innovative engineer, while the rich elites in other places did not?

    The answer is that none of this is true. Agrarian economies are typically very innovative and continually act to optimize themselves to become more efficient agrarian economies. But one agrarian economy broke the pattern, and assuming human nature is universal, this could have had nothing to do with any personality characteristics whatsoever.

    The systemic incentive were different somehow.

    554:

    Perhaps I should expand, though all the information is available elsewhere in this thread. In 1700, the drivers for mine drainage were at least as much the metal ore mines as coal, and a lot of the development was done by people from the West Country (which has no coal). Furthermore, while only c. 10% of England's area was wooded, almost all was managed, used mostly for fuel, and that gave almost exactly the same amount of energy.

    Yes, coal was critical to the EXPANSION of the industrial revolution, but it was not even particularly important to its initiation, or things like the invention of the steam engine. But the coal myth won't die :-(

    https://gpih.ucdavis.edu/files/Clark_Jacks.pdf

    555:

    Yes. The trouble about extreme events is that they often correspond roughly to a Poisson distribution with a very small parameter, and you can't really predict them except over a long period. There will be roughly ten 100-year events in a millennium, but how many in a decade or even a century? While they don't strictly come out of the blue, that's what they seem to do.

    556:

    "I think people who have studied evolutionary theory or Black Swan theory would argue that the effect of happenstance approaches 1 over time."

    For the effect to approach 1 would require that everything that is happening right now is the direct result of the Chixculub impact, which isn't true. My typing this to you isn't really predictable from that event at all.

    I think you are confusing phenomena at different scales. There are rare random events that change things at a large scale: the species that are alive, the nature of the climate. The amount of information the Chixculub event gives about the climate on Earth later on is high (it allows us to predict the climate fairly accurately) but the amount of information it gives us about later small scale events (you and I joining this blog and having this exchange) is indistinguishable from zero.

    None of this in any way contradicts the Black Swan effect, which is our tendency to ignore outliers and estimate their occurrence as less frequent than they really are. The other side of that is to treat Black Swans, when they happen and can't be ignored, as more influential than the really are, because then they stand out.

    557:

    Sorry, I missed you the first time through, so my replies are out of order.

    "So you disagree with Steven Jay Gould on evolution, then?"

    The theory of punctuated equilibrium, which is what I assume you are referring to, states, IIRC, that evolution proceeds in gradual incremental steps, then suddenly more extensive changes will occur in a relatively short period of time, before incremental adaptation resumes.

    Of course this doesn't relate to what I was talking about at all. We are discussing why England the Industrial Revolution and not China (or Rome, or whoever). I regard the effect of happenstance as almost zero. That's like saying primates climb trees, not as a result of adaptation to objective conditions in the environment, but due to happenstance. Evolution depends on random mutation much like history depends on innovation, but in both cases the mutation/innovation doesn't spread unless it is a successful adaptation to something.

    Why was, say, the steam engine adaptive in England but not in China or Rome? What was it an adaptation to?

    558:

    To your question, arguably, deep, wet mines. England's minerals had been mined since neolithic times, and most of the surface deposits had gone. And many of the sub-surface mines were wet. Rome was much earlier in the exploitation process. What the situation was in China, I can't say.

    559:

    "To your question, arguably, deep, wet mines. England's minerals had been mined since neolithic times, and most of the surface deposits had gone. And many of the sub-surface mines were wet. Rome was much earlier in the exploitation process. What the situation was in China, I can't say."

    While plausible, this is still kicking the can down the road. Why was most of England's surface deposits gone, and the sub-surface mines wet? What I'm trying to get to is something the English themselves didn't do (which is like saying primates evolved opposing digits because they started climbing trees. Why did they start climbing trees? Because something in the environment changed).

    With history, it's more complicated than that, but the underlying principle is the same. All human communities are open systems. What external inputs started the sequence of internal changes?

    560:

    Eh? Four millennia of mining in a heavily-populated region will remove most of the surface deposits; and the reason for the population density was probably the reliable rainfall and hence fertility. And the reasons the mines were and are wet is (a) due to the geology and (b) that rainfall and minimal evaporation. You are trying to look for causes that don't exist - those factors can best be regarded as just chance.

    561:

    Yes, or another method is to wrap a length of wire around it, which itself gives you enough of a thread shape to get started. These days that's easier, since it largely guides itself and you can get uniform wire in kilometre lengths for the asking if you want. I don't know how well they could make long uniform lengths of wire in the olden days, but wire-drawing is one of those things that always amazes me they could do it at all, and the answer to "how well could such-and-such a bunch make wire", if it isn't "not at all", seems to always turn out to be "far better than I expect".

    As Moz says, dowels are easy; a properly basic wood-turning lathe starts at two points plus (in the deluxe version) a straight line for a tool-rest, so "spinning wheel with nearly all the bits removed" still rather overstates the complexity. Flats are also easy, especially if you've got a bit of slate - split it and then lap the two bits against each other for greater precision.

    562:

    The theory of punctuated equilibrium, which is what I assume you are referring to, states, IIRC, that evolution proceeds in gradual incremental steps, then suddenly more extensive changes will occur in a relatively short period of time, before incremental adaptation resumes.

    Nope. The theory of punctuated equilibrium is old news. Gould and Lewontin were correct in their observations, but they're now a sideline in modern evolution. Turned out that, while they were hogging the spotlight with the gradualist versus punctuated equilibrium debate, the real revolution was cladistics, which put evolution studies on a quantitative basis, where what Gould was doing was qualitative. This cladistic revolution happened in the 90s as Gould was winding down, and it was the biggest revolution in evolution since Darwin.

    I went to grad school in the middle of it, and it was absolutely bonkers, with the textbooks being regularly thrown out as more information came in. This may sound normal to in computers, but biology runs more on the once-per-decade update schedule.

    So if your latest model for evolution is Gould, the best analogy for your situation is that you've only studied analog computing using vacuum tubes (you got your PhD in electronics in 1961, and left the field) and think that's current in 1982. Meanwhile, everyone who works on computers went to integrated circuits and digital computing.

    If you want to start getting your head around where the field is Thompson's Relentless Evolution is only a few years old, and it's pretty cool.

    That's like saying primates climb trees, not as a result of adaptation to objective conditions in the environment, but due to happenstance. Evolution depends on random mutation much like history depends on innovation, but in both cases the mutation/innovation doesn't spread unless it is a successful adaptation to something.

    The second statement doesn't follow from the first. You're right, that arboreal animals mostly occur where there are trees. But primates? Our clade started differentiating before Chicxulub. We're here, not because they climbed trees, but because all the mammals that survived that event were underground in burrows (Martin, Evolution Underground). Why our clade subsequently became arboreal is most likely random. Our earliest putative ancestors didn't have thumbs. Those came later. If basically every mammal came out of a burrow, and most produced arboreal species (the Paleocene was mostly forest from the tropics to the poles), but our group alone produced grasping hands and re-evolved tricolor vision. Why us? Chance, most likely.

    A similar argument could be made for why you're here. That you're here on antipope isn't that surprising, because this site tends to attract highly educated, older white heteronormative males, much as that causes Charlie angst. The fact that you exist is due to a random sperm and a random egg fusing decades ago. Different sperm, and you'd be female. This is the point: day to day stuff like posting on this site is utterly predictable. That we exist at all is happenstance. The big things generally are unpredictable, while the smaller things are, literally, routine.

    563:

    »Flats are also easy, especially if you've got a bit of slate - split it and then lap the two bits against each other for greater precision.«

    Take three bits and lap them against each other in rotation, until any combination of two have no gaps.

    Only three flat surfaces can do that, so flatness is limited only by your patience.

    564:

    I went to grad school in the middle of it, and it was absolutely bonkers, with the textbooks being regularly thrown out as more information came in. This may sound normal to in computers, but biology runs more on the once-per-decade update schedule.

    Can't resist. The textbook I used when I took real analysis during the 1975-76 school year is still in print and still widely used. The publishers haven't even changed the appearance very much, because "Rudin's blue book" means a specific thing.

    565:

    Yes and no to your last sentence. The big things are unpredictable in detail, but are constrained by physical, biological and ecological limitations. There are reasons that huge terrestrial arthropods and tiny mammals don't exist, for example.

    But, in this case, I fully agree with you that happenstance is by far the most plausible explanation. Yes, there are specific factors, but THEY are mostly happenstance (e.g. what I said in #561). No, England's industrial preeminence in that era was not due the superiority of the inhabitants or their social system, let alone the favour of the universe, no matter what the bigots think.

    566:

    Troutwaxer @ 535:

    If a 2x4 were thick as a brick you could probably use it to build a Truss.

    Well, perhaps a particular specific Truss.

    567:

    Can't resist. The textbook I used when I took real analysis during the 1975-76 school year is still in print and still widely used. The publishers haven't even changed the appearance very much, because "Rudin's blue book" means a specific thing.

    I stand corrected. Thanks!

    Still, the whole cladistic revolution was bonkers. Prior to cladistics winning out, evolution was a qualitative science. Researchers made best-guess analyses of the information they collected. In many cases they got pretty close to the cladistic version. In others, not so much.

    Cladistics provides a framework for quantitatively evaluating the evidence to test hypotheses. Coupled that with DNA providing gigabytes of evidence (morphological data is typically in the hundreds of bytes of data), and evolution went through a revolution that we're still in.

    To compare, the gradualist (classical Darwinian) vs. punctuated equilibrium (Gould and Lewontin) argument in the 1980s was about fossils, because sometimes fossils change radically over a short stretch of strata, other times there's, well, generally no fossils, but the ones that appear look similar to each other. What was the evolutionary process behind that, gradual buildup of unseen changes, or do evolutionary rates really vary?

    Well, evolution leaves traces all over the genome as well as the fossil beds. So now both paleontologists and live-animal biologists collect as much data as they can and do a cladistic analysis. In the DNA case, you can add in a molecular clock model to figure out when your organisms split from their common ancestor, how fast they diverged, and in some cases (humans and chimps) how long they kept occasionally interbreeding before they finally split. The gradualist vs. punctuated equilibrium philosophical argument is irrelevant, because we have data to resolve what happened in each case, and techniques for evaluating which hypothesis best fits observations. Gould was right that rates vary in some circumstances (see adaptive radiation), but the philosophical debate is past history now.

    568:

    "Well, perhaps a particular specific Truss."

    Yes, the weight takes quite a Tull on the wood.

    569:

    On the subject of "punctuated equilibrium" I suspect something more is going on. In order to survive, if an animal needs something obvious, like bigger, sharper teeth right now, (in evolutionary terms) that's what's going to happen with everything else taking a back seat. So maybe for that time-period, genes that give longer, sharper teeth are more important than genes that give disease resistance or a better digestive system. And we see this evolution because it's visible on fossils.

    But once the animal has its longer sharper teeth, i suspect that stuff which doesn't show on the fossil record become more important. And the mutations which lead to a better immune system or a better digestive system become the "important" genes, but those don't show up as differences in fossils a hundred-thousand years apart, even though those improvements might be revolutionary in their importance.

    In short, I'm not sure "punctuated equilibrium" is really a thing. "Punctuated equilibrium of obvious traits" is more likely what's happening.

    570:

    Powering towns with nuclear reactors from ships is a currently expected and planned-for thing. It’s used by the military in their other role, which is civil disaster recovery.

    The US navy hooked up a warship (aircraft carrier, I think) to help power part of San Francisco some days after the past big earthquake. I am sure it is something you need to have prepped in your disaster plan, as it’s not just a matter of plugging in an extension cord, but I do not know the details.

    New Zealand frigates do this with their diesel generators for small South Pacific islands after hurricanes.

    571:

    Mathematics is not like the sciences - even in my university degree, virtually all the topics had nothing after the 18th or 19th century, though the way they were described and used had changed.

    That is polemic about cladistics. Some of us were doing quantitive analysis way before the cladistic religion started; while I was a very minor player, there were many people who were not. Yes, it's a useful systemisation, but it is also unscientific in the way that it ignores the fact that evolution does NOT result in a rooted tree, but a DAG, especially on a small scale and with symbiotic organisms. I have been told that it has been improved in this respect, but nobody has been able to point me at a non-trivial reference to how.

    Where the simplistic Darwinistic model fails is when an organism evolves drastically, the intermediate states are counter-selection, and there is not a good explanation for why. I agree that punctuated equilibrium is merely a description, not an explanation.

    572:

    Backward again. What's going on here, I think, is that most of you don't know the terminology, and that's hampering the discussion. The bigger teeth thing is "coevolution," and the best place to read about it is in Thompson's Relentless Evolution. Rapid evolution is "adaptive radiation," and you can hunt down references to Galapagos finches and the like.

    Here's the tech metaphor for punctuated equilibrium and coevolution.

    Rapid evolution happens when an organism falls into an vast, empty niche space: a flock of finches on the Galapagos, some fruit flies in Hawai'i, cichlids in the African lakes. They have no competitors, so they diversify. Then competition and outside forces and organisms chomp down, and the survivors start steadily accommodating whatever the environment's throwing at them, generation after generation. That's coevolution.

    Tech examples abound:

    --Cars in the first decade of the 20th Century,

    --Planes in the teens and 1920s.

    --Personal and portable computers in the 80s and 90s

    --Social media in the 90s

    --Portable phones in the 1990s-2000s.

    In each case, the first few generations of a new technology are both diverse and bonkers. Cars were electric, diesel, gas, steam, steering systems were diverse, signals were too, etc. Over time, a handful of designs took over, leaving most of the weirdos in the dust. Change after that, while substantial, was basically fiddling within a fairly limited space of standard designs, with the standards increasingly codified into laws. Same thing happened with portable computers (remember Kaypro and Osborne?), social media (the dot.com boom) and so forth.

    That first generation of crazy exuberance, when everyone's seeing what they can get to work, is the adaptive radiation part of technology. As the better systems start to take over, the space gets channelized by competition among the best designs, and other factors (malware on computers, for example) become more important than competition over design features. That's the coevolutionary part of the cycle.

    Put them together and you have what looks like punctuated equilibrium, when archaeologists dig through landfills and try to trace the development of cars, computers, cell phones, and dot.com ads used as trash wrappers (undecayed thanks to being landfilled, of course).

    Same thing happens with organisms, and cladistics provides a way to reconstruct some of the details of what happened, based on surviving evidence.

    Hope this helps.

    573:

    "So you disagree with Steven Jay Gould on evolution, then?"

    The theory of punctuated equilibrium, which is what I assume you are referring to, states, IIRC, that evolution proceeds in gradual incremental steps, then suddenly more extensive changes will occur in a relatively short period of time, before incremental adaptation resumes.

    Actually, I was referring to his statements on the effects of chance on evolution. An species survives by being both fit (or least unfit) and lucky.

    Your statement "For large enough spans of time and across enough distance, the effect of happenstance approaches 0." appears to discount luck.

    Gould famously said that if we rewound the tape of evolution to the dinosaurs humanity as we know it wouldn't have evolved again. There are enough contingencies in industrialization that it appears to me that the same applies there, with the added proviso that once industrialization has happened somewhere it appears enough of an advantage that whoever does it first is likely to swamp those who don't.

    I will note that Chinese technology wasn't static for 2000 years — see Needham's Science and Civilization in China for many details.

    574:

    evolution does NOT result in a rooted tree, but a DAG, especially on a small scale and with symbiotic organisms.

    DAG?

    In short words for a Bear of Very Little Brain, please. I'm feeling particularly thick today. (Even have Ian Anderson on the stereo!)

    575:

    Directed acyclic graph; closer to a braided river than a tree.

    576:

    Ha! I knew that one. I don't remember any of the things I could prove about them from back in the long-ago days when I was doing large-scale network flow optimization, but at least the name popped up.

    577:

    Yes. A good example is the European plums and allies, where they speciated and then hybridised across species. Apparently, based on DNA evidence, even sloe is an inter-specific hybrid.

    578:

    I don't think you've considered your metaphor, because it pretty much agrees with the idea I expressed above.

    To remind you what's obvious and what's not in computer evolution, eventually we settled on the idea of a screen, a keyboard, a mouse, and some kind of enclosure - usually a tower - for the rest. So if you're looking at computers from the outside, you're not seeing much change - a boxy structure with a couple drives. Every once in awhile something happens which is obvious from the outside - a drive stops being included or a fan which is visible gets added, and looking at a "fossilized" computer - that is, one you can't see inside - you'd notice the changes, but all the not-obvious stuff - better graphics, better processors, different operating systems, additional fans which aren't visible from the outside, growth in hard-drive and memory storage, etc., aren't visible.

    The change from a 386-computer to a Pentium III isn't terribly visible if all you're doing is looking at the case. What you notice is that a CD-ROM drive has been added... but the massive changes in memory, the larger drives and better graphics are essentially invisible, and when the CD-ROM drive changes from a readable CD-ROM to a writable DVD drive that's not easily noticeable when looking at the "fossils."

    What I'm saying is that anyone who's thinking about "punctuated equilibrium" isn't looking inside the case. "Bigger bill for dealing with larger seeds" might happen in only a hundred-thousand years, but the digestive-system changes to deal with the new diet might continue for a couple million years and not be noticed because someone's only looking at the outside of the fossils. So I'd say there's an illusion of punctuated equilibrium, but maybe it doesn't really exist. As I understand things, the general mutation rate is unchanging, but what's being conserved as advantageous is sometimes visible and sometimes not.

    Does that make sense? Or am I recreating an argument from twenty years ago?

    579:

    "And the reasons the mines were and are wet is (a) due to the geology and (b) that rainfall and minimal evaporation. You are trying to look for causes that don't exist - those factors can best be regarded as just chance."

    Ah, then you agree that, however many intervening steps there are, it all comes down to geography in the end. Diamond and I agree with you.

    And yes, it's ultimately due to chance, in the same way that random mutations and random changes in the environment are due to chance, but obviously there is a lot more going on there.

    580:

    "Nope. The theory of punctuated equilibrium is old news. Gould and Lewontin were correct in their observations, but they're now a sideline in modern evolution."

    I think you misunderstood the context of my statement. I was responding to Robert Prior, who took my statement "For large enough spans of time and across enough distance, the effect of happenstance approaches 0" to mean that "So you disagree with Steven Jay Gould on evolution, then?" My understanding of what he was saying was to ask me if I did not agree that chance events events could play an important role in the course of evolution. And of course they can, but I'm making a scale argument, which goes something like "Large scale events are affected by prior large scale events; small scale events cancel each other out." I'm arguing against the idea that the Chinese had all the pieces necessary to carry out their own IR, but somehow missed it because, oops, chance connections, which frankly sounds too much like "they just weren't creative enough."

    The systemic incentives weren't there.

    As for Gould himself, I think he demonstrated convincingly that the old school gradualists were wrong, and evolution could vary in terms of the rate of change over time. I am not enough of a biologist to way any more than that.

    As for primates in trees, my point was that primates didn't just happen to start climbing trees "by happenstance." Yes, the very first one did, but that mutation would have failed to spread had it not been adaptive due to some set of conditions in the environment. In other words, there was a systematic process going on, complex enough to require evidence and hypothesis testing before we can claim to understand it.

    And my reason for making that claim was to draw an analogy to large scale historical changes like the IR--transformations of that scale do not happen by chance alone, there are systemic processes going on, complex enough to require evidence and hypothesis testing before we can claim to understand it.

    And further, I have a hypothesis to offer: that there were societal incentives in place that rewarded those innovations that lead to industrialization in England in the 1700's, which did not exist anywhere or anywhen else.

    581:

    "Gould famously said that if we rewound the tape of evolution to the dinosaurs humanity as we know it wouldn't have evolved again. There are enough contingencies in industrialization that it appears to me that the same applies there"

    Ah, ok, I was not aware of that specific quote. Thank you for clarifying.

    If he said that, and meant it, then yes, I disagree, in that I believe that "chance", per se, does not exist at anything higher than the quantum scale. Randomness is a euphemism for "there are too many causal factors for us to track." Actual reality does not operate randomly, and everything that happens is the result of a finite set of objective causes.

    Therefore, if you rewound time, humanity would evolve again.

    And the IR would once again occur first in England in the 1700's.

    582:

    "Gould famously said that if we rewound the tape of evolution to the dinosaurs humanity as we know it wouldn't have evolved again. There are enough contingencies in industrialization that it appears to me that the same applies there"

    Ah, I was not aware of that exact quote, thank you for clarifying. In that case, then, yes, I disagree. Above the quantum level, and events that are the direct result of interactions at that level, I do not believe that random chance plays any role at all in causing events to occur. Chance is really just a euphemism for "There are too many causal factors for us to track." Everything that happens occurs due to a finite set of objective causes. Those causes were themselves the effect of prior causes, and so on back to the Big Bang. I believe in causal determinism, that if we could comprehensively identify all causal factors affecting some system, we could predict the future of that system (with the caveat that human beings, as actors within the universe, may not be in a position to comprehensively identify all causal factors affecting a given system, even in principle).

    Therefore, if we could rewind time, and play it forward, then yes, humans would evolve again.

    583:

    So methods for pumping water out of mines using muscle power were well known all the way back to antiquity

    You can even read about them directly here

    https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38015/38015-h/38015-h.htm#BOOK_VI

    The problem was they weren’t cost effective unless the ore was extremely precious hence you mostly found them in precious metal mines

    The problem coal mines had was not that no one knew how to get the water out but that the existing methods were not cost effective

    But the advantage was plenty o’ coal

    Which allowed the mines to run very very inefficient steam engines productively and also allowed a incubator to make those engines more effective

    Eventually they became efface with enough to be used in laces that didn’t have such direct supplies of coal

    At least that is the thesis

    I am not sure whether it is true or not but it is absolutely true that the first commercial steam engines were used to pump out coal mines

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine

    585:

    Directed acyclic graph; closer to a braided river than a tree.

    Thanks.

    586:

    hat is polemic about cladistics. Some of us were doing quantitive analysis way before the cladistic religion started; while I was a very minor player, there were many people who were not. Yes, it's a useful systemisation, but it is also unscientific in the way that it ignores the fact that evolution does NOT result in a rooted tree, but a DAG, especially on a small scale and with symbiotic organisms. I have been told that it has been improved in this respect, but nobody has been able to point me at a non-trivial reference to how.

    In general, cladists tend to ignore any complaint with ignores the large number of unrooted trees published. Most scientists ignore complaints about current practice in the field which are based on past practice (like saying astronomy in the 20th century is incorrect, based on problems with Tycho Brahe's work). Also, most practitioners tend to ignore complaints which haven't don simple google searches to see where the field is now, but insist that such proof must be provided by the people targets by polemics.

    In other words, please provide evidence that your polemic is relevant.

    Meanwhile, this paper might be of some use to you.

    587:

    Therefore, if you rewound time, humanity would evolve again.

    Something would evolve again, but I doubt you'd recognize it as anything like humanity. From the Smithsonian:

    About 74,000 years ago:

    Near-extinction of H. sapiens. Greatly reduced population, with numbers estimated at about 10,000 adults of reproductive age to as few as 600. Timing correlates with repeated, large-scale droughts in portions of Africa.

    https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/factsheets/milestones-human-evolution

    From what I've read, genetic analysis of human mitochondria suggests there were about 300 breeding women in the entire world at that time. Human survival was pretty fragile then, and it's hard to believe that the human race could survive stuff like this a second time.

    588:

    Not only would we survive, you and I would have this conversation again. The exact same subatomic particles would decay at the exact same time. There is no chance in the universe... only complexity.

    589:

    From what I've read, genetic analysis of human mitochondria suggests there were about 300 breeding women in the entire world at that time. Human survival was pretty fragile then, and it's hard to believe that the human race could survive stuff like this a second time.

    What if you reran history 10,000 times and only once did the number get as low as 300. It could be this was the edge case. And we still made it.

    590:

    What if you reran history 10,000 times and only once did the number get as low as 300. It could be this was the edge case. And we still made it

    This is the Toba Catastophe theory (Wikipedia link). Apparently cheetahs, chimps, tigers, and others show a similar bottleneck. Read the article for all the caveats and suppositions.

    591:

    I've actually visited Toba. The crater is now a really big lake, fifty-five miles long, with an island in the middle that's thirty miles long. It must have been one hell of an eruption!

    592:

    Not only would we survive, you and I would have this conversation again. The exact same subatomic particles would decay at the exact same time. There is no chance in the universe... only complexity.

    The annoying physical problem is that chaos is so complicated that, to know the outcome of some chaotic events, you'd need a computer bigger than all the particles in the universe not involved in said random event to simulate it with sufficient accuracy to predict the outcome. That implies that the universe cannot know its own future, because chaos is ubiquitous and that's just one event.

    Similarly, if you calculate things like the computer resources required for computing things like phylogenetic trees, you'll find that it would take a digital computer many times larger than the universe just to come up with a phylogenetic consensus tree for all orchids (and yes, they hybridize, so you need to do trees for all genes and gene families and derive a consensus for the taxa). And if that little bit of evolutionary past is unknowable, then I'd argue that the universe can't know its own past based on current information. This is true even for Earth's past, and we're a tiny, tiny part of the universe as a whole.

    Hawking may have believed that information cannot be created or destroyed in theory, but these inconvenient calculation barriers argue that, even if this is true for the cosmological purposes, in practice that information is of limited use, due to other limits based on the size of the universe.

    Therefore, you may not have an easy way to prove your assertion. Perhaps it would be better believe in chance, randomness, black swans, dragon kings? And the free will you get therefrom?

    593:

    What if you reran history 10,000 times and only once did the number get as low as 300. It could be this was the edge case. And we still made it.

    What if you reran history 10,000 times and only once did the number get as high as 300. It could be this was the edge case. And we barely made it.

    594:

    No, I don't. That was why WE were interested in steam engines but, as a little bit of research will show you, there were plenty of people in other countries who were, too, and plenty of other use cases. Without the UK, it would have been invented, just a bit later. There was not the same level of need for the internal combustion engine, or computers, for example.

    595:

    Not quite. The first commercial ENGINE (singular) was, but successive ones were used in tin and copper mines as well, where the requirement was equally strong.

    596:

    I was referring to your offensive airbrushing of all the pre-cladistic quantitative work out of history as polemic. It is, though I could have used less polite words.

    I have (recently) tried searching for anything that describes the mathematics of cladistics, with special reference to that issue, and found nothing. I have also seen recent papers that force evolutionary issues into a rooted tree structure, when they demonstrably aren't. Yes, cladistics MAY have improved but (a) I have seen little evidence of it and (b) my repeated requests to cladists for a reference to HOW it has improved have been met with blithering, insults or both.

    That paper is paywalled, and addresses a different problem, anyway.

    For the Nth time, I am asking you for evidence for your claims.

    597:

    That is mistaken. You cannot predict the outcome of a chaotic system in detail unless (a) you have such a super-massive computer, (b) you know the starting position to unphysical accuracy and (c) there are no probabilistic events (e.g. caused by outside sources). That is why it is generally described as impossible.

    All you can predict is the pattern of behaviours, and the system (not you) gets to choose what sorts of pattern are predictable. Yes, strange attractors and all, and I don't pretend to understand chaos theory.

    Actually, constructing phylogenetic trees is NOT particularly computationally intensive (been there - done that) (*). The problems arise when the data do not form a tree, because you are trying to force a complex data structure onto a simpler one, and there is rarely a single 'best' solution. This is a common problem in that and similar areas, and has been worked on seriously since the 1950s (see Kruskal et al.) A consensus will never be possible, because different people will have different views of what is important. The lack of computer power is not the problem.

    (*) I worked on that issue in 1969.

    598:

    »That is mistaken. You cannot predict the outcome of a chaotic system in detail unless […]«

    I think you guys have wantered into a topic area where neither your questions nor answers make any sense, in the "not even wrong" sense of sense :-)

    First, "chaotic system" is almost defined by being "impossible to predict the future of", which makes any discussion about what it would take to predict their future a tautology.

    Second to make things more complicated, chaotic systems are almost always physically bounded, my cup of tea does not change the weather and our biosphere has no effect on Jupiter, so you can almost always treat them as parameterized components until you have to look into them.

    So simulating our history does not take a computer bigger than the universe, because nothing which happened in most of the universe would have any effect, what with the speed of light being finite and what's not.

    That doesn't make it doable, but it is impossible for different and far more interesting reasons, than the stuff you're going on about...

    599:

    The weather forecasters, climatologists, orbital mechanics people and others would dissent; they are all in the business of predicting the future of chaotic systems. As I said, you can't predict the details in the long term, but there are usually patterns you can predict (though you can't choose which patterns). You can also predict the details for a short period, depending on the accuracy of your data and the instability of the system. The reason that chaos theory was so revolutionary was that it provided a framework for such predictions, rather than the previous ad-hoc approaches.

    Indeed, the short-term weather forecasts (and planetary ephemera) are good examples of predicting the details of chaotic systems in the short term. But neither can do it in the long term without the three conditions I mentioned, which are completely unrealistic (read: impossible).

    600:

    Provably nonsense - Cornwall averages 800 to 1600mm per year depending on location, and Bala (nearest site to Llandudno) 1300mm, so apparently the dry copper mine on Great Orme gets similar rainfall to the Cornish tin mines.

    601:

    Actual reality does not operate randomly, and everything that happens is the result of a finite set of objective causes.

    This statement seems to embody a mistake, or at least a misunderstanding, that I think is about scale. I think you're saying that the universe is (at least quasi-) deterministic in the macro and the general, even while it might be aleatory or chaotic in the specific and the detail. I (probably, depending on the scope and context) agree and I think this also aligns to the consensus view among folks here. But I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation of the distance between the general and the specific, that is what scale is the boundary threshold between the random and the predictable, I guess a stochastic boundary. I think others here would probably have a better definition to hand, I'm not sure I even know how to look one up.

    So I think you're saying that all the effects that are visible to us fall on the deterministic side of the stochastic boundary, and perhaps even that the things that fall on the random side are unimportant and trivial details. And that's what I think I disagree with, in our world the devil really is in the details. But I'm not completely sure that's what you're saying either.

    602:

    I was referring to your offensive airbrushing of all the pre-cladistic quantitative work out of history as polemic. It is, though I could have used less polite words.

    A) the paper is available for free, and had you simply typed the title into Google or Google Scholar, you would have found a free copy immediately. I didn't link to the free copy because the link had five lines of Google cruft.

    B) The modern version of punctuated equilibrium kicked off in 1972, and I was trying to point out that it's NOT what I was talking about, because one (1) person thought it was.

    C) Unlike you, I've actually taught cladistics to beginners. It's like teaching algebra to middle-schoolers, in that it takes some exposure for it to "click." So far as I can tell, spamming this blog with lessons no one wants would be considered rude. That's why I spent no time going into the history of numerical taxonomy.

    D) The math for the orchid example:

    What you're going on about is termed phenetics or numerical taxonomy, for anyone who cares.

    With orchids, there are around 28,000 species, and genome sizes range from about 322 x 10^6 to 54180x 10^6 base pairs (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2720655/). The phenetic approach EC champions is generally based on total similarity: you input all your data, run a similarity analysis on it, and make the tree based on greatest total similarity to least. In this case it fails, because when there's a 168-fold difference in the amount of data per species, how you code the similarities basically determines your outcome, and unlike cladistics, phenetics has no method to deal with researcher bias.

    With cladistics analysis on DNA information, you have to align the base pairs, which with 28,000 species is going to take centuries. Why? Genes can be duplicated, giving rise to gene families. If one species has one copy of a gene and another has eight different versions of that gene, which one do you compare it to? In orchids, it turns out that genome size itself is a fairly important character. Plants fairly frequently double their genomes, and that's undoubtedly part of why their genomes vary so much inside.

    But anyway, cladistics would have you add an onion to the orchid dataset (they're reasonably close relatives) to "root the tree." Cladistics is based on shared, derived characters, meaning they shared within the group you study, actively evolved within the group you're studying ("derived"). If all orchids share a character with onions, including that data isn't going to make a bit of difference in determining how orchids evolved, so you pitch it. THIS SHRINKS YOUR DATASET BY OVER 90%. The reason? A lot of any genome consists critical, highly conserved genes that all eukaryotic life has. These evolve really slowly, if at all. In cladistics these are considered "uninformative" and discarded. In phenetics, they're 90% of your DNA dataset. This is the advantage of having a rooted tree.

    But still, you're stuck with making a directed acyclic graph linking 28,000 end points, and figuring out the graph with the fewest nodes, based on megabytes of data per end point. IIRC the number of possible graphs scales roughly as the factorial (PLEASE CHECK ME ON THIS), so the number of graphs you need to calculate is on order of 28000! possible graphs. Actually it turns out that you need to do trees for each separate gene family that evolved (add those), AND you need to run this program thousands of times with some data deleted, to determine how often you'd get the same result with slightly different data (aka bootstrapping and jack-knifing, and more complex forms of likelihood analysis). Robustness of branches is a required metric in making trees.

    Then you get to reconcile all the graphs into a consensus tree.

    By now, it should be obvious why figuring out the evolution of all orchids is a calculation problem that's larger than the universe. The information may be there, but the capacity to make sense of it is not.*

    There is an orchid family phylogenetic tree. It was created by using example species from each subfamily and tribe, so instead of thousands of species, it used data from hundreds, and instead of full genomes, it used data from a few sequences that typically mutate about as fast as species evolve. This family tree is a hypothesis based on the data, but it's what we have to work with.

    *A decade ago, I actually evaluated a grant proposal from a masters student who wanted to create a phylogenetic tree for all Asteraceae (sunflowers, thistles, daisies, etc.), a family that has around 38,000 species, and then to determine the potential for invasive weediness of each species, to tell land managers which species to watch out for in the future. I do not think he understood what he was proposing to do...

    603:

    kiloseven @ 585:

    Oh. My. God.

    I would eat Primate Chow before giving up Junior.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/families-give-up-their-pets-as-cost-of-living-bites-xldwsnfjf

    PAYWALLED

    But I note the headline says Families. Maybe there's more to the story, like having to choose between feeding the kids or feeding the pet? If you were facing a choice like that, wouldn't you try to find a home where they had a chance of being well fed (whichever one you chose)?

    604:

    Non-paywalled version available here. It's just a small filler article about the fact that, as inflation starts to bite, enquiries about rehoming pets are through the roof.

    On a personal level, I've already seen the cat food preferred by my clowder increase in price by about 25% over the last 18 months. I'm lucky enough that I'm not yet worried about my electricity and food bills for the winter, but there are plenty of people who won't be able to afford the heating bill and a further increase in the cost of pet food.

    [[ missing quotes in link fixed - mod ]]

    605:

    On why Britain industrialised first, I highly recommend The Origin of the Modern World by Robert Marks. The book not only directly addresses this question, it's also an exceptional distillation of current historical research packaged in a very accessible but well-referenced tome.

    One factor that he identifies is to do with the lack of nitrogen-rich fertiliser under the "biological old regime" (solved with artificial fertilisers) which curtailed population growth and restricted land use. In China, for instance:

    Food, clothing, shelter, and fuel competed for land, and to get more from the land, the Chinese lavished increasing amounts of labor on agriculture. The dynamics of specialization, increased market exchanges, and improved transportation in the context of the biological old regime and the particularities of China’s situation were pushing it toward an increasingly labor-intensive agriculture and the depletion of land resources, rather than toward an industrial revolution.

    England got around this thanks to its colonial holdings. On the one hand, they not only provided the raw materials for cotton textiles, but also foodstuffs which freed up English land for non-agrarian purposes. On the other hand, it provided a captive market for English textiles:

    Part of the reason [for industrialisation] is that Britain had a "peculiar" periphery in the New World: slavery, mercantilist colonial legislation, and then the expansion of cotton plantations in the American South after independence created a very large market for British cotton textiles, thereby stimulating and sustaining the growth of the cotton textile industry in Lancashire.

    Along with an abundance of local coal, this created the necessary conditions for steam engines to revolutionise textile production (while simultaneously 'de-industrialising' Indian textile manufacturing).

    On the ACOUP blog, just a note to be careful about relying too much on Devereaux's conclusions when he talks outside his area of expertise. For example, this historian critiques Devereaux's famous blog posts on Sparta for being out of touch with the last 20 years of scholarship on the topic. I would similarly take his thoughts on industrialisation as a starting-off point and follow up with some further reading.

    606:

    That doesn't make it doable, but it is impossible for different and far more interesting reasons, than the stuff you're going on about...

    Like thermodynamics? Light speed?

    Amdahl's Law? ;)

    607:

    EC
    You realise, of course, that your argument in # 598 is a demolition of the "future is fixed"/"no free will"/"brickverse" hypothesis?
    Well played, sir!
    { Yes, I think the brickverse is bollocks, for reasons given }

    608:

    AlanD2 @588:

    Something would evolve again, but I doubt you'd recognize it as anything like humanity. From the Smithsonian: About 74,000 years ago: Near-extinction of H. sapiens. Greatly reduced population, with numbers estimated at about 10,000 adults of reproductive age to as few as 600.

    Except that neanderthals, denisovans, and a couple of other members of the genus Homo were already out of Africa by then.

    Without H. sapiens to wipe them out, once the climate stabilized, I'm sure that one of them would have figured out the agricultural revolution. Neanderthals? Probably. Denisovans? Nobody knows much about them, but also probably.

    609:

    What you're going on about is termed phenetics or numerical taxonomy, for anyone who cares.

    Yes. I shan't respond to every point, but only to salient ones.

    With cladistics analysis on DNA information, you have to align the base pairs, which with 28,000 species is going to take centuries. Why? Genes can be duplicated, giving rise to gene families.

    Er, no, there are better algorithms, but I accept that it's a computationally-intensive task. However, it has nothing to do with cladistics, as such - not merely can it be used for other analyses, cladistics long predates affordable DNA sequencing and can use other properties.

    ... how you code the similarities basically determines your outcome, and unlike cladistics, phenetics has no method to deal with researcher bias.

    Yes, to the first clause, and I will come back to that.

    But anyway, cladistics would have you add an onion to the orchid dataset (they're reasonably close relatives) to "root the tree." If all orchids share a character with onions, including that data isn't going to make a bit of difference in determining how orchids evolved, so you pitch it. THIS SHRINKS YOUR DATASET BY OVER 90%. ...

    Firstly, why does adding a researcher-chosen outgroup NOT add researcher bias? I am sure that it has been done, but I have rarely seen a paper that has used more than one and compared the result, let alone using both 'close' and 'far' outgroups. That is my secondary objection to cladistics as it is intepreted.

    Secondly, you don't need an outgroup to remove common characteristics, doing so does NOT depend on cladistics, and it's an ancient optimisation (memory was short in the 1960s). A missing characteristic is very important information, too!

    But still, you're stuck with making a directed acyclic graph linking 28,000 end points, and figuring out the graph with the fewest nodes, based on megabytes of data per end point. IIRC the number of possible graphs scales roughly as the factorial (PLEASE CHECK ME ON THIS), so the number of graphs you need to calculate is on order of 28000! possible graphs. Actually it turns out that you need to do trees for each separate gene family that evolved (add those), AND you need to run this program thousands of times with some data deleted, to determine how often you'd get the same result with slightly different data (aka bootstrapping and jack-knifing, and more complex forms of likelihood analysis). Robustness of branches is a required metric in making trees.

    That is true, except that you are making the assumption that you need to do an exhaustive search. If the structure is clear, MUCH less work is needed; if it is not, all you are getting is a highly-polished myth. I am sure that I don't need to explain why even the directed nature of the graph can be erroneous. For example, using the number of shared characteristics (and/or unshared ones) gives a much more reliable indication of ancestry than using just one; using a ranking of characteristics is perhaps the main reason some older taxonomies are so mistaken. There are ancient techniques of using a fast method to get an initial result, and checking it against the more detailed data, if you want to do that. And so on.

    There is an old expression in numerical and statistical work "Delusions of accuracy". The power of modern computers allows people to extract 'information' out of the entropy in large datasets, which does NOT advance science.

    Then you get to reconcile all the graphs into a consensus tree.

    Which is another major source of error. If the structure is more general than a tree (e.g. a DAG), forcing it into a DAG will just produce yet another 'scientific' myth. A DAG should be left as a DAG. And that is my primary objection to cladistics.

    610:

    thewehie @ 605:

    Non-paywalled version available here.

    I tried to find it through that archive site before mentioning the paywall, but it came up for me that there was no archive available. Did you have to archive the article before posting the link?

    611:

    I had a look for it on The Times website using bypass-paywalls-clean, and it came up as non-archived, so I did have to archive it first.

    612:

    If nothing else you'd need to be able to develop and tree in which two branches could unite, as when Mutation A mates with Mutation B and they successfully have children. But it gets more complicated than that, because later Mutation B could mate with Mutation C, and the fact that Mutation B and Mutation C have mated to form Species D doesn't mean that Mutations B and C have vanished... That's definitely not how a tree looks.

    613:

    Except that neanderthals, denisovans, and a couple of other members of the genus Homo were already out of Africa by then.

    Without H. sapiens to wipe them out, once the climate stabilized, I'm sure that one of them would have figured out the agricultural revolution. Neanderthals? Probably. Denisovans? Nobody knows much about them, but also probably.

    So if you rewound time, something other than humanity (H. sapiens) could evolve again? As I said earlier, if this happened, I doubt we'd recognize it as anything like today's humanity.

    614:

    hippoptolemy @ 606:

    On the ACOUP blog, just a note to be careful about relying too much on Devereaux's conclusions when he talks outside his area of expertise. For example, this historian critiques Devereaux's famous blog posts on Sparta for being out of touch with the last 20 years of scholarship on the topic. I would similarly take his thoughts on industrialisation as a starting-off point and follow up with some further reading.

    OTOH, Devereaux is up front about how his own area of expertise IS NOT ancient Greece, and says we should look to ancient (semi) contemporary sources in judging Sparta. Those sources do not speak well of Sparta even when the writer is PRO-Sparta ...

    615:

    When you realize that systems of galaxies, galaxies, star formation, planetary systems, planets, weather, etc. can all be chaotic, you might come to the conclusion that the universe couldn't model itself with all the resources it has.

    This is the counter to the argument that posits that a) information can be neither created nor destoryed, and b) everything can be known, so c) the universe will rerun itself perfectly every time.

    If the universe started with a chaotic explosion, inflated this chaos (chaotically???), and then assembled stars, black holes, galaxies, and so on chaotically, probably rerunning it will give different results each time. While it's likely that the types of phenomena observed will be predictable (lots of black holes and red dwarf stars, for example), the details will not be.

    616:

    One does notice how so many who believe they know very well the history of something in particular, though they don't read the languages and never studied the primary documents, etc. get very on the high horse of being the smartest person in the room and my area of expertise as an engineer of whatever outweighs the historian's area of expertise every damned time.

    The way those who object to Brett's articles on the matters of Sparta and industrialization is pretty silly, because they show they haven't even been able to read what he actually writes. They create an argument out of what they say he said or didn't say.

    Though I will say this, when he gets out of the weeds of military matters of the ancient world, there's a lot he isn't aware of. When it comes to why England and Europe were able to industrialize so quickly, it really matters that this region of the globe rapidly dominated two entirely fresh continents in terms of resources. Not to mention a third continent, Africa, from which it extracted the founding labor power. These economic histories of the transatlantic slave trade are out of his ken.

    But when it comes to Sparta and the military -- Imma gonna go with Brett every time, particularly as it vibes with my own reading, though that history is so NOT my area of expertise, and I sure do not read the languages, unlike the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the 'new world.'

    617:

    Yes. That's a DAG - as Pifeon says, like a braided river. At least in theory (and probably occasionally in practice), you can get a descendent passing a few genes back to a parent population, without eliminating the original line, which leads to metaphysical questions about what a species is and what structure that defines. But, normally, DAGs are all you need. However, I agree that trees aren't enough.

    618:

    Precisely. Provided that you exclude the hypothesis that the physical constants were also an unpredictable result of the big bang.

    619:

    "The problem coal mines had was not that no one knew how to get the water out but that the existing methods were not cost effective

    But the advantage was plenty o' coal

    Which allowed the mines to run very very inefficient steam engines productively and also allowed a incubator to make those engines more effective

    Eventually they became efface with enough to be used in laces that didn't have such direct supplies of coal

    At least that is the thesis

    I am not sure whether it is true or not but it is absolutely true that the first commercial steam engines were used to pump out coal mines"

    Naturally, since once a machine like that is available, and your own operation is where it gets its fuel from in the first place, it's an obvious way to make things easier for yourself. It's also an obvious thing to do for Newcomen to set up his first serious model at a coal mine, since setting up a first-of-its-kind thing like that is inevitably going to involve a lot of fucking around to get past all the rocks in the path from idea to reality, and you can well do without the additional hassle of hauling tons of fuel in from miles away on top of that.

    However the idea that they were developed at coal mines for coal mines because you need to be surrounded by fuel to make them come out as being less hassle overall than existing drainage methods are, and didn't become useful elsewhere until the fuel consumption had been improved enough for their performance advantage to also counterbalance the additional disadvantage of transporting the fuel in, is not true. Newcomen's principal motivation was draining metal mines - tin and copper mines in Cornwall, where there is no coal - and he started installing them there straight away, having done no more development at the coal mine than simply demonstrating that the first one did actually work properly. They were immediately useful for Cornish mines even in their original, grossly inefficient, fuel-guzzling form, and also even though those mines were producing neither coal nor "precious" metals, but "only" ordinary non-ferrous "engineering" metals.

    Now to be sure the circumstances of that application were more advantageous than the general case. Minable tin deposits are not common, and Cornwall was an important enough source of tin that for hundreds of years it had severely weirded up the politics of the place - miners were kind of like an additional sub-state superimposed on the "real" one, with their own laws and judiciary to handle mining-specific privileges and concerns (to put it in a few words); the importance of copper mining was also increasing at the time. The veins tend to be pretty vertical, so you're mostly digging down, and the very long history of Cornish mining meant they had already dug pretty deep. The topography is generally rather less suitable for capturing the surface drainage from land higher than the mine and using it to run water-powered machinery than it is in other British non-ferrous mining regions that have much bigger hills. Although there isn't any coal, you're still a fair bit better off than most other places where there isn't any coal, because the nearest coal mines are in South Wales and the Forest of Dean (which is next door), there's a fairly short journey with lots of gravity assistance from the coal mines to the docks, and then you can bring it nearly all the rest of the way to anywhere in the long narrow Cornish peninsula by sea. (Also the coal from South Wales is particularly good for fuelling steam engines, and the mines at that time were fairly easy to work and drain, being up mountains so you could go in from the side and drain them from underneath. Though South Wales is complicated and this is eliding a lot of stuff.)

    So while the coal supply was an important factor, it wasn't so important as to be the only one that counted, nor was it such a burden that you had to be actually mining it on site. Rather, there were several factors of roughly comparable significance which all came together. If you're looking for some overarching circumstance of which you can say "it was all down to this" the best candidate is probably the aggregation of geological chances which put one of the rare concentrations of tin conveniently across the water from a useful concentration of coal while also making the tin difficult to mine, which may not be what you're looking for if the question you're actually interested in is why was that particular set of circumstances the one that first got someone to build a steam engine as opposed to one of the other sets of other circumstances in other places which provided a similarly motivating combination.

    620:

    Though I will say this, when he gets out of the weeds of military matters of the ancient world, there's a lot he isn't aware of. When it comes to why England and Europe were able to industrialize so quickly, it really matters that this region of the globe rapidly dominated two entirely fresh continents in terms of resources. Not to mention a third continent, Africa, from which it extracted the founding labor power. These economic histories of the transatlantic slave trade are out of his ken.

    I agree with your assessment of Brett.

    About the First Industrial Revolution (1760-1820ish), I'm not sure I agree with you or him.

    First problem: the map. Here's a map of the globe from 1800. What should be eye-catching is that England is not the powerhouse you claim. Spain (not an industrial giant), Russia (not an industrial giant) and Qing China (not an industrial giant) are all far larger.

    This is consistent with economic research on British wheat imports from 1800-1914 (Jstor link, sorry), where before ca. 1850, food imports were a small part (less than 10%) of total British food consumption, and Britain was importing wheat primarily from Germany, France, and Russia.

    Now, I quite agree that sugar was a major factor in the Atlantic slave trade, but note that Big Sugar was primarily a Spanish and Portuguese trade, while the US shipped booze?

    The point I'm trying to make is that yes, resource stripping made Europe rich. But at the time the Industrial Revolution was happening, resources from the New World weren't spurring industrial innovation. That came later, once industrialization gave Britain a decisive advantage.

    The third problem seems esoteric, but it helps to understand that I studied soil science at King Hall at UW-Madison. F.H. King was an agriculture professor at UW-Madison who spent nine months in 1909 touring China, Japan, and Korea to study how they did agriculture. This wasn't a lark, because at that time global famine was a huge concern, including (quite rightly) for the US Midwest and Great Plains. He wrote the hugely influential Farmers of Forty Centuries, which among other things became a basis for the organic farm movement in the US. Even in 1909, at the end of the Qing dynasty, Chinese agriculture was hugely productive and quite sophisticated in the way it maximized the output of human and animal labor. King carefully documented what he saw (effort, inputs and outputs, costs, and profits), and brought it back to the US with the goal of introducing Chinese and Japanese-style agricultural practices to the US to increase production (Korea in 1909 did not impress him). This is not what you do if a place like China had failing agriculture.

    This is why I'm bothered by why China didn't industrialize first. I suspect it was happenstance.

    It might have also been that England's small, so inventors tended to party with each other and exchange ideas. China, meanwhile, is huge and linguistically diverse. Even if all the components were available, the inventors weren't getting together and bouncing ideas...

    The problem with this explanation is that Europe is of a comparable size and linguistic diversity to China, and there were often problems traveling from country to country. That said, none of this stopped people from stealing inventions from other countries, especially in the clothing trade that was a cradle of English industrialization.

    That's why I favor happenstance at the moment. It may well be my relative ignorance of Chinese history, but so far no one's made the convincing argument that China couldn't have started industrializing with coal much earlier than Britain did. China had been mining coal since 1000 bCE and was using it as a replacement for charcoal ca. 1000 CE, due to widespread deforestation. They basically had all the precursors to industrialization about 700 years before the British, and yet it never came together...

    621:

    Sorry I didn't make myself clear.

    It is my opinion that if you rewound time then things would turn out differently.

    FWIW, I think that if you rewound history, you'd see things working out like Ted Chiang's Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom - which is to say: make one minuscule change and, due to chaos in the natural universe, one year later there's different weather all around the globe. Different babies are being born, which (of course) has massive impact downstream.

    So 50 years later, if you could communicate between the universes, different people would be world leaders / billionaires / social activists, etc.

    TL;DR: small changes add up quickly. Things don't work the way they do in most time travel fiction where either history is fixed and unchangeable, or has a 'preferred track' which requires great effort to move from the preferred track to some other path.

    Of course, we'll never know for sure until we establish communication with other parallel universes.

    622:

    To bad it would be politically inexpedient at the moment...

    However, one could fairly easily write an alt-history where the polymath Shen Kuo, head of the astronomy bureau for the Song Dynasty (or some person known to him), kicked off the industrial revolution in China ca. 1050-1100 CE or thereabouts, and it spread from there with increasing rapidity as guns replaced fire arrows.

    I'm not seeing where Harry Turtledove wrote this one. So maybe...

    The real point is that if you read about Song Dynasty China, it does look a bit like Renaissance Europe or the heights of the Fatimid caliphate.

    Writing about China conquering the world right now? Maybe not the best idea?

    623:

    Which brings up the Arab world, where the math underlying the Industrial Revolution was developed - it might also have a plausible point for an Industrial Revolution.

    624:

    Moving coal around was the initial reason for the huge development of the UK canal network from the 1760s onwards, as these provided a more efficient way of transporting coal (and then other goods) using horse power.
    ( except through tunnels, many of which didn't have room for a tow path... )

    625:

    "They basically had all the precursors to industrialization about 700 years before the British, and yet it never came together..."

    Assuming this to be true, it makes happenstance more unlikely doesn't it? That is a lot of time for happenstance to occur as opposed to in the UK.

    626:

    The Great Orme is dry where it is above the water table( obviously), the copper deposits started at the surface and they worked down. Copper mining started in the bronze age, it also finished in the bronze age and didn't start again until water pumping improved enough to enable miners to go deeper in about 1800. The Great Orme is a fascinating site, quite possibly the first "industrial" site in the UK.

    627:

    "The Great Orme is a fascinating site, quite possibly the first "industrial" site in the UK."

    Grime's Graves?

    628:

    Acoup has an interesting article at http://acoup.blog/2020/11/06/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-addendum-crucible-steel-and-cast-iron/ which talks about Chinese cast iron manufacture, and their development of processes for converting raw cast iron into something more useful a couple of thousand years before the European iron industry reinvented recognisable versions of the same things. I had no idea they had got so far so early. Unfortunately it's only a tag-end to a series on the historical aspects of European iron making, which leaves it unsatisfyingly short on length and detail, and he gropes a bit on some of the technical aspects.

    629:

    Sequence, though; that was after the steam engine had been invented.

    630:

    You do sometimes get archaeologists and/or historians talking what appears to be complete B0110cks with a little research.
    For example, in the case of the Uist "jelly baby houses" (like 2 round houses joined opposite the "front door"), the archaeologists stated that the inner chamber was a "ritual space" on no actual evidence.
    I can't remember the place name, but there's a replica with a roof on the Isle of Lewis. One day the curator noticed a cold draft blowing out of the inner chamber, from which Scots rapidly concluded that the inner chamber was a larder rather than a ritual space.

    631:

    Assuming this to be true, it makes happenstance more unlikely doesn't it? That is a lot of time for happenstance to occur as opposed to in the UK.

    Happenstance, in this case, is named Kublai Khan, who finished conquering the Song dynasty in 1279 and founded the Yuan dynasty. I get the impression from various sources that the ethnic Chinese weren't too thrilled about it, but regardless, the technical bravado of the Song era wasn't repeated. Then we get the question of why the Ming didn't industrialize. They were taken down by the Manchu nation during the Little Ice Age, and they formed the Qing Dynasty, which in many ways was already behind the West (they had Jesuits teaching them how to make cannons, for instance).

    So basically, there was a period of around 150-200 years during the Song Dynasty when it could have been ripe for industrialization, before the Mongols started becoming an overwhelming problem. For whatever reason they didn't make the jump.

    In light of all the problems we're having with climate change, of course, one could equally suggest that everyone else was a bit more far-sighted than the English inventors and didn't go for destabilizing technologies. I kind of doubt this interpretation, but it's worth noting that questions about the wisdom of running society on fossil fuels were raised in England in the 1850s, and the people raising these points were basically shouted down instead of debated.

    632:

    "The annoying physical problem is that chaos is so complicated that, to know the outcome of some chaotic events, you'd need a computer bigger than all the particles in the universe not involved in said random event to simulate it with sufficient accuracy to predict the outcome. That implies that the universe cannot know its own future, because chaos is ubiquitous and that's just one event."

    There are several things wrong here, but it's going to take awhile to explain it fully.

    TL/DR: Although there have been serious speculations regarding how the universe could be a simulation running on a computer somewhere, there is no evidence that I know of to suggest that the universe we live in is calculating anything; "Chaos" (more properly "Nonlinear systems") is a mathematical modeling technique that, by design, does not allow one to predict the outcome of a series of iterative calculations ahead of time, but so far as anyone knows no real phenomenon is actually chaotic in nature.

    Let's start with nonlinear systems analysis. There is a type of nonlinear quadratic equation such that, if you plug a value into it (the so-called "initial condition") you run the equation, get the result, and plug the result back in as the new value of that variable. Run for several thousand iterations. These are the equations that produce the butterfly patterns in 3-D state space diagrams that you have probably seen. The things to note about them are that by their very nature, you cannot predict what the outcome of a series of equations will be without running the equations.

    What that implies is that a system that can be modeled as a nonlinear system also cannot be predicted ahead of time, beyond a certain number of equations, without letting the system simply run. This is why the weather is considered inherently unpredictable beyond a few weeks or so--weather is one of those natural phenomena that can be modeled as a nonlinear system, and so no model we can produce will accurately predict the weather beyond that range.

    HOWEVER, this is purely a feature of the modeling technique--no scientist that I know of thinks that the weather is actually random in any way. What is happening is that there are far too many causal factors interacting with one another to be able to compute, as so the phenomena appears unpredictable. But the map is not the terrain.

    But what is happening inside a cloud is simply that molecules are bumping into one another and exchanging energy. Quantum uncertainty prevents us from accurately tracking any single subatomic particle, but at larger scales (molecular and above) that all cancels itself out, and the cloud itself is acting entirely in accordance with natural forces. Presumably if we could know the position and energy of every molecule that interacts with the cloud, we could predict the weather until the heat death of the universe.

    But we can't know that, so we never will. The universe is fully determined in truth, but fundamentally unpredictable from our perspective.

    Related to this is the other important point, which is that, so far as I know, the universe isn't a computer, and it isn't calculating anything. When a planet orbits a star, if follows a path that can be modeled with precise accuracy. It does not follow, however, that the universe is using equations to figure out where the planet should go. It's just interacting with various fields. Therefore, the universe isn't calculating anything in order to produce itself, the fact that we would need a computer larger than the universe to keep track of every particle in the universe (if that's true, I've seen speculation about compression techniques that might bring it smaller) is actually irrelevant. Modeling is what we do to understand the universe, the universe isn't using modeling to produce itself.

    The so-called "brickverse" is that idea that everything that has ever happened in the universe, and everything that ever will, already exists in some form, potentially available to an observer outside our framework of space and time. This is a thing because the physics equations that are used to model the universe with a surprising degree of accuracy, while they account for change over time, do not contain a term in them that represents a particular moment in time called "the present." A moment in time in which everything exists before passing on to the next moment is unnecessary--we can accurately model everything without it. Therefore some physicists have speculated that perhaps the experience of a present moment is just an illusion of some sort (there are many speculations regarding what might be causing this illusion). Another way of putting this is that if every effect in our universe comes exclusively from a prior cause, then everything is perfectly determined and no new quantum information can be created or lost.

    And of course what's true for planetary orbits and clouds is equally true for evolution and life. And the brain. There have been many, many articles printed on whether or not the brain and the mind can be modeled as a nonlinear equation or not (if it can be, that might preserve a version of free will). But even if it could be, once again that doesn't in any way imply that the brain operates randomly in any real sense, or that it is not as fully causally determined as anything else in the universe.

    I can't speak to Hawking specifically, but my impression is that conservation of information is a widely accepted premise in QM (BUT: not a physicist! Check your own sources). More recently, "Superdeterminism" is a proposed theory explaining the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, the experimentally verified effect that measuring the spin of one of a pair of entangled particles will be correlated with measurements of the other particle instantaneously, regardless of the distance between them. If the universe is superdetermined, that will necessarily include the measurement choices of the observers, which were predetermined from the beginning of time (or at least once the two particles become entangled). This has not yet been experimentally confirmed. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnKzt6Xq-w4

    "Therefore, you may not have an easy way to prove your assertion. Perhaps it would be better believe in chance, randomness, black swans, dragon kings? And the free will you get therefrom?"

    Ah, free will. I have literally written pages of speculation on this topic, in another forum (TVT). I can strongly recommend this video, which summarizes an excellent presentation in layman's terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY7hjt5Gi-E

    To summarize the key points of the video: it all depends on what you think free will is, or to put it another way, what would you require to be true about the mind and the universe in order to accept that free will exists? One definition is that future decisions be fundamentally unpredictable regardless of how much information you collect--that criteria might be possible to meet, for reasons given above (but note that our hypothetical observer outside of time and space will still know every decision you ever make). OR, do you require that, in order to be "free" a decision has to be independent of the chain of cause and effect going back to the Big Bang? That doesn't seem possible.

    Sorry for the wall of text. As you can see, I have a personal interest and fascination with these questions. If I provided you with more information than you wanted, I apologize.

    633:

    "No, I don't. That was why WE were interested in steam engines but, as a little bit of research will show you, there were plenty of people in other countries who were, too, and plenty of other use cases. Without the UK, it would have been invented, just a bit later. There was not the same level of need for the internal combustion engine, or computers, for example."

    You don't agree that it comes down to geography? Then why did it happen in one place before any other place? I don't think you can know that an IR would have happened anywhere else. I have stated my reasons for thinking that would be unlikely (the economic incentives did not exist).

    634:

    "The weather forecasters, climatologists, orbital mechanics people and others would dissent; they are all in the business of predicting the future of chaotic systems. As I said, you can't predict the details in the long term, but there are usually patterns you can predict (though you can't choose which patterns). You can also predict the details for a short period, depending on the accuracy of your data and the instability of the system."

    You're right, although I don't think you are disagreeing with Paul so much as agreeing with him using different language. The point is that Heteromeles is wrong in stating that nonlinear systems are a reason that the universe is not fully determined. Indeed you can't predict the outcome of a nonlinear system without letting the system run itself (ie, wait to see what the weather will bring), but nonlinear systems are completely determined by the variables and terms in the equations. They are determined, but unpredictable.

    635:

    When a planet orbits a star, if follows a path that can be modeled with precise accuracy.

    Not exactly true, unless you have solved the N-body problem. All current orbital calculations are approximations, and their accuracy is limited by finite-length numbers.

    Even with an N-body solution, the orbital calculations would still be approximations (though better ones), as their accuracy would still be limited by finite-length numbers. Especially in the most general (and most accurate) case, where N is the number of bodies in the entire universe.

    636:

    "I think you're saying that the universe is (at least quasi-) deterministic in the macro and the general, even while it might be aleatory or chaotic in the specific and the detail."

    No, what I am saying is that the universe seems fully determined, above the level of quantum uncertainty. That is to say, every observable effect is the consequence of a prior set of causes, in a chain of cause and effect going back to the beginning of time.

    Not everyone agrees with this, of course, but I believe it is the consensus opinion among physicists.

    637:

    "EC You realise, of course, that your argument in # 598 is a demolition of the "future is fixed"/"no free will"/"brickverse" hypothesis?"

    Actually, it isn't. Please see my comments above.

    638:

    That was my first reaction too. Even with just three bodies you're into exciting territory in the general case. Start adding dust, gravity waves or light pressure and suddenly you have quantum effects perturbing your pretty macroscopic model and I reckon the wheels fall off again. Add a fourth large body and I think the maths gets sufficiently complex that you don't need micro effects to really bother the computations people.

    I'm also wondering how light sails work if the universe is predetermined above the quantum level.

    639:

    @621

    France and England, were for Big Sugar in 17th and 18th centuries.

    Spain not so. It was gold and silver for Spain in terms of extraction value (which from the beginning in the Spain squandered in the wars of the Austrian Succession and France). Notice, the Industrial Revolution came late, if at all, to most parts of Spain. There are Reasons for that, and this is one of them.

    By the mid 1700's England already had dominated vast amounts of India, controlled Asian ports; by 1820 England ruled the world having taken out Napoleon.

    Until the wars and the rebellion, the single most lucrative producing spot on the globe was San Domingue, i.e. Haiti. Sugar and coffee. It kept the royal house of France financially viable, even as France warred with England over dominance of India.

    All the European countries profited enormously from the transatlantic slave trade, and / or fought very hard to do so, see even Denmark. The Portuguese domination (she was also concentrating on her Asian empire in India and southeast Asia) of the African trade was lost to the Dutch (then the Dutch too concentrated on the overseas interest/dominance in southeast Asia), and then to the French and English. France did a great deal of it, which was the great opening for abolitionists in England during Napoleon. The Spanish didn't trade themselves: they sold the right to trade African slaves to Spanish territories, the asiento, to the highest bidder. For the longest period, England had it.

    And recall the colonies in North American were prohibited from exporting anything at all except raw materials, which had something to do with that fracas known as the War of Independence (and so did slavery and England's fur trade). Smuggling was, of course, rife in the Colonies. The New Englanders were the ones who provided the food, etc. that was given to the incarcerated labor force on San Domingue ....

    After the prohibition of the African slave trade by the Brits, after the Treaty of Ghent between the US and England, the US sold the protection of its flag to anybody from anywhere who wanted to transport them.

    That cotton gin was invented when it was, as cotton textile$ really pu$hed Indu$trial improvement so greatly, was a great boon to England, i.e. the southern US.

    640:

    No, what I am saying is that the universe seems fully determined, above the level of quantum uncertainty. That is to say, every observable effect is the consequence of a prior set of causes, in a chain of cause and effect going back to the beginning of time.

    This is true in theory. In practice, the universe lacks sufficient mass-energy to store all that information in a retrievable format, so for all intents and purposes, most of it is overwritten, so you cannot reconstruct causes completely. The future is unpredictable, for similar reasons.

    This is the point of Black Swan theory, that huge events can be unpredictable, but can be retroactively explained. The problem with the explanation is that it provides you with precisely no way to predict the next Black Swan. This lack of predictive power is the curse of many research fields, including ecology, economics, and sociology.

    So can you say that, if you reran the universe, you'd get the same thing? No, because you lack the information to create the starting conditions or tell whether they're identical. It's a statement of faith in theory, but in practice it's probably more useful to believe in free will and randomness.

    641:

    OTOH, Devereaux is up front about how his own area of expertise IS NOT ancient Greece, and says we should look to ancient (semi) contemporary sources in judging Sparta. Those sources do not speak well of Sparta even when the writer is PRO-Sparta ...

    To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Devereaux has been debunked or anything of that nature, just that he's critiquing a view of Sparta that was outdated in the 1970s while his own views are similarly outdated. There's far more recent scholarship that he isn't abreast of.

    642:

    "Though I will say this, when he gets out of the weeds of military matters of the ancient world, there's a lot he isn't aware of."

    Yes, and this includes not only areas of history outside his own field, but also engineering and related matters. This is particularly noticeable in things like the iron-making posts I referred to above. He knows a lot more about the historical context than I do, but at the same time it's an inescapably technical subject, and also one that has points at which it gets technically complicated in unexpected ways because iron and its alloys have a lot of wiggly metallurgical idiosyncrasies. He seems to approach this from a "historian's perspective", collecting information from what various (mostly non-technical) observers have had to say about the industry through the ages and what uses the iron was put to, and working backwards to a broad model of how the different processes compare with each other. From my (technical engineering/metallurgy oriented) perspective that looks like a piss awkward and uncertain method with a lot of ways to get misled, but he seems to make it work remarkably well. He also seems to have a good sense of when the risk of being misled is getting too high and it's time to leave off the chase, so although he does leave occasional holes and vague bits, he mostly manages not to get anything important actually wrong.

    And he is very good at pointing out where he's running beyond the limits of his knowledge and how large a pinch of salt to take his conclusions with, so I do rate him as a good source of information. I guess him being a teacher has a lot to do with it.

    "When it comes to why England and Europe were able to industrialize so quickly, it really matters that this region of the globe rapidly dominated two entirely fresh continents in terms of resources. Not to mention a third continent, Africa, from which it extracted the founding labor power. These economic histories of the transatlantic slave trade are out of his ken."

    We extracted the founding labour power from our own rural breeding population. Most farm workers worked on someone else's farm rather than owning their own, and it was a pretty shitty prospect - you'd probably get food and some approximation to a roof over your head, but fuck all money, in return for working your arse off all your waking hours outdoors in British weather. Technically it wasn't slavery but for all the real choice you had in the matter you'd have been hard put to it to draw the distinction, including the being treated like an animal bits. So we had a steady supply of people growing up with only that to look forward to and as ready as anything to go "fuck this" if only they got the chance, which when textile manufactories started wanting urban labour they did, and happily upped sticks.

    Those manufactories were set up to process fibres from indigenous sources - ones that go "baa" - whose importance was very well established from way back (hence the Lord Chancellor's official arse-park being The Woolsack). Slave-produced imported cotton as a feedstock came along later; it wasn't a case of industrialising to process something that there was suddenly lots of, it was that it made sense for there to suddenly be lots of it because the industrial processing ability was already there.

    As Heteromeles points out, the "global power" shit was not a pre-existing condition. The spinning jenny was invented before US independence; France and Spain had most of the Americas; the Netherlands and Portugal were important around Asia. Britain was still getting by importing only a little food from mainland Europe (although it was significant enough for Napoleon to wonder if he could manage to starve us out). Germany wasn't maritime, wasn't colonialist and wasn't a nation, but they did have handy concentrations of mineral resources that were useful in connection with each other and were in the same places, they were good at mining, and they were on the way to putting it all together.

    Industrialisation was one of the factors that changed the balance, but it's also significant that while Britain was building textile mills, France started building guillotines. Then they spawned a dictator who terrorised most of the Continent and went round invading everyone. Then once he was out of the way various other countries carried on dinging at each other. Meanwhile Britain had a handy moat and managed to avoid the distraction, needing to spare only enough military resources to stick an oar in here and there on the winning side so as to get a boost off everyone else's backs when the winning happened, and being able to concentrate on building things like factories, navies and empires. Of course there then emerged the positive feedback loop of the empire feeding industry and industry enabling empire, but that was possible because the industry was already there.

    643:

    This brings up a problem: predicted by who? The Chixulub meteor impact was a major black swan, but certainly wasn't unpredictable - any competent astronomer, had one existed, could have predicted it eons in advance. "No one could have predicted it" is frequently an invalid statement. Frequently it only means, "we didn't predict it" or "we failed to predict it" or "we shouted down the people who were predicting it and failed to apologize to them afterwards, or take their advice where the future is concerned."

    The idea of "Black Swans" isn't only about predictability, it's about inadequate information - it doesn't fit well into a philosophical argument.

    If you want to do the work, figure out how much the quantum effects actually affect larger physical events,* then at least you'll have some real parameters to argue about.

    • Yeah, I know, easier said than done.
    644:

    That's a good point. No mass extinction event is a black swan. A number of them took millions of years to completely unfold. Only Chixculub was instantaneous, and had there been astronomers around they might have called it at least a few years in advance. Depending. I'll point out that the asteroid Apophis won't hit us in 2030, but IIRC we won't know about its next few near passes until we see how it interacts with the Earth and Moon. It's not clockwork.

    That said, the effects of mass extinctions seem hard to predict. Certainly, evidence says that animals that can live in holes do disproportionately well in extinction events, for fairly obvious reasons. This doesn't at all explain how so many birds survived Chicxulub. Where they living on India (other side of the globe)? Antarctica? What happened during the paleocene was that some birds got really big and dinosaur-like (they're theropods, after all). Had you been around, you'd have bet a Mesozoic rerun: mammals have a brief field day, then dinosaurs take over again. Instead, the mammals got big and mostly took over, except in New Zealand and Madagascar. Why? It's a puzzle, made worse by the fact that most Paleocene fossils suck and bird bone fossilization in general sucks double, because the bones are so thin. It's not because mammals were smarter, either. Until well into the Oligocene, birds in the parrot/songbird lineage were almost certainly the smartest vertebrates on the planet.

    645:

    Until well into the Oligocene, birds in the parrot/songbird lineage were almost certainly the smartest vertebrates on the planet.

    And they may still be in our league - we probably honed our own intelligence against them, now it's the other way around - crows and the like building hacks against the world homo-sapiens made. If we're going to uplift a species I'd suggest corvids - at least they don't fling poo at each other!

    646:

    ...Correction: the machinery wasn't created to deal with fibre sources that went "baa" alone, but imported cotton also. However it was still before US independence, and cotton was imported from India to begin with. It still looks to me like pre-existing industrialisation facilitating slave-produced cotton rather than the other way round.

    647:

    As long as the process includes somehow convincing them to make sure other creatures are dead before pulling bits off and eating them, instead of pulling the bits off first and leaving the creatures to become dead in their own good time. Otherwise I think it's probably preferable to choose a species that's into ballistic turds.

    648:

    I doubt our ancestors did any differently. And there are lots of bright parrots who mainly eat vegetables.

    649:

    how it interacts with the Earth and Moon. It's not clockwork.

    Can I just recreationally (dis)agree with you again, on the basis that real clockwork is nowhere near as simple as people who like to talk about "clockwork universe" make out? There was that whole prize thing promised by the British that took a while to turn into a useful chronometer, for example. And then the various speed regulators developed to turn wound springs into regular motion. Plus the latterday thermodynamics and quantum wizardry determining exactly how much of whatever it does you can get out of your clockwonkery.

    The whole point of Newton was that the motions of stuff like planets is clockwork, we just need proper maths to analyse it. AFAIK no-one has proved him wrong yet, they've just gone "three body problem is hard" and thrown their hands up (like they just don't care). Well, and spent a lot of time and energy trying to find workable approximations. To the point where they do actually account for light pressure at times.

    So... quantum clockwork?

    650:

    As long as the process includes somehow convincing them to make sure other creatures are dead before pulling bits off and eating them,

    Do any animals actually do that? I vaguely divide them into "eat it whole", "break bits off", "smash their way in", "dissolve then drink", none of which involve "kill it first" except incidentally (a splashed turtle is dead, but that's not why it was splashed). Plus there's a whole lot of different "keep it alive but immobilised to eat later" going on especially in the insect world.

    651:

    There's also birds that mostly eat vegetables but can defend themselves if necessary. But I vaguely recall that most birds can and will eat meat if it happens to be available.

    Specifically thinking of whatever it is that distributes mango seeds. Because a bird that can eat a mango seed is probably not a small bird. Sure, flying foxes will carry the fruit a small distance then drop the seed, but IIRC there were bigger birds in the past that could pass the seeds. Even if they were as flighty and harmless as emus you still wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of one. Let alone a 4m tall cassorwary...

    652:

    Yes, I've been to Oz and know about cassowaries - they're basically raptors - When I was in Queensland I was told that I should never, under any circumstance, go near one. But if we uplifted monkeys we'd get something that was mostly like us, if we uplifted dogs... I have enough trouble with relentless extroverts... but birds look interesting.

    653:

    there are lots of bright parrots who mainly eat vegetables

    Large parrots and songbirds seem to be the smartest. Your corvids come under the latter category, but it also includes the Australian magpie and especially butcher birds, which may be earlier branches. There's a theory that all songbirds have an Australian origin... there's a book that H has referred to here several times that sums it up better than I would if I tried.

    It's possible that cockatoos were the smartest things on Earth for millions of years...

    654:

    cassowaries ... told that I should never, under any circumstance, go near one

    IME the problem is them coming near you. They're curious birds and don't fear people so they will come over to see whether you are fun to play with. The main issue, as with all animals, is that they're protective of their babies. Which are even less fearful of humans than the adults. So you get a few 0.5-1.5m high "babies" coming over to check you out, maybe see if you're fun to play with, then dad comes over and says "don't fuck with my babies" and now you're a gutless wonder...

    Australia is a bit overrated as far as dangerous animals go. I think it's more than we have unusual things that are dangerous. Most places you can swim with jellyfish, it's just gross. In Australia we have Portuguese Man'o'war which are no fun{tm} but at least you can see them, and irukandji which you can't see but are much worse. Plus the Gimpi Gimpi tree, and "no-one expects a tree to stab them". Anyone who doesn't expect that from a crocodile could easily graduate from Darwin's University (it still amuses me that that is a real thing). But then "the great sandy desert" has killed a lot of people and it's just really obviously big and sandy. And a desert. Guess how it kills people.

    OTOH way more people get bitten by sea wolves than by sharks, it's just that the former is fucking obvious... don't argue with seals. Same as in Europe, if the walrus wants the yacht, the walrus gets the yacht...

    655:

    And they may still be in our league...

    Yup. Alex the African grey parrot had the English vocabulary of a human five-year-old. Considering the brain ratios of parrot to human, that's pretty darn impressive...

    656:

    It's not a better brain, but definitely better brain-tissue!

    657:

    the archaeologists stated that the inner chamber was a "ritual space" on no actual evidence

    When I was studying archaeology at uni, my professor said "probably had a religious/ritual significance" was basically code for "I don't know, but I won't get my grant renewed if I say that". When coupled with the tendency of many archaeologists (at that time, anyway) to be childless bachelors you apparently often got some real whoppers.

    The example I particularly remember was a small clay model of a house with little clay figures. Wear patterns of the objects indicated that figures were often moved around the house. Apparently the archaeologist discovering this had hypothesized a religious ritual where the figured representing people were moved around the model for some reason — a very complicated explanation for what looked a hell of a lot like a dollhouse!

    658:

    Australia is a bit overrated as far as dangerous animals go.

    It's hard to overrate a place which has Irukandji jellyfish.

    659:

    As long as the process includes somehow convincing them to make sure other creatures are dead before pulling bits off and eating them, instead of pulling the bits off first and leaving the creatures to become dead in their own good time. Otherwise I think it's probably preferable to choose a species that's into ballistic turds.

    Given how aggressive chimps can be (including in at least one case ganging up on and castrating a now-ex troop leader by biting his junk off, as part of a coup) I think it advisable to remember that ballistic turds are the least dangerous aspect to being close to a chimp.

    660:

    OTOH way more people get bitten by sea wolves than by sharks...

    I presume you're not talking about the "breed of wolf found in the Great Bear Rainforest along the Pacific Coast of Canada. Swimming between islands like fish, they are genetically distinct from their inland cousins, or from wolves in any other part of the world." :-)

    661:

    Given how aggressive chimps can be...

    No kidding. If I wanted to get up close to a primate, I'd pick a bonobo!

    662:

    Remember that the animal that kills most people in Australia is the horse. Well, excluding other humans. And I hear they have both horses and humans in most countries.

    663:

    Those of you who think you know a bit about evolution might enjoy this article and/or the paper it's based on:

    https://phys.org/news/2022-08-corals-mutations-lifetimes-offspring.html

    corals have been shown to pass somatic mutations—changes to the DNA sequence that occur in non-reproductive cells—to their offspring. The finding, by an international team of scientists led by Penn State biologists, demonstrates a potential new route for the generation of genetic diversity, which is the raw material for evolutionary adaptation

    664:

    The whole point of Newton was that the motions of stuff like planets is clockwork, we just need proper maths to analyse it. AFAIK no-one has proved him wrong yet, they've just gone "three body problem is hard" and thrown their hands up (like they just don't care). Well, and spent a lot of time and energy trying to find workable approximations. To the point where they do actually account for light pressure at times.

    First I have to apologize to EC for not continuing on the cladistics argument. I got busy with other stuff. You're wrong, but sorry, details omitted!

    Anyway, I've had an annoying day, which is totally not your fault. However, I'm just going to quote Wikipedia on the Three-Body Problem: "The three-body problem is a special case of the n-body problem. Unlike two-body problems, no general closed-form solution exists, as the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required."

    So it can't be solved for all cases, but each can be simulated with some accuracy for each particular case for some time. As a friend of mine who's an astronomy buff cheerfully noted, if you go far enough into the future or past, it's impossible to determine which side of the sun the Earth will be on during a given month, due to all the little tugs from other planets and solar wind issues adding up.

    In simulating the universe, we have the biggest known n-body problem of all. Except that we have no idea what 80% of it is, and it's entirely possible that some (large) part of it has already accelerated past C relative to us due to dark energy (which expands space). It can no longer interact with us, although it might have interacted with what became us during the Big Bang or shortly thereafter. So even if we knew where all the matter and dark matter is to an arbitrarily high degree of precision, that might well be inadequate for reconstructing the deep history of the universe, because parts of that deep history rage-quit and went off to perform their own solo acts, and have been out of touch ever since. So to speak.

    Your soapbox, sir.

    665:

    To be sure you get all kinds of horrors especially among invertebrates. But I think it's true to say that certainly once you get to land animals with big enough brains that making an uplifted version ceases to be a totally silly idea, they mostly do kill things before they eat them. It stops them trying to run away and it stops them trying to fight back. It's not much fun when you're tucking into your dinner and it suddenly bites your nose off and legs it under the sofa, especially if you need your nose to find the next one.

    666:

    "So you get a few 0.5-1.5m high "babies" coming over to check you out, maybe see if you're fun to play with, then dad comes over and says "don't fuck with my babies" and now you're a gutless wonder..."

    Does running away work, or do they just go "ooo, it runs away, it's chaseable"?

    667:

    there's a book that H has referred to here several times that sums it up better than I would if I tried.

    Tim Low's Where Song Began. Still one of my favorite books from the last two years. If you want to get an idea of how smart "primitive" parrots (keas), and primitive songbirds (Aussie honeyeaters, etc.) are, it's by far the best.

    Then there are the falcons, which split off from parrots around the Eocene. As a clade, they generally went in for psychopathically focused hunting, sort of like were-parrots, but far cooler. Then there are the most primitive falcons, the caracaras, which are a bunch of bumbling, slow maturing, generalist hunters and scavengers that are probably the smartest raptors around, if not quite in the parrots' league.

    It just goes to show that evolution doesn't always favor the growth of brains, Carl Sagan notwithstanding.

    Incidentally, Low doesn't go into caracaras, which live exclusively in the Americas. Turns out that the ancestors of parrots and falcons were likely southern hemisphere birds. Falcons subsequently evolved in South America and spread to the rest of the world, including Australia. Parrots probably first evolved in Zealandia and Australia and subsequently spread to the rest of the world, including South America. Go figure.

    668:

    Pigeon seems to deliberately misread what I wrote regarding the extraction of labor power out of Africa. Not to England but to the continents of the 'new world'. Their labor produced wealth never before available to the nation states of Europe, particularly Enand, France and Spain - Spain in the mines. Without that wealth to fund the various parts that made the Industrial economy it couldn't have happened either.

    669:

    Remember that the animal that kills most people in Australia is the horse.

    Hey, I even remember that the animal that kills most people in Africa is the hippopotamus! :-)

    670:

    As a friend of mine who's an astronomy buff cheerfully noted, if you go far enough into the future or past, it's impossible to determine which side of the sun the Earth will be on during a given month, due to all the little tugs from other planets and solar wind issues adding up.

    Yup. We also don't know if our earth will be ejected from the solar system by Jupiter at some point in the distant future...

    672:

    Does running away work, or do they just go "ooo, it runs away, it's chaseable"?

    I have never been game to find out. I'm told it's better to focus on keeping the babies between you and dad, or alternatively making sure you don't get between dad and babies. Kind of like all the stories about how to stay safe from bears... best to watch someone else try them if you must experiment.

    Limited experience says that backing away slowly generally works if you back towards the carpark or some other open space. Or just move suddenly, they are pretty flighty (is that the wrong term for a flightless bird?).

    673:

    Pigeon seems to deliberately misread what I wrote regarding the extraction of labor power out of Africa. Not to England but to the continents of the 'new world'. Their labor produced wealth never before available to the nation states of Europe, particularly Enand, France and Spain - Spain in the mines. Without that wealth to fund the various parts that made the Industrial economy it couldn't have happened either.

    For what it's worth, it turns out there's a Wikpedia on industrialization of China. We seem to be rehashing old arguments for why China didn't industrialize, although I was at best peripherally aware of them.

    That said, no one seems to be arguing Foxessa's point, and that might actually be more worthwhile to explore:

    It may be that China, in fact, has had at least one, possibly as many as three, industrial revolutions, at least the early stages involving things like large scale iron and steel production using coal, and fairly complex machines. They all provided ages of prosperity that collapsed due to invasions, often triggered by military fiascos.

    Perhaps instead of looking at the special genius that made England different, we should be looking at what caused England, followed by the rest of Europe to explode in power when they started dinking around with industrial innovation. That would be the wealth extracted from the New World and to a lesser extent, Australia and Africa.

    So maybe it wasn't the launch that was different, it was the subsequent stages?

    The follow-on possibility is that maybe industrial revolutions are inherently temporary, and the ones China went through were simply smaller than the one we're currently in. That, unfortunately, is entirely possible, given our current evidence. Show of hands of those who think we can continue using energy at current levels indefinitely?

    674:

    Maybe the important thing is the the U.K. is an island, making it far less likely to succumb to a Mongol invasion. Also, where in the arc of a state, from poor cousin of the French to imperial ascendancy to Brexit was the U.K when they industrialized? If England underwent the "Fourth Great Scientific Revolution" (understanding industrialization as the Third) could they keep it?

    675:

    Heteromeles noted in part in #621:

    The problem with this explanation is that Europe is of a comparable size and linguistic diversity to China, and there were often problems traveling from country to country.

    Linguistic diversity in Yurp may have been mitigated by common knowledge of Latin by educated folks, maybe.

    676:

    A good example is the Kea - look it up on Wikipedia.

    677:

    Maybe the important thing is the the U.K. is an island, making it far less likely to succumb to a Mongol invasion. Also, where in the arc of a state, from poor cousin of the French to imperial ascendancy to Brexit was the U.K when they industrialized? If England underwent the "Fourth Great Scientific Revolution" (understanding industrialization as the Third) could they keep it?

    Erm, cough cough. The first industrial revolution was punctuated by the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Not a peaceful time. And it turns out Song Dynasty China was building reservoirs (fed by the Yellow River) that were up to half as wide as the English Channel, just to stop nomad invaders at chokepoints.*

    While one could make an argument that wartime Britain innovated more rapidly than peaceful China, China was churning out mass quantities of steel for weapons early on in their revolutions, while Britain went first to the textile mills. So that idea seems to fall apart too.

    I think your last question, about a presumed arc of development, is probably worth thinking about quite hard.

    *Found a reference that Song China actually planted large forests of Chinese elms, willows, and mulberry just north of the capitol at Kaifeng, to get the Liao Empire cavalry off their horses and fighting on foot. Kaifeng is a plain city in Hebei, while what's now Beijing had been conquered by the Liao. Using a forest as a fort sounds weird to us, but they were just following Sun Tzu and manufacturing difficult terrain for their enemies to fight through. And all the while they claimed the trees were for civilian use.

    Nice to know that Chinese elm has beneficial uses (to be fair, they also used it for timber).

    678:

    "Erm, cough cough. The first industrial revolution was punctuated by the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Not a peaceful time."

    Yes, but the UK wasn't invaded, while China had to turn their attention from whatever they were doing to fighting Mongols. I hear that takes all your concentration!

    "I think your last question, about a presumed arc of development, is probably worth thinking about quite hard."

    I'm not sure either the U.S. or the U.K could keep a "Fourth Revolution" at this point. BTW, have you read Ruthanna Emrys's "A Half Built Garden Yet?" It seems like something you'd like.

    679:

    A good example is the Kea - look it up on Wikipedia.

    Thanks, I've been trying not to type it. That most caracara-like parrot.

    That said, every pack hunter from ants to lions and orcas seems to at least occasionally go in from biting off pieces of still-live prey as part of killing them.

    680:

    Show of hands of those who think we can continue using energy at current levels indefinitely?

    I'll bite. We have a long way to go before we exhaust solar and wind power. Plus nuclear fusion is only ten years away, right? :-)

    681:

    I'll bite. We have a long way to go before we exhaust solar and wind power. Plus nuclear fusion is only ten years away, right? :-)

    Fusion's 30 years away, has been since the 1950s. When hat starts steadily dropping, I'll be happier.

    The problem with solar is that sunlight averages around 300 w/m2, with wide variation. So my rather large rooftop array can give me about 240 miles of car travel per week in sunny weather, if I can figure out how to store that much electricity at home. This matters when you live in a place designed around long car commutes.

    Then there's the energy required to make the car, and so forth. It adds up.

    682:

    Well one thing I hadn't expected to get from Tim Low's book... my wife and I have been talking about how there are no sparrows in Brisbane anymore, how we remembered them from our childhood and we wondered where they have gone (even wrote a song partly about it). Turns out it's noisy miners.

    683:

    643 - And Egyptian cotton? With the note that I normally encounter the substance in fiction rather than as a physical thing.

    658 - Yes; my interpretation is that "ritual significance" is code for "we don't actually know, and can't/won't do the research to find out".

    675 - "Great Britain is an island" shirley? Anyway, invading an island of any unsurroundable size requires you to first build a navy...

    681 and 682 - Fusion is 20 years away, and has been since the 1940s. OTOH we're 4 orders of magnitude nearer to passing breakeven.

    684:

    EC
    "Delusions of accuracy" - yeah, the difference between accuracy & precision - an old, old trap, that lots of people fall into ...

    Toby
    The Great Orme is a fascinating site - and that is without the Goats - or the Tramway (!)

    685:

    Oh, dear. The three-body problem is called that, not because it is hard, but because there is no explicit solution, and people spent a LOT of time searching for one.

    The N-body problem is quite simple to analyse, especially given computers, but is chaotic in general. No, it's not the finite word-length that is the problem (that's easy to solve), nor that a huge amount of computer power is needed (though it is, once one accounts for the moons and asteroids), but the lack of precision in the initial conditions. It's a measurement issue (on many thousands of objects). When errors build up exponentially, you need vastly more initial accuracy to even double the extrapolation period, and we need to expand it a thousandfold.

    And then there are the black swan events, like heavy comets coming from the Oort cloud - assuming they exist.

    686:

    Actually, that's not quite true. England was never successfully invaded, but there were two rebellions/invasions and two raids.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_England#Following_the_Acts_of_Union_1707

    687:

    I am still confused. On the one hand you're adamant that even the 3 body problem has no explicit solution, and thus presumably someone has proved that this is so. But H only linked wikipedia which doesn't mention such a proof.

    Chaotic and no analytical solution are not the same thing at all. Chaotic can be trivial in the theoretical case, just intractable as soon as reality intrudes and you can no longer say "this value is 3. Not 3 +/- 0.00000000000001, but 3. Exactly 3". I've written code to let people play with chaotic systems, and that was entirely and exactly repeatable due to the discrete and exact nature of the maths (viz, all integers and in a computer).

    So it's obvious to me that the three body problem could be solvable in theory but not in practice, due to the lack of spherical cows in a flat universe. Realistically that's going to be the case for any real system over long enough timescales as noted above.

    But it's not obvious to me that a chaotic system is necessarily intractable at a theoretical level (which the 3 body problem is).

    688:

    The bird survival problem is a bit strange, and not for just that reason. It seems th the only survivor(s?) was either flying or evolved to fly, which is also odd.

    689:

    Prosecution wishes to submit into evidence the "Norman Conquest" m'lud!

    690:

    I have never seen such a proof, either, and I don't know if one exists or merely that everyone is convinced of it. I didn't say the 3-body problem is chaotic, and I am not sure that it is (either way) - the N-body problem assuredly is, but the 3-body may be a special case.

    Chaotic systems are intractable in the sense that their details cannot be predicted more than a short time ahead, subject to the constraints I gave in #598. The simple case you dealt with met the latter two conditions by using integers and defining there to be no external events (which cannot be done for real, physical problems such as orbital mechanics). Fine. But, even in that case, predicting whether a specific point very close to its boundary is in the Mandelbrot set or not is an intractable problem. Your system would have been similar.

    691:

    Request rejected. It was not during the industrial revolution.

    692:

    H @ 632

    This is why I'm bothered by why China didn't industrialize first. I suspect it was happenstance. It might have also been that England's small, so inventors tended to party with each other and exchange ideas.

    Here’s another thought: consider the societal and sociological constraints.

    I think England was first to permit the Joint Stock Company as a permitted form of economic activity, with Elizabeth I authorising The East India Company in 1599. Interestingly, women were prohibited from owning land, but allowed to invest in shares. The same goes for religious non-conformists (the Quakers, particularly) who were also not allowed to own land.

    What you therefore have is a moderately wealthy business/middle class with money to invest in profitable enterprises, and prohibited from buying land.

    But before we get too carried away, not all was rosey. In 1719-20 we get the South Sea Bubble, a fraudulent enterprise that on paper was attempting to mimic the Whig Bank of England-East India Company with a Tory Sword Bank-South Seas Company clone. Being a Tory enterprise, it was a simple Pump-and-Dump operation from the outset, and involved key figures in the Tory Administration.

    The outcome of the bursting of the bubble was to impoverish the country for about eighty years, and to postpone the Industrial Revolution for that same 80 years. After all Abraham Darby (a Quaker) was already smelting iron with coke by this time. What probably held him and his customers back was a lack of available capital. As Charlie has remarked — as part of his research for the next part of his Peter Pan Trilogy — England had a similar GDP to modern Ghana in 1815.

    693:
    I have never seen such a proof, either, and I don't know if one exists or merely that everyone is convinced of it. I didn't say the 3-body problem is chaotic, and I am not sure that it is (either way) - the N-body problem assuredly is, but the 3-body may be a special case.

    In general the 3-body problem under Newtonian Gravitation is chaotic. Consider three identical bodies moving around a common centre of gravity. They will continue in this motion in perpetuity.

    But if there is any discrepancy -- any at all -- from the ideal initial conditions (one mass slightly heavier, one mass moving slightly faster or slower, or slightly out of direction) then the outcome is that one body is ejected and the remaining two orbit one another.

    The three orbiting identical masses are at an unstable equilibrium point. Thus the behaviour depends critically on initial conditions, and predicting what a later state will look like requires exponentially more accuracy for a linear increase in the time over which the simulation is run.

    Under Relativistic Gravity even the two body problem is potentially unstable. ;)

    694:

    The outcome of the bursting of the bubble was to impoverish the country for about eighty years, and to postpone the Industrial Revolution for that same 80 years. After all Abraham Darby (a Quaker) was already smelting iron with coke by this time. What probably held him and his customers back was a lack of available capital. As Charlie has remarked — as part of his research for the next part of his Peter Pan Trilogy — England had a similar GDP to modern Ghana in 1815.

    You've run smack-bang into the teleological fallacy there. The industrial revolution didn't develop like an RTS game where the path to industrial production was clear and you just need to mine enough resources or construct additional pylons in order to get there. In reality, there were many intermediate steps in the way and they all had to be stumbled upon by people who didn't always know in advance where it was all leading.

    Which brings us back to the broader question: why didn't China industralise first? Again I defer to Robert Marks (Origins of the Modern World) whose point is that the Chinese state highly optimised its land, labour, market and resource management to maintain its population. They did so very effectively, but there was little overhead to engage in novel projects.

    In summary, China had a highly developed market economy within the constraints of the biological old regime. Nonetheless, that regime placed ecological limits upon growth, and the freedom of Chinese peasants coupled with practices governing the sexual division of labor, all combined, meant that China was bumping up against the limits of growth by the mid-1800s. Food, clothing, shelter, and fuel competed for land, and to get more from the land, the Chinese lavished increasing amounts of labor on agriculture. The dynamics of specialization, increased market exchanges, and improved transportation in the context of the biological old regime and the particularities of China’s situation were pushing it toward an increasingly labor-intensive agriculture and the depletion of land resources, rather than toward an industrial revolution.

    By contrast, there were a number of dependent and independent factors in England which, in retrospect, appear to converge on an industrial revolution. In a previous comment I mentioned how colonialism provided England with both natural resources and a captive market for manufactured goods, which enabled it to side-step the trap of agrarian optimization which caught out China. This in turn enabled a population boom in London which drove massive demand for coal heating:

    Along with digging deeper, coal miners had to go farther from London to find coal deposits and thus had higher expenses for transporting the coal overland from the pithead to water. Fixed steam engines were being used to haul coal out of the mines and to pull trams short distances. But at a mine in Durham in the north of England, the idea of putting the steam engine on the tram carriage and running it on iron rails became a reality in 1825 with a seven-mile line connecting the mine directly to the coast. The first railroad was born.

    Where in 1830 there were a few dozen miles of track in England, by 1840 there were over 4,500 miles, and by 1850 over 23,000 miles. The progeny of the coal mine, the railroad fueled a demand for more coal, more steam engines, and more iron and steel: each mile of railroad used 300 tons of iron just for the track. Between 1830 and 1850, the output of iron in Britain rose from 680,000 to 2,250,000 tons, and coal output trebled from fifteen million to forty-nine million tons.

    Put simply, England's industrial revolution didn't merely rely upon some highly unique starting conditions, but also required that incentives exist at every step of the way to encourage a collection of cottage industries into a national project.

    695:

    Remember that the animal that kills most people in Australia is the horse. Well, excluding other humans.

    Is this more from the aggression of horses or rapid unplanned dismounting?

    696:

    Dave Lester@694: Under Relativistic Gravity even the two body problem is potentially unstable. ;)

    If you want to account for virtual particles from the quantum vacuum, so is the one-body problem.

    The zero-body problem is left as an exercise for the reader ;)

    697:

    Or a black swan event.

    I don't have the figures handy but the US went through a huge industrial communications upgrade due to what we call the Civil War. Miles of railroad track and telegraph lines increased by a magnitude or more. Grant and his like thinkers realized that fighting a way the way Napoleon did foraging along the way would never lead to a win. They built rail and communications lines to the battles as fast as they could. And when the fighting stopped all of that infrastructure was still in place to be used. It might have been a decade or two or more for a similar build up without the war.

    This fight also led somewhat to the industrial fighting and trench warfare of WWI. Petersburg was an ugly example of the start of trench warfare. And the Franco Prussian War in general seemed to be take the US dust up and do it better.

    698:

    He actually responded to the criticism on his Sparta series

    I’ve noticed an interesting trend among historians where they often change their read in history in pretty dramatic ways on pretty regular, generational cycles without the introduction of any new significant primary evidence.

    So I think is point that “new doesn’t mean better” is a well founded one

    https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-retrospective/

    699:

    hippoptolemy @ 642:

    To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Devereaux has been debunked or anything of that nature, just that he's critiquing a view of Sparta that was outdated in the 1970s while his own views are similarly outdated. There's far more recent scholarship that he isn't abreast of.

    Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Retrospective

    Note the date posted. I'm pretty sure Devereaux is aware of more recent scholarship.

    700:

    Dave Lester
    the bursting of the bubble was to impoverish the country for about eighty years - err .. no. Otherwise England (GB) would not have been able to fight & decisively win the 7 years war { 1756-1763 }

    hippoptolemy
    Where in 1830 there were a few dozen miles of track in England - NO
    Liverpool & Manchester - an actual inter-city Main Line - opened in 1830 & there were already other connecting railways open or in progress - the Grand Junction started operating by 1833-4 f'rinstance

    701:
    the bursting of the bubble was to impoverish the country for about eighty years - err .. no. Otherwise England (GB) would not have been able to fight & decisively win the 7 years war { 1756-1763

    Perhaps I should have phrased it slightly differently: "investors were sufficiently burned to be very nervous indeed about stocks".

    I also failed to mention that the purpose of the Sword Bank was to purchase Government Debt that had accrued as a result of Marlborough's activities in the War of Austrian Succession.

    As a result of the mishandling of the South Sea Bubble, that debt £1,000,000 (when a million quid, was a real million ;) ) was still hanging around eighty years later.

    Fighting the war against France in 1756-63 required a further increase in the National Debt.

    So, we sort of agree, yes?

    702:

    Harking back to the steam engine, if it hadn't been invented in England for draining mines, it might have been in the Netherlands for pumped drainage a few decades later. I don't believe that the special features of England were critical, and I definitely don't believe that what happened here is of any help in understanding why China didn't get there first.

    703:

    I don't have the figures handy but the US went through a huge industrial communications upgrade due to what we call the Civil War. Miles of railroad track and telegraph lines increased by a magnitude or more. Grant and his like thinkers realized that fighting a way the way Napoleon did foraging along the way would never lead to a win. They built rail and communications lines to the battles as fast as they could. And when the fighting stopped all of that infrastructure was still in place to be used. It might have been a decade or two or more for a similar build up without the war.

    Yes and no. Full disclosure, I'm still working on my alt-world where Blacks gained equality as the result of the Civil War, so I've been diving down Civil War rabbit holes a lot recently. That's also why I've been reading the Bible, because it's hard to understand 19th Century American politics without knowing it better.

    Anyway, yes, you're right, the Federalist side had a huge advantage in industrial output. That was one of the things that helped them win. Having an army that was four times bigger and composed of one-quarter to one-third immigrants helped immensely too.

    Rails and telegraphs helped in some places. Were they permanent? Well...if you drill down a bit, the Secesh were more than happy to destroy every Yankee railroad line they could. There are notes of rails heated and wrapped around trees so they couldn't be reused. In places like Missouri, every railroad bridge had a Union Army blockhouse next to it, to try to keep it from being blown up. And the "Partisan Rangers" often robbed civilian trains. Some veterans of those units kept up the habit in the Wild West after the War too.

    What happened after the War was equally important. The US went nuts on rail lines to conquer the West by flooding it with settlers, both immigrants, unionists, and yes, a lot of confederates relocating. By the 1890s, IIRC, there was actually a financial crash in the railroad sector, because they'd overbuilt.

    This is a general point that I've learned: it's a mistake I make frequently, and it looks like most people make. Much of what we think "The Civil War did" actually happened after the Civil War, from railroads, to cowboys and Indian genocides, modern racism, the strategies and tactics the US far right is still using...all those really gelled after the cannons fell silent. Had Reconstruction actually worked, the US would be a radically different place today.

    If you want to do more rabbit holing (it's still August, after all), there's the other transportation battle, for control of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. That's where we see two little brown-water navies of steamships, from ironclads (so heavy, tippy and slow that they could barely go upstream, but more-or-less resistant to cannons), tinclads (wood and 1" iron plate, proof against small arms), and even cottonclads (Texas and others didn't have enough iron plate to make a difference, so they armored up by using big bales of raw cotton. More-or-less proof against small arms). To be clear, these were up-armored, paddle-wheeled steamboats, normally with armor around the wheels, an armored pilot shack on top (crewed mostly by civilian pilots who hated the job), and so forth. It's worth tracking them down because they're among the weirdest warships of the 19th Century. And if you enjoy really strange military units, there's the United States Ram Fleet. Armored paddlewheelers built solely to ram, initially without other armaments. They actually won a battle with the things.

    704:

    How big/important were these invasions as compared with "The Mongols are coming?"

    705:

    I can't answer anything to do with China -- I'm not familiar enough to comment sensibly.

    Instead, I was addressing the issues around the various pre-conditions required to make it happen here. And the availability of finance is one of the issues I'd not seen mentioned in this thread yet.

    706:

    Re: 'I definitely don't believe that what happened here is of any help in understanding why China didn't get there first. ...'

    What we (Westerners) think of as 'THE Industrial Revolution' is probably not the same as what other (very distant) nations regard as their industrial revolution.

    From my POV, it looks as though the overall arch of what was discovered followed a similar trajectory - we're loads ahead of our neighbors, so we can sit back, rake in the trade/profits and relax to the point of no longer paying much attention to what went into those advances. We got egotistical, snobby and lazy - and stopped funding/rewarding discoveries.

    https://china.usc.edu/sites/default/files/forums/Chinese%20Inventions.pdf

    In 'Guns, Germs and Steel', Jared Diamond comments on China's tech (economic) breakthroughs and one comment really made me sit up: because China invented porcelain which satisfied their needs for secure (and decorative) liquid containers, they didn't bother to go to invent glass. Westerners invented glass and because of this they then went on to develop lenses, mirrors, etc. Just a tad of difference in the initial breakthrough product can over time mean huge differences in future breakthroughs.

    Change of topic ... stats:

    Curious about your opinion of this open access article.

    'Principal Component Analyses (PCA)-based findings in population genetic studies are highly biased and must be reevaluated'

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14395-4

    I've worked with a few stats/math people and each one had a different preference for data testing/analysis. Their rationales for their recommended approach made sense for each particular event. Unfortunately their different approaches made cross-validation [ahem] difficult. Yeah - and PCA was used at least a few times. (Not impressed.)

    707:

    Sorry, I don't think Robert Marks got it right on China, especially the last sentence:

    "The dynamics of specialization, increased market exchanges, and improved transportation in the context of the biological old regime and the particularities of China’s situation were pushing it toward an increasingly labor-intensive agriculture and the depletion of land resources, rather than toward an industrial revolution."

    There are two problems here. One is what I mentioned in 621, the story of how a well-trained agronomist (F.H. King) went to China, documented how they were doing agriculture in 1909, and came away impressed enough to write a book about it which is still in print (I've read my copy several times).

    That's not what Marks is talking about, and unless Marks was on the ground in China before the communist cock-up, I'll take King's first-hand description of what the Chinese were actually doing. Yes, it was muscle-powered, but it was efficiently muscle-powered, and it wasn't resource-depleting the way modern agriculture is.

    The second problem is that the story for why the Song Dynasty got into using coal to make iron and steel had to do with a shortage of charcoal. The thing to remember is that in agricultural China, trees are planted. We're not talking about a plundering of the wildwood as in the US, we're talking about too many rice-fields, too few woodlots, charcoal's getting expensive, and hoo boy look at all that nice coal (which they'd been using for over 1,000 years by that point).

    England was in a similar situation around the Industrial Revolution, because wood and charcoal came from woodlots, not "wild"* forests. And it appears they came up with the same idea as the Chinese had 700 years earlier. It's what happened next which is different.

    *The latter in quotes because it turns out the Indians managed forests too, so "the wildwood" in the US was in many cases depopulated, not untenanted.

    708:

    Here’s another thought: consider the societal and sociological constraints. I think England was first to permit the Joint Stock Company as a permitted form of economic activity, with Elizabeth I authorising The East India Company in 1599. Interestingly, women were prohibited from owning land, but allowed to invest in shares. The same goes for religious non-conformists (the Quakers, particularly) who were also not allowed to own land. What you therefore have is a moderately wealthy business/middle class with money to invest in profitable enterprises, and prohibited from buying land.

    Well, I'm not sure. Song China apparently ran on a social class system that put scholars at the top, followed by farmers/landowners, tradesmen, and merchants at the bottom. However, as in England, when the Song dynasty was prosperous, there were a lot of wealthy lowlife merchants hobnobbing with the scholars (aka the Imperial Bureaucracy) and the nobles (wealthy landowners). That looks like a similar situation to what was going on in England, although I could be wrong.

    I completely agree that England invented joint stock companies. What I don't know is whether classical Chinese finance had alternative systems that worked as well. I know almost nothing about classical Chinese economics and finance, beyond what Graeber (Debt) went on about with Buddhist temple economics. Which may not be relevant.

    709:

    A quick glance at it indicates that the example they use is one where PCA is inappropriate. Where it is really useful is in things like sociological or economic 'wealth' or 'privilege' measures, when if often shows that there are a few underlying factors (often only a couple), and using a zillion variables will merely introduce spurious effects. But it is NOT suitable for data that are categorical (with more than two categories) or highly non-linear.

    And, sheesh, the fact that selecting different sizes of sample from different groups changes the result has been known since time immemorial. That effect applies even to the most linear of data (though less so).

    710:

    Well, in one, the government was packing up preparatory to abandoning London.

    711:

    I should have added to its non-suitability "or with extreme tails to the distributions". E.g. don't use raw income, but its logarithm (or whatever).

    713:

    The latter in quotes because it turns out the Indians managed forests too, so "the wildwood" in the US was in many cases depopulated, not untenanted.

    Around here, central North Carolina, people get all bent out of shape talking about our natural trees. Many/most are Lobbloly pine that are very close to 100 years old. I doubt our forests were virgin woodlands in 1915. Something happened 100 years ago in central NC. Best time to find virgin forests around her would have been prior to 1700. And then they might have been managed by the locals prior to then or maybe 1600. But most of the evidence for those managed forests are in the lands between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes.

    714:

    Re: [PCA] 'Where it is really useful is in things like sociological or economic 'wealth' or 'privilege' measures, when if often shows that there are a few underlying factors (often only a couple), and using a zillion variables ...'

    Okay - sorta.

    My problem/apprehension was that this approach never seemed to identify how the identified-as-important variables interacted or their timelines, i.e., what was the underlying narrative weaving these particular elements, backdrop and groups of people together.

    BTW - these studies could be considered soc-econ so there was in fact a starting time (as-of date), a baseline reading on a variety of potentially key variables and a bunch of other metrics followed by exposure to the test variable, followed by repeat of initial measures, etc. Very basic and straightforward study designs.

    The 'zillion variables' can be a problem. Different groups have different needs and resources so cutting off the chain of variables too quickly can mean not being able to identify what's really important in/to some remote group.

    Apart from multi stepwise regression is there a stats technique that can help build a time and strength-of-variable dependent narrative? [Not sure how else to phrase this.]

    715:

    You are right that it's not good at explanations. But, when gummint departments measure 3,000 more-or-less linear numeric variables or even more (yes, really), it's a good way of telling how many important factors there are, their relative magnitude, and roughly what they are. It's quite common for the first two factors to account for 90% of the variation, and the first five to account for 99%. In the areas I mentioned, it's commonly wealth and education, in that order - and it CAN be used to identify where groups fit on those scales.

    I am very rusty, and not familiar with many recent techniques, but there are plenty of other methods, all with restrictions and limitations; which one is best is very dependent on the data and exact question, and sometimes there isn't an appropriate one, so you have to change the question. But I definitely would NOT have used PCA for the example described in that paper - possibly some form of cluster analysis or multi-dimensional scaling, but there may now be better methods and I would need to brush the rust off my skills and study the data carefully before deciding. No chance :-)

    716:

    Apart from multi stepwise regression is there a stats technique that can help build a time and strength-of-variable dependent narrative? [Not sure how else to phrase this.]

    I'm as rusty as EC, but what I remember from doing ecological stats was getting drummed into my head NOT to use PCA or other parametric methods unless the data were multivariate normal. Otherwise I agree with everything he wrote.

    Something like non-metric multidimensional scaling does most of what PCA does without requiring normally distributed data.

    If the data are abundant and normalizable, then structural equation modeling might be appropriate, if masochistic.

    As for the rest, I'm not sure whether finding the right method is the best idea (e.g. you're admitting it's a fishing trip where you're looking for correlates rather than testing for causation) or whether it's better a question for experimental design (set it up as a post hoc natural experiment, then see if your causal variables correlate with your response variables).

    If you've got a few hundred dollars to drop, then you might want to get a copy of PC-Ord. It's a set of nonparametric and other stats for use by ecologists, recommended because it is (or used to be) hard to find them implemented elsewhere. The associated book (Analysis of Ecological Communities) is also useful for figuring out how to deal with non-normalizable data. Community data often show the infamous "dust bunny" distribution, which cannot be normalized, and this book, while a few decades old, is basically a cookbook for what to do when your data are fugly and you need to try to do something with them. Since I learned multivariate stats from a sociology textbook, I can testify that methods are adaptable across fields.

    Hope this helps.

    717:

    "NOT to use PCA or other parametric methods unless the data were multivariate normal"

    That's overkill, but you can't relax it far beyond that - the variates need to be ones with low or moderate skewness and kurtosis (which is fixable in some cases by transformations), and they need to associate linearly so that covariances make sense (which is NOT easily fixable if false).

    718:

    "Pigeon seems to deliberately misread what I wrote regarding the extraction of labor power out of Africa. Not to England but to the continents of the 'new world'."

    Erm, I simply read what you wrote - you said we extracted the founding labour power (for the industrial revolution) from Africa. Which is quite obviously untrue, since (as you say above, though you didn't originally) they didn't come to England; nor did they come to Scotland or Wales. Moreover, the places they did go became conspicuous, once industrialisation had begun to spread, for not industrialising. Those places used the slaves instead of industrialisation, not a source of labour for it.

    "Their labor produced wealth never before available to the nation states of Europe, particularly Enand, France and Spain - Spain in the mines. Without that wealth to fund the various parts that made the Industrial economy it couldn't have happened either."

    No: that was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, as demonstrated by examples on both sides. As you pointed out earlier, Spain conspicuously didn't industrialise, even though they had the most money at the time it began to get going. Germany was not a maritime colonialist nation and wasn't even part of the racket, but they did industrialise, and did it well enough to catch up to Britain's head start and then overtake. (Indeed they were better at mining even before it all got going, hence Elizabeth I importing German miners to compensate for England lacking expertise, with evidence still visible in the German terms in English mining terminology and Englishised German miners' surnames).

    Most of the pioneers of industrialisation were not rich at all. Instead they mostly came from the kind of background where they never went to school but had to go out to work as kids to support their families, then gradually got promoted to some level above grunt labour where they had enough freedom to invent things. Quite a lot of them didn't even get rich out of inventing things, but spent most of their time scratching for resources and scrounging facilities off people to develop their ideas.

    The resources for industrialisation were also indigenous. The results of it allowed the American slave system to function by processing their output instead of India's, but the resources for it came from within Britain, with only a few exceptions like the mining knowledge which had arrived with the German miners long before it all got going, or Papin's contribution to the evolution of the pumping engine. The British slaves didn't produce any resources at all: they produced sugar, which is basically entirely useless. It isn't used for digging mines, producing raw materials, or making machinery; it isn't an ingredient in any industrial process. It doesn't feed the workers either; they never saw the stuff until much later on, and it certainly never provided any significant part of their calorie intake. It doesn't even get refined by industrial methods when you've got slaves doing the refining instead. It doesn't become involved with industry until you (a) stop having slaves and (b) start doing cooking in factories, which didn't happen until much later.

    719:

    "NOT to use PCA or other parametric methods unless the data were multivariate normal"/That's overkill, but you can't relax it far beyond that - the variates need to be ones with low or moderate skewness and kurtosis (which is fixable in some cases by transformations), and they need to associate linearly so that covariances make sense (which is NOT easily fixable if false).

    I agree, although I'd counter that most ecologists are statistical bottom feeders, not statisticians, so telling us what we can get away with is generally a bad mistake.

    720:

    The British slaves didn't produce any resources at all: they produced sugar, which is basically entirely useless.

    I beg to defer. Sugar's essential for producing rum, and also arguably an addictive drug, therefore suitable for international trade (a la tobacco, opium, tea, coffee...).

    However, I have no clue what role rum played in industrializing Britain, beyond helping the British Navy decontaminate its water a bit.

    Otherwise I agree.

    *As a random thought, since it's one of those days, contemplate Song Chinese sailors coasting down the California Current in ships built from PNW-sourced Douglas Fir, to trade Chinese cannabis for Toltec tobacco, silver, and rubber, before pointing their junks toward the Hawaiian Islands (colonized by the Chinese, who got there just before the Polynesians did) to restock on the way back home. Any alt-worlders out there could have a lot of fun designing a Pacific Triangular Trade between an industrializing China and the Pacific coast of the Americas ca. 1100. No slaves required.

    721:

    "Rails and telegraphs helped in some places. Were they permanent? Well...if you drill down a bit, the Secesh were more than happy to destroy every Yankee railroad line they could. There are notes of rails heated and wrapped around trees so they couldn't be reused."

    Oh, both sides got up to all sorts of fun and games with railways. Locomotives with big plough things attached so they could run along ripping up the track as they went. There's a book on Project Gutenberg somewhere about a commando/infiltrator raid who went deep into enemy territory, pinched a train, and drove it home lighting fires on bridges and smashing shit up as they went, with the other side chasing them in another train extinguishing the fires and putting the shit back together to carry on chasing; the book is a fictionalised account, but the raid was real and went pretty much like the book says.

    The interesting thing is not how well attackers were able to fuck things up, but how rapidly the defenders were able to get it working again. Stuff that had taken ages to build in the first place nevertheless only needed a few days to bodge up some way of getting the trains through again. The Germans took note, and put the knowledge to use in WW1, which made it remarkably difficult to bomb or shell their railway lines with usefully severe effect.

    722:

    The interesting thing is not how well attackers were able to fuck things up, but how rapidly the defenders were able to get it working again. Stuff that had taken ages to build in the first place nevertheless only needed a few days to bodge up some way of getting the trains through again.

    My impression is that most of the time budget went into figuring out the route. And if you're not blasting through the Sierra Nevada's or digging a tunnel, laying new or fixing can be done rather quickly if you're got a few 100 or 1000 troops waiting for the next fight. And you can bring in supplies fairly quickly given the rails go back to your industry.

    723:

    Thats interesting about Hawaii. Can you give a reference to that please? Have never heard that.

    724:

    Thats interesting about Hawaii. Can you give a reference to that please? Have never heard that.

    The date for the settlement of Hawai'i is highly contentious. Current radiocarbon dating puts the earliest traces between 1219 and 1266 CE (Wikipedia, Discovery and Settlement of Hawai'i. Pat Kirch's A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai'i gives the date of the oldest known settlement as between A.D. 1040 and 1219 CE.

    So if the Song Dynasty kicked off an industrial revolution in the 1000s CE, and Chinese were exploring the Pacific in the 1100s CE, they might conceivably have found the Hawaiian Islands before the Polynesians did.

    Weird thought, isn't it?

    725:

    Re: '... most ecologists are statistical bottom feeders, not statisticians, so telling us what we can get away with is generally a bad mistake.'

    Yeah - make that anyone who's not a statistician.

    I looked up the author of the book you recommended and found this article that describes what I was thinking of. Catchy name - 'dust bunny distribution' - and I like how he layers the data stats tests.

    https://bmccune.weebly.com/uploads/2/4/5/6/24567979/mccuneroot2014onlineresources.pdf

    Thank you both - You and EC!

    726:

    [ "The British slaves didn't produce any resources at all: they produced sugar, which is basically entirely useless." ]

    Good grief, that's just ... dumb!

    The wealth they produced via the gold and silver mines, the sugar, the coffee, the cotton -- and further abroad somewhat later, the tea and opium -- had no value at all? How can you say say such a silly thing? Why were all those plantations and mines in existence?

    Not to mention that the very bodies of the enslaved labor force were a big part of the credit side of the ledger. The crops for the hot cash flow, the labor force -- and far far far less -- the land for credit.

    You really believe that industrialization needed absolutely no financing? Enormous fortunes were made out of slavery and the production of enslaved labor -- the big difference is that, if one survived the diseases, one didn't need to have a noble family to be rich -- anybody, who was lucky and could survive the could get very very very rich, and they did. Where in heck do you think the term 'sugar barons' comes from?

    727:

    I completely agree that England invented joint stock companies. What I don't know is whether classical Chinese finance had alternative systems that worked as well. I know almost nothing about classical Chinese economics and finance, beyond what Graeber (Debt) went on about with Buddhist temple economics. Which may not be relevant.

    according to wikipedlo the song had something similar

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy\_of\_the\_Song\_dynasty\#Joint\_stock\_companies

    729:

    charlie must have tweaked markdown, nice

    730:

    However, I have no clue what role rum played in industrializing Britain, beyond helping the British Navy decontaminate its water a bit.

    Don't forget sodomy and the lash!

    731:

    I've been reading the Wired magazine article about The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a 2021 book by anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow.

    They make some interesting claims about the diversity of early human societies (nicer alternatives to capitalism, perhaps?). Does anybody have opinions on their thesis? (Silly question, no doubt...)

    733:

    H @ 621 writes: "This is why I'm bothered by why China didn't industrialize first. I suspect it was happenstance. "

    Chinese technological progress was deliberately stifled by their religion, to an extent never reached by Western religions. For all its virtues, and I do think it was a positive influence overall, Confucianism set out to encourage formation of a natural aristocracy by emphasizing the importance of personal virtues like loyalty, honor, reverence for elders and obedience of authority.

    With or without these virtues, however, aristocracy became the entrenched form of political power in China, every bit as much as European divine right of monarchs ever did. Where China surpassed the West in this regard was by developing their official cult into a nationwide system of education to inculcate these social norms right down at the level of the family and even within the minds of individuals themselves.

    Given this ideological background, which included explicit statements of suppressing market forces (merchants are the lowest class, money defies human- heartedness), it became much easier for Chinese landed gentry to keep commercial interests from gaining political influence. They clearly understood the intrinsic rivalry to aristocratic power coming from the merchant class. So things like patents, copyrights and government supported banking systems suffered from a big wet blanket of official disapproval holding them back.

    One interesting example from 18th century literature, "Dream of the Red Chamber" had a chapter where a prominent family experienced a major setback when it was revealed they'd been loaning out silver at interest. Medieval Catholicism also forbade usury but permitted a useful sidestep to official sanctions by way of Jewish lending activity, until merchant empires like the Venetian republic eventually outgrew papal interference. Likewise, Chinese commercial growth relied heavily on workarounds such as intermingling of local and national elites via arranged marriages or just outright bribery of imperial officials, who always had a free hand to thwart, stymie and intimidate merchants under their jurisdiction. Corruption just got to be a way of life.

    So workarounds existed in East and West, but Europeans fought church authority for centuries, culminating in the Reformation. After that, commercial interests could grow their own civil legal apparatus relatively free of religious interference. In "Connections", James Burke singled out Abraham Darby and other Church of England dissenters like the Quakers, for special recognition of their contribution toward industrial advancement by encouragement of "doing good by doing well", an early form of the Prosperity Gospel.

    Personal freedom of faith in the form of prayer without priestly intervention, self justification of motives through supposedly direct relationship of God to the individual, these were liberating concepts empowering individual action free of social control. "You cottage weavers don't like my new powered shuttle loom? Tough! God told me it was okay, what are you gonna do, complain to the priest, you buncha crybabies?" That's the kind of freewheeling, obnoxious individualism that never got a toehold in East Asia, and it might very well be a prerequisite for an Industrial Revolution, since progress usually means vested interests get disrupted.

    Certainly no shortage of obnoxious captains of industry nowadays, just look around. Jobs, Musk, Zuckerberg, no trace there of the humble self-effacement proposed as virtuous conduct in East Asia, still to this day. Because the old chestnut about group responsibility over individual initiative really is how they see things, for better or for worse. Kind of highlights how Xi Jinping could crack down on Jack Ma in a way you'd never see in the WEIRD world.

    How big a deal would Watt's improvement have been, if him and Bolton didn't get a patent on their engine? I suspect it would have been lost in the shuffle without an unobstructed path to personal gain. And can you imagine how patent disputes would have been settled in Qing era courtrooms? (Let's see, who's related to who...)

    734:

    Yeah, I've got opinions about The Dawn of Everything. To save the sanity of everyone else, I won't repeat them here again. But they should be searchable.

    735:

    I think you need to do some reading about 10th Century China, because just about everything you wrote there is incorrect in some way. Sorry! This was the dynasty that invented paper money and inflicted it on the rest of the world, and they weren't into stifling innovation that I can see.

    You might want to start with Adrian's link above (thanks for that!): Wikipedia on the Economy of the Song Dynasty.

    736:

    i vaguely remember reading a story once about some chinese guy who invented something potentially disruptive and was executed for his pains, can't track it down tho

    737:

    MODERATION NOTICE

    I am at the world science fiction convention in Chicago right now.

    I have lost track of the comments on this thread.

    I'm kind of annoyed that you've diverted it from a discussion of the UK's polycrisis/omnishambles, because I was hoping for some useful insights on it and now you've ruined that.

    But I get that you want to talk about industrial policy in mediaeval China instead and I can't be bothered to moderate it right now.

    So you're on your own.

    Humph.

    738:

    The mice will play when the cat's ...

    739:

    If you want insight from Song China, try the notion that China experienced at least one, if not two (Ming?) or three (Han?) small-scale industrial revolutions, and none of them lasted very long, mostly because they didn't invent firearms capable of defeating cavalry (which didn't really happen anywhere until the late 19th Century anywhere, to be fair).

    It is possible that our current industrial revolution is different in scale, not kind. For unrepeatable reasons and at enormous cost, we've sustained it for pushing 350 years. But if China's history is a guide, industrial revolutions may be inherently temporary, not permanent. What may be tangling us up here is that we grew up with an ideology of Progress, and that's blinkered us against contrary evidence.

    If China's history is a guide, post-industrial crashes are horrible but recoverable. Does any of this history apply to the globe in general and the UK in particular? That might be worth discussing.

    Sometimes what looks like a distraction turns out to be inspiration instead.

    Now let's see if he reads this...

    740:

    If China's history is a guide, post-industrial crashes are horrible but recoverable.

    I doubt China has ever had a post-industrial crash exacerbated by Global Warming...

    741:

    I don’t understand what you mean by “none of them lasted very long”. They lasted basically to the current time. None of things that were invented by those technical flowerings (I don’t really like the overloading of industrial revolution past its common meaning) went away of anything.

    China confined to innovate. They just didn’t for whatever reason make it all the way to steam power before the Europeans lapped them.

    The story of china is not a story of rise and then a fall back to barbarianism or anything.

    As far as gunpowder versus the mongols, gunpowder did just fine. They just put them on ships and kept the mongols out for quite awhile that way. Despite the fact that the mongols were pretty close to the greatest military machine of the ancient world. And had their own gunpowder by that time.

    742:

    "The wealth they produced via the gold and silver mines, the sugar, the coffee, the cotton - and further abroad somewhat later, the tea and opium - had no value at all? How can you say say such a silly thing?"

    I didn't. What I said regarding that matter was to give examples which show that engaging in such operations was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for industrialisation.

    I then considered from where Britain was getting the resources with which it got started with industrialisation: mostly from within Britain, with some non-slave-based imports. The British slaves did not produce any resources for industrialisation. They produced sugar, which was not used for anything industrially and was refined by slave methods rather than industrial ones. It has some industrial relevance now, but at the time it was industrially useless.

    What sugar was "useful" for was as one of two complementary parts of a hacking tool to exploit the pathological breakage in a method used for regulating access to resources according to a poorly related and basically fictitious single supposed aggregate proxy variable, the other part of the tool being keeping slaves. That some people did this had no effect either way on whether or not Britain had the resources to begin industrialising; the necessary condition was that it did have them. It then used them because someone had an idea for solving some problem with them, eg. mines getting too deep and wet to keep up with pumping them out, or coal being a much easier fuel to get hold of for iron smelting than charcoal if only you could figure out how to make it work properly; again the ability to do this was not dependent on there having been slavey sugar buggers running exploits first - cf. China inventing the same coal-based smelting methods two thousand years before Britain started reinventing them - the important part was the clever bugger who got the idea to work. Then other people saw it was useful and started copying it - which again they would do in any case regardless of whether or not there had been a slavey sugar bugger episode, because that's what humans do do, and so do rats.

    743:

    "How big a deal would Watt's improvement have been, if him and Bolton didn't get a patent on their engine? I suspect it would have been lost in the shuffle without an unobstructed path to personal gain."

    Few of them found such a path. Watt certainly didn't; he got into lots of patent battles, a good deal of the "personal gain" got eaten by lawyers, and people copied his ideas anyway. The inventors of spinning engines all came up with similar ideas within a span of a few years and then got into dinging at each other over patents. Nevertheless, the good ideas carried on because they were useful. Strengthening patent legislation seems to have been more effective in limiting the spread of good ideas, while encouraging the temporary proliferation of bad ones as people come up with silly ways of doing it to dodge the patent.

    744:

    discussion of the UK's polycrisis/omnishambles

    Without Mock The Week or even Have I Got News For You it's hard to get any idea of the more or less current issues. All I'm getting is Dave on YouTube playing old Mash Report, Rachel Parris and Russel Howard stuff from when Boris was still around. Before the leadershit contest, at least.

    Teh Guardian periodically gives us colonials a dose of whatever they're doing in the UK but that's mostly "it's summer and we don't know what to do" type catastrophe rather than "this week in politics". I suppose the drinking sewage, swimming in sewage and something about heating count as part of the omnishambles.

    I bet you never thought UKians would visit the US to get decent drinking water out of the taps for a change.

    745:

    Minor and tangentially related to the gathering crisis: I see that the Queen is going to be having a chat with the outgoing PM and the incoming PM while in Scotland. For the first (and probably only) time in her 70+ years on the throne. Mobility issues continue. How she must feel about the declining quality of the recent PMs I can only imagine.

    Just passed the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana's death. I remember coming downstairs for breakfast and getting shown the headline on the newspaper announcing that Di was dead. I was surprised at how moved I was. Thought I was indifferent to royal shenanigans.

    I imagine I'll feel shocked and saddened for a bit when London Bridge does fall, but quickly move to the "Oh dear. How sad. Never mind." gif territory at the no-doubt interminable news coverage.

    Weirdly, we (in Canada) aren't having any sort of debate (that I'm aware of) as to whose picture goes on the money ($20 bill, all coins) and stamps. You'd think that this would be a perfect opportunity to give some home-grown notables extra coverage.

    Heck, I was reading that some Caribbean island nation has a policy of 'if you make it to age 100, we'll put your picture on a limited edition stamp'. If we did that here, that's (according to Google) 9500 people. Enough to keep Charles off the stamps basically forever.

    746:

    As noted in the study of medieval Chinese economics, the shift from a system based on government fostered mercantilism to a command economy run by intruding, highly nomadic, authoritarian outsiders stifled innovation and fomented both sabotage (as with the invasion of Japan) and rebellion. That after the hostile takeover caused considerable damage that took years to repair.

    Golly gee, I don't know what a highly nomadic authoritarian running a top down economy looks like these days. Maybe a CEO instead of a Khan?

    Sarcasm aside, if I had Charlie's address, I'd ship him a copy of Cody Lundin's When All Hell Breaks Loose. Maybe to the hotel courtesy BigMuddy?

    747:

    Sorry.

    I for one, and I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few other people think similarly, have basically run out of any new insights to post. The things are all the same shit we've been experiencing or predicting for the last n years, and now lots of them are happening at the same time. We have the same government of fucking idiots who have caused those experiences and predictions of the last n years, still lashed to the helm by the shortcomings of the electoral system despite having steered the ship full tilt head on into the rocks, and still shouting "I MEAN TO HANG ON TILL HER CANVAS BUSTS OR HER STICKS ARE GONE" regardless of all the ratings yelling "THE WHOLE FUCKING BILGE HAS GONE AND WE'RE UP TO OUR NECKS IN WATER YOU TWAT". It doesn't really leave much to say beyond "where's Fletcher Christian when you need him eh?"

    748:

    The Graun's what to watch today says Have I Got News For You is on tonight, so there should be plenty of Boris-monstering there.

    749:

    I was going to say the same. What more is there to say?

    The UK makes nothing of note, just a few niche things. This has been mentioned on this blog.

    The UK imports most of its food. This has been mentioned on this blog.

    The UK depended on Europe to maintain the stability of the pound, the supply of food, provide an export market, and an escape valve if things go bad. All these things have been flushed down the loo. This has been mentioned on this blog.

    The UK's only real money earner was money laundering for Europe, that's gone. This has been mentioned on this blog.

    The UK imports most of its energy, much from unfriendly and unstable regimes, which exposes it to being frozen at the whim of those regimes. This has been mentioned on this blog.

    The UK has refused to diversify energy sources. This has been mentioned on this blog.

    The UK farming is very sensitive to climate change. That's now impacting food supply. This has been mentioned on this blog.

    The UK has chosen to let Covid rip. That's going to result in a significant portion of the population being disabled to some extent. That will impact production and fuel inflation. This has been mentioned on this blog.

    So what's to say? There's not enough money to pay for the energy or food. There's no escaping to the Greek Islands. It's going to be a cold hard winter, this year and the next. They're systemic problems now. No change of government can fix them.

    Buy heated clothes?

    750:

    Charlie
    WAIT - until Monday afternoon - or maybe Wednesday AM, when the hernia-support lists her cabinet of no-hopers, incompetents, crooks & outright liars.
    THEN we can go to town!

    751:

    Do you think that the makeup of the tory cabinet will make the slightest difference?

    Here in Aus we've changed the entire government but you couldn't tell without a programme. We stopped torturing one refugee family and.... (thinking music) some talk about carbon emissions, but no action.... (thinking music)...

    752:

    I feel like I'm stating the obvious but I'm going to say it anyway.

    The UK is run by individualists who are incapable of intellectually or emotionally understanding that there are problems that can only be solved collectively. For them and the people they're beholden too, all problems should be solved at the individual level. And for the majority of them, that actually works, mostly because they can insulate themselves from the reality that affects the rest of us.

    The reason why we're having such issues now is we have an ever growing list of problems they can't ignore or insulate themselves from, which have to be solved collectively but the solutions fall in their blindspot. They also have a religious belief in markets and their ability to supply all that's required at the lowest price, which maybe true right up until it isn't, like now, and again, it hits them in their blindspot.

    They've all grown up in a time milk and honey and plenty which informed their world-view and where their ideas would've worked(-ish) but those times are gone and they're lost in the wilderness without a map or compass to guide them.

    753:

    gasdive
    Oddly enough, yes.
    However, if - as looks likely Ms Hernia-support gets the job it's going to be automatically worse than Sunak, who has some tenuous connection with reality. Even then, 2x4 has the choice of picking the slightly-less-dim, or going full-blown fascist/Brexit nutters & I fear greatly that she will do the latter. { E.G: Braverman, Frostie, Redwood, Grease-Smaug, etc. }
    The amount of damage she & they can do between now & the end of 2024 is immense & short of food riots in the streets & the police ( etc) refusing orders to stamp down on the desperate{Note}, they are going to stagger on misgoverning .. worse & worse until the end.
    Like I said before: BATTEN DOWN.

    Phinch
    That & they also have the Trump/Retuglilizard problem - they believe all "games" are zero-sum, when it is clear they are not.

    {Note: The police, too are suffering from lower wages & energy costs & all the other ills. Something worth remembering.

    754:

    My main insight is that you will shortly come around to the point of view of the Conservative party members - i.e. we would have been better off sticking with Johnson. Incidentally, I suspect Frost will be Foreign Secretary as well as Braverman Home Office ....

    But I disagree with most of the posters in that I don't regard this as being about the individuals, or even the parties - our political system is completely broken, which has been clear for half a century, and we are only now seeing the machine falling apart. I can't see any chance of real improvement until there is a revolution, which isn't going to happen for a long while yet, and will almost certainly follow an extended period of extremely nasty monetarism, fascism and foreign control.

    755:

    One correction: the money laundering was not primarily for europe, and is doing fine. It won't fail until the USA cracks down on any other country doing it, when I agree it will crash the UK economy.

    756:

    the money laundering was not primarily for europe, and is doing fine

    i did hear that the way the sanctions on russia were imposed might have caused some high-net-worth members of shifty regimes to have second thoughts about where they should be keeping their ill-gotten gains

    757:

    Here in Aus we've changed the entire government but you couldn't tell without a programme.

    Hmm. In the US our news headlines and first paragraphs seem to indicate life for you will be totally different. [/sarcasm]

    758:

    746 - Well, Lillibet could (probably won't but could) refuse to accept Bozo's resignation.

    749 - Especially given that my listing magazine says that tonight's HIGNFY is "a Bozo special".

    759:

    Responding to JBS as well

    He actually responded to the criticism on his Sparta series

    I’ve noticed an interesting trend among historians where they often change their read in history in pretty dramatic ways on pretty regular, generational cycles without the introduction of any new significant primary evidence.

    So I think is point that “new doesn’t mean better” is a well founded one

    Thanks for the link - I actually hadn't seen this response yet (although there was some back-and-forth in the link I posted earlier.)

    It's not true that the classical historigraphy is merely cycular: Devereaux doesn't characterise it this way, and nor is the Hodkinsonian "heterodoxy" a return to the views which predate the "orthodoxy". New doesn't mean better but, crucially, Deveraux explains that he favoured the old because he cared more about disuading the 'Spartan bros' than accurately reflecting contemporary scholarship. Which explains why he was criticised for failing to properly engage with it; he was failing to engage with it, by his own admission.

    760:

    That's not what Marks is talking about, and unless Marks was on the ground in China before the communist cock-up, I'll take King's first-hand description of what the Chinese were actually doing. Yes, it was muscle-powered, but it was efficiently muscle-powered, and it wasn't resource-depleting the way modern agriculture is

    That's exactly what Marks is talking about. To pull back slightly, the book is billed as an ecological, non-Eurocentric history of modernity. He's frequently talking about the 'old biological regime' to mean that, in the absence of the Haber process or a guano island to strip-mine, societies often ran into the ecological limits of their territory. China was able to maintain near-modern population levels because they almost perfectly optimised their food production. It wasn't resource-depleting because it couldn't be (again, no Haber process, no guano islands, just crop rotation and nightsoil and other techniques you would presumably be familiar with). But a perfectly optimised system lends itself to stability, not to revolutions (industrial or otherwise), because you only want to gently tinker with the system which is keeping rapid population collapse at bay.

    England was in a similar situation around the Industrial Revolution, because wood and charcoal came from woodlots, not "wild"* forests. And it appears they came up with the same idea as the Chinese had 700 years earlier. It's what happened next which is different.

    This is also what Marks is saying. He spends a chapter on the "what happened next" part.

    761:

    It doesn't really leave much to say beyond "where's Fletcher Christian when you need him eh?"

    Problem with that analogy is that Captain Blye was an excellent seaman, and indeed much gentler with his crew than most captains of that era. And Christian turned out not to be such an excellent leader — look at the fate of those who followed him to Pitcairn!

    762:

    That's exactly what Marks is talking about. To pull back slightly, the book is billed as an ecological, non-Eurocentric history of modernity. He's frequently talking about the 'old biological regime' to mean that, in the absence of the Haber process or a guano island to strip-mine, societies often ran into the ecological limits of their territory. China was able to maintain near-modern population levels because they almost perfectly optimised their food production. It wasn't resource-depleting because it couldn't be (again, no Haber process, no guano islands, just crop rotation and nightsoil and other techniques you would presumably be familiar with). But a perfectly optimised system lends itself to stability, not to revolutions (industrial or otherwise), because you only want to gently tinker with the system which is keeping rapid population collapse at bay.

    To be fair, I haven't read Marks, so he may well cover this. If so, what I'm about to say is irrelevant.

    China wasn't stable, on at least three levels.

    --The fundamental one is that they're the meme-setter for "hydraulic empire," far more than Egypt. Dealing with floods on the Yellow River was quite likely how Chinese government arose in the first place. They had to be able to mobilize armies of people to move soil and rechannel water, or else, and they got pretty good at it very early on. The Yellow River is where the Shang Dynasty, and its predecessors, arose.

    The point is that they weren't and aren't an ancient, optimized, frozen system. They created systems that regularly dealt with huge problems through human-powered civil engineering. Even their mythology had early kings as river-tamers.

    Things like the Great Wall, the Song "Elm Wall" north of Kaifeng, the Qing "Willow Wall" were all huge defensive projects, while the Grand Canal and others were dug to promote commerce. China's a country that re-engineers itself, for good and ill. There's an argument that the reason Imperial Chinese government favored a meritocratic bureaucracy was that these bureaucrats were the ones in charge of dealing with these huge civil engineering problems and projects. Of course they had to be good.

    --The Song Dynasty had a population boom caused by starting to plant Champa Rice from what is now Vietnam (see Wikipedia). This allowed them to double-crop, thereby feeding more people. That population boom coincided with this with the surge in mercantile culture and technical developments that look a lot like an industrial revolution, right down to the stock companies.

    --Similarly, the Ming Dynasty had a population boom, this one caused by maize and potatoes reaching China via the Manila galleons (see 1493). Paddy rice is the powerhouse crop in terms of calories per acre, but corn allowed them to grow much larger amounts of food in previously marginal uplands, as did potatoes, which also do very well in cooler regions. This population boom appears to have been accompanied by a surge in innovation as well.

    On multiple levels, I don't think it's a good idea to read China as some exotic, perfectly optimized system. Any reading of Chinese history instead shows that it's basically people adapting to one damned thing after another. It's interesting that in the few really good times (early Song, early Ming), technological innovation appears to have surged, much as it did in the 1980s through ca. 2010 when they experimented with relaxing top-down management in favor of markets. This suggests that what held China back wasn't a conservative culture optimized to agrarian food production, but disasters and problematic governance interacting with each other.

    763:

    The UK is run by individualists who are incapable of intellectually or emotionally understanding that there are problems that can only be solved collectively. For them and the people they're beholden too, all problems should be solved at the individual level. And for the majority of them, that actually works, mostly because they can insulate themselves from the reality that affects the rest of us.

    Replace "UK" with "GOP", and you have a good idea of what politics in the U.S. looks like these days... :-(

    764:

    While I'm not offering this as a source of trusted news (see below), I find The Canary useful as a source of crisis-news.

    Perhaps it's crisis-porn or even Russian propaganda. There's so much of it on their site that I can't tell. There's so much weird and stupid Russian propaganda, too. So I read most news now the way I'd read alien conspiracy theories in the 90s. I can enjoy the creativity without believing a word of what I read. Maybe that's what stopped me falling down the rabbit hole I've seen so many conspiracy theorists fall into. Most of the kooks I've known, and sometimes chatted with online, were sucked into Q-Anon.

    However, like Raw Story's coverage of US crisis news, The Canary certainly differs from the UK's crisis news I find on other news sites. Both sites provide me with a level of grim news that goes way beyond anything I find in the more mainstream news. Both sites make me feel like I should making saving throws for my sanity.

    I never expect anyone on TV to explain current events to me. Everyone one TV has passed various gatekeepers. The more I've learned about how to TV gets made, over the last 5 decades, the less interested I become in the content, and the more curious I become about the people creating/filtering the content.

    So who are those gatekeepers? I remember a Conservative MP quiting the party in 2018 while talking about links between the leader of his party and BBC News. I still view this with some suspicion, recalling how both Conservative and Labour parties have used the BBC as a "political football" for decades.

    GRU officers and their trollbots been playing this kind of game, too. Apparently this is just how UK politics works now. The BBC reported a few years ago that every major party plays this game.

    I doubt any of this will shock people here on this blog. I'm just a little suprised to see someone expecting the kind of TV shows that attract reactionary criticism of the BBC to provide any insights. I mean, even The Vicar of Dibley was accused of promoting Satanism! Complete with "defundthebbc" hashtag.

    This morning I read about a reactionary attack on a new Amazon TV show that features some non-white actors. Just another day, in other words. The non-white presenter of Mash Report gets this all the time.

    So mainstream media is a battleground. We all knew that, didn't we?

    765:

    "The UK is run by individualists who are incapable of intellectually or emotionally understanding that there are problems that can only be solved collectively."

    This exactly. We have similar problems in the U.S. The world is currently run by people who's attitude is "I've got mine, fuck you." They don't get that they're one bad winter from being hung from a lamppost.

    766:

    Yeah, I know, but I needed an obvious figure to finish up the chain of nautical references :)

    767:

    I'm sure there's someone out there (way out there?) ready to scream, "But... financial services!" Great - how do you eat that? How do you build things with that? How do you save lives with that? Maybe they have answers to these questions, but I've never read or heard an interviewer ask those questions, nevermind see any replies.

    The news media seem to be entirely pre-Maslow. The public debate suffers from the same problem. The political debate follows this, or perhaps the other way around. Anyway, the result is kakistocracy.

    This problem has been discussed rather a lot on this blog, including many times in this very thread.

    768:

    There was some twitching, yes, but the City moved rapidly to allay their fears and provide ways of avoiding the sanctions. At least for multi-million pound deals - they still apply to us mere peasants.

    It wasn't clear where they would go to, anyway, as the EU has much tougher transparency laws and the sanctions emanated from the USA, so New York and its other vassal states were no better. And they have deep suspicions of the Chinese, so Shanghai is also out.

    769:

    The news media seem to be entirely pre-Maslow.

    Are you referring to Maslow's Hierarchy? I've never quite known what to make of that. If so, does it have any relevance to our current problems?

    770:

    EC
    I know, personally & very well, someone who deals with "Financial Services" - specifically & usually international & national Corporate Tax. .....
    She - & her employers are really, studiously paranoidly careful about making sure that they tick all the boxes when it comes to "Money Laundering" & dubious deals & anything that "looks dodgy". Her employer is the largest single-office accountancy in the country & is based in The City.
    So - where is all this washing-out of dirty money taking place, then?
    I must admit, that if it is occurring { As seems likely } then it is further UP the pile - in the top 10 or even top 5 players, where, actually it's easier to hide stuff, than in a "smaller" firm. { ?? }
    FYI: A useful list - I have my own suspicions as to which ones in there are dodgy, but there are these pesky libel laws ...
    Oh yes, note the steep fall-off in turnover in these top firms.
    4500 / 4477 / 2750 / 2290 / 731 / 524 / 471 / ... 54 @ number 20 ....

    771:

    David L @ 714:

    The latter in quotes because it turns out the Indians managed forests too, so "the wildwood" in the US was in many cases depopulated, not untenanted.

    Around here, central North Carolina, people get all bent out of shape talking about our natural trees. Many/most are Lobbloly pine that are very close to 100 years old. I doubt our forests were virgin woodlands in 1915. Something happened 100 years ago in central NC. Best time to find virgin forests around her would have been prior to 1700. And then they might have been managed by the locals prior to then or maybe 1600. But most of the evidence for those managed forests are in the lands between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes.

    FWIW, the loblolly pine Pine is also known as the "oldfield" pine, because it is one of the first (and most persistent) colonizers of abandoned, farm fields. I suspect the "something" that happened was the Great War & the Roaring 20s to the tune of "How Ya Gonna Keep'em Down On The Farm,".

    Inland from the coastal plain, here in the Piedmont and into the mountains the forests settlers found in 1700 (or there about) were a mixture of pines and hardwoods. With hardwoods (oak) predominating in the mountains.

    Most of the forests along the Blue Ridge and down into GSMNP are less than 100 years old.

    772:

    ilya187 @ 731:

    However, I have no clue what role rum played in industrializing Britain, beyond helping the British Navy decontaminate its water a bit.

    Don't forget sodomy and the lash!

    It's one leg of the Triangular Trade

    773:

    Oh, it's all LEGAL laundering - the laws are written so that people with enough money can bypass the restrictions. Remember how much of London and other places is owned by foreign organisations with unknown ultimate owners; the dodgy money is laundered through even less reputable taxen havens first, and the dodgy advisers tell their clients how to do that. My suspicions are similar to yours, especially given the companies that are in bed with the government amd what Private Eye prints.

    774:

    hippoptolemy @ 760:

    Yeah, my only point was that it was by choice rather than an oversight.

    775:

    Are you referring to Maslow's Hierarchy? I've never quite known what to make of that. If so, does it have any relevance to our current problems?

    Yes, and yes. Imagine applying policies based on the evidence, globally.

    One small data point that came to my attention just now: https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2022/09/02/extremebb-supporting-large-scale-research-into-misogyny-and-online-extremism/ "The Womanstats database, created by Val Hudson and colleagues, has uncovered many statistically significant relationships between the physical security of women and the security of states: authoritarian patriarchal attitudes undermine good government in multiple ways."

    More info on the link between misogyny and extremism: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/19/home-grown-how-domestic-violence-turns-men-into-terrorists-joan-smith-review "Childhood lives informed wholly or in part by misogyny, poverty, neglect, abuse and racism, Smith argues, shaped, for instance, “the Beatles”, the London gang members who joined Islamic State, the Kouachi brothers and murderous angry young white men [...]"

    I think Yvonne Roberts makes the mistake of assuming academic books automatically turn into policy. However, she praises the Scottish government for implementing some policies. I'd like to see more action on this globally. I'm also realistic about my chances of seeing it.

    Anyway, here's the Maslow relevance:

    "Domestic abuse is rooted in inequality – that needs to be aggressively tackled but so, too, does bringing the right kind of help to boys such as the Kouachis long before they raise a hand in anger."

    Yes, more policies that please. The ExtremeBB paper provides more data to support that. I just wish more policy-makers were paying attention, globally.

    776:

    EC @ 774 FUCK OFF
    The firm I mentioned, yes?
    They are known to have completely rejected clients ... because they could not find out the actual ownership - the case I'm thinking of, ran back upstream from Hong Kong to a Chinese PRC local/regional government office ...
    "Not touching that one"
    - as a matter of fun, use a programme to input the numbers from my previous link on money-turnover of those "accountancy" forms & see how it drops off ...
    I'm standing by my previous assertion that it's the "really big boys" who are playing dirty.

    777:

    The good news is that HIGNFY has hit youtube so I can spend a rainy Saturday morning lie-in watching that :)

    River cleanup is cancelled due to English weather.

    778:

    Apropos of nothing, I keep thinking that the outgoing British PM.

    Something on a pedestal, perhaps, if on the pedestal is inscribed:

    "My name is BORIS JOHNSON, Prime Minister of Britain! Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!"

    Not sure what should be on the pedestal though. A non-functioning public loo?

    Actually, should there even be anything on the pedestal?

    779:

    seems odd to be lumping the beatles in with that lot tbh

    780:

    I've never quite known what to make of that.

    Try comparing with Herzberg*, which might be a little more on topic for the emerging situation in the UK. Per Herzberg, getting hygiene needs right doesn't by itself necessarily bring about great outcomes, but not providing for them adequately is demotivational (a euphemism for bad things in general, really).

    The Tory view seems to be that we should only pay attention to motivations, because adequately motivated people can provide for their own hygiene needs. There's an interesting error in that, one that's obvious to me in a deontological ethics mode but that's not what everyone's perspective looks like so it might need spelling out. There are things that not everyone can do, not because they lack the talent to do it but because the social system context works only on the premise that not everyone can do it and this is an inevitable outcome of valuing exclusive rights as part of the underlying model.

    * There are many articles online literally comparing Herzberg and Maslow, but that isn't really what I mean here.

    781:

    A set of plans for a hospital, with "Foundations not laid" stamped on them?

    782:

    Not sure what should be on the pedestal though

    Nothing would be pretty accurate. But really, the pedestal should be in a hole representing the damage he did. Ideally the hole would be in either a toxic landfill site or an old sewage works. But between the tracks of a closed railway line would also work. Perhaps along HS2 somewhere? Or at the motorway next to Stonehenge?

    Actually, on that note, they could just stack it out the back of the British Museum will all the other stolen stuff that no-one wants to return because that would mean implicitly admitting that stealing it in the first place was wrong. It would be amusing because no-one would want that pedestal if it was offered :)

    783:

    That would also work, or the closed railway line could go to the National Museum of Scotland for added irony?

    784:

    Martin Rogers @ 776:

    Anyway, here's the Maslow relevance:

    "Domestic abuse is rooted in inequality – that needs to be aggressively tackled but so, too, does bringing the right kind of help to boys such as the Kouachis long before they raise a hand in anger."

    I tend to look Maslow's Hierarchy through an evolutionary psychology lens. From that point of view the lower levels make a lot of sense. Obviously an individual needs immediate survival, then belonging to a larger group makes for better long-term chances, then family to ensure that offspring are cared for and hence survive and reproduce in turn, then status which also makes offspring more likely to survive. It all hangs together really well at the conceptual level.

    But then, how does "self-actualisation" fit in? Its a real thing: lots of people (me included) like doing stuff that doesn't obviously seem to fit into any of the above categories. Is it some kind of peacock's tail? Or is it actually a status-seeking drive in disguise? Or maybe its a response to some supernormal stimulus presented by large civilisations. Of course that's the problem with evolutionary psychology: it can explain anything, so on its own its not a scientific theory. However it is a useful framework for thinking about behaviour.

    This matters because there is a bit of a problem with the status bit of the hierarchy. Status is a positional good: a high status for Alice implies that Bob must be of lower status. And being low status is an unpleasant business even when that doesn't imperil the family and survival levels, because being low status means precisely that your access to those lower levels is conditional on the decisions of the high status people rather than yourself.

    Attempts have been made to create groups without a status hierarchy, but they don't work even on a small scale. And a large society can't operate without a skilled management class who tell everyone else what to do. So it seems that we are doomed to have people of low status in our society, angry and frustrated at this fact, and they will be stuck at the "Family and friends" level in Maslow's hierarchy.

    I've just been reading What do you say after you say hello? by Eric Berne. The big idea of the book (as well as its predecessor "Games People Play") is the influence of parents. In Berne's scheme everyone carries in their heads the child they once were and a model of its parents. According to Berne, you learn what to be from the parent of the opposite sex, and you learn how to be that from the parent of the same sex. According to this framework (not "theory", see above) the violent wife-beating husband learned that he had to be strong and manly from his mother, who always deferred to his father, and to be violent from his father who taught him how to throw a punch and that any insult must always be answered with violence. Berne emphasises that these parental injunctions become "scripts" that are followed by the individuals throughout life. Some scripts are winning scripts: they lead to success, money and status. Others are losing scripts: they lead to low status, poverty and ultimately death. Berne sees the job of the psychiatrist as exposing the script that a person is following and showing them that they can do things differently. This can be surprisingly difficult: when losers present for treatment they don't actually want to become winners, they just want to become happier about losing. (There is a lot else in Berne's books: please don't judge them by my necessarily brief summary)

    But at the larger scale this all looks futile because, as I said earlier, status remains a positional good. Helping one individual shift from a losing to a winning script looks like a success, but by definition it shifts everyone else down a fraction. It takes a lot of time by skilled professionals to outweigh the influence of the parents. So that kind of "aggressively tackling" of bad scripts doesn't seem like a feasible proposition at a mass scale, and even if it were you would still have the problem of lots of frustrated and angry low-status people (albeit with better life-scripts). And finally you have the problem of getting people to hold still and be treated: a person's life-script is a fundamental part of who they are, and attempting to change it is generally perceived as a threat.

    Of course this only applies to the "status" level in Maslow's hierarchy. There is no reason why we can't provide the lower levels to everyone (with the exception of "family" for some people with really bad scripts).

    One other question not addressed by all of this is that of hope. One factor in making people happier is the sense that their lives are under their control and their actions can make things better (i.e. climb to the next level on Maslow's hierarchy). But how you create that sense at a mass scale in everyone is something I'm unsure about. Its clearly related to all the above though.

    785:

    "Domestic abuse is rooted in inequality – that needs to be aggressively tackled but so, too, does bringing the right kind of help to boys"

    Good luck reforming anything to remove inequality, especially inside families. I both hope and fear for increased equality, but I suspect the author of that remark did not intend it in the way I'm interpreting it. But since the UK as well as other countries is reducing the help they give everyone, and especially children, the whole discussion of "right kind" is overriden by the need for "any help", starting right at the bottom with food clothes and shelter. Proper health care and clean running water. a But then I also suspect they also just assumed that girls are completely unproblematic in all respects so need never be mentioned or indeed thought of. As part of a family or in any other context. I'm giving them a pass on nonbinary kids because I assume the reference is older than a couple of decades.

    786:

    You really DO have trouble with English comprehensions, don't you?

    I never said that it was every firm, and I said that I agree with your last sentence.

    787:

    Of course this only applies to the "status" level in Maslow's hierarchy. There is no reason why we can't provide the lower levels to everyone (with the exception of "family" for some people with really bad scripts).

    Indeed, I find the first few levels are challenging enough. It's disappointing that so much public debate concerns status, neglecting the more immediately concerns. It's even worse when policies that work on the status level sacrifice resources required for the lower levels. Critics of these policies tend to overlook this point. Instead there's a lot of, "But what about us?"

    Consider as one example the calls to rename the JWST telescope. While I have no strong objection, I worry more about physical violence. That's a problem that predates any telescope, nevermind JW himself. Unfortunately, that might sound too much like, "All lives matter", which is not my point. I'm thinking instead of the clarity of Gil Scott-Heron's Whitey on the Moon.

    So let's bring this down to Earth: police violence in the USA. Where does that fit into Maslow's heirarchy? Same for all the issues outlined by OGH at the start of this thread.

    While I can see why policy-makers at the highest levels of government may be overly concerned with status (after all, that's a critical part of how they got there), it appears to blind them to the needs of people at every level below them in the social heirarchy. It also shapes much of the debate surrounding these problems, leading to much confusion and, oh dear, more status games. ("But what about us?")

    788:

    Yes, addressing these problems is a long-term project. It begins at the lowest levels in Maslow's heiarchy. I don't see much discussion of this in the political debates I've read. It crops up once a year on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, where I can read some fine speeches in Parliament.

    While this level is represented in some UK laws, there seems to be very little in general policy-making. For example, anyone following the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire will notice how far up in government this problem goes. A late stage of the inquiry, just a few months ago, dealt with this directly. Ministers like Eric Pickles were questioned. Gross negligence was revealed almost everywhere.

    As I said earlier, I'm realistic about my chances to seeing significant improvement in my lifetime. I realised in 1983 how bad this problem is, expecting everyone to fail. My one hope was that there might someday be a generation who might do better, but almost four decades later, I'm only slightly less pessimistic. Nothing I've learned since 1983 contradicts my grim conclusions, except in one detail. I no longer fear that humans will someday leave this planet and spread through the universe like a cancer. Either we solve the problems that are killing us down here, or we fail even harder - and quicker - in space.

    So even if the generation I hoped for is here, they may be too late. At least some of them seem to understand this.

    789:

    This can be surprisingly difficult: when losers present for treatment they don't actually want to become winners, they just want to become happier about losing... But at the larger scale this all looks futile because, as I said earlier, status remains a positional good. Helping one individual shift from a losing to a winning script looks like a success, but by definition it shifts everyone else down a fraction.

    To me these "losers" sound smarter than the psychiatrists trying to help them: Instead of trying to get a bit ahead in what is inherently a zero-sum game, they want to increase the sum a bit.

    Also, if "self-actualization" means "doing something that gives one's life meaning", then plenty of people, myself included, put it ahead of status. My status, as society defines it, is pretty low -- I do not lord over anyone, at work or otherwise. But the effort necessary to change that is absolutely not worth it to me; I'd much rather spend energy on something I enjoy.

    790:

    One other question not addressed by all of this is that of hope. One factor in making people happier is the sense that their lives are under their control and their actions can make things better (i.e. climb to the next level on Maslow's hierarchy). But how you create that sense at a mass scale in everyone is something I'm unsure about. Its clearly related to all the above though.

    For almost all of history, almost nobody had such hope -- including people fairly high in the status hierarchy. Indeed, a big part of all major religions is to quash that hope: "Everyone is at their proper place as ordained by God, and you should be happy with yours".

    791:

    ilya187: To me these "losers" sound smarter than the psychiatrists trying to help them: Instead of trying to get a bit ahead in what is inherently a zero-sum game, they want to increase the sum a bit.

    The zero sum bit is only for status; it doesn't apply to everything else. So the violent husband who gets drunk every weekend and can't hold down a job isn't just low status, he's low everything else. And that (according to Berne) is because his script keeps him there. And for that matter his wife is probably following a complementary script because why else would she have married him? Sorting out those loser scripts can make people a lot happier even if their social status doesn't change one jot.

    My status, as society defines it, is pretty low

    This is a can of worms that I basically ignored in my earlier post. "Status" isn't just a one-dimensional legal-authority thing of who is high and who is low. I described it that way because, well, I was over-simplifying. What actually matters is your status among your social circle (colleagues, friends, relatives, neighbours etc). Its quite possible to be high-status among that circle even though (or because) you don't have much money or formal authority. So it isn't quite the zero-sum game I painted. However my basic point still stands: status is positional, and some people are going to be frustrated and angry that they are at the bottom of whatever scale they find themselves being measured on by the people around them. Maslow also talks about self respect versus respect from others, but I'm definitely not convinced by the way he organises things at that level of detail; it sounds too much like the result of excessive navel-gazing.

    Somewhere I encountered the concept of "achievement porn" (or some similar term). Unfortunately I can't now find it. But the gist was that a lot of games and internet sites provide you with an illusion of achievement and status in order to plug in to Maslow's Hierarchy and get you to keep coming back. You may be a loser in Real Life, but in Final Conquest XXIV you are the God-Emperor of Mars! Some people find that addictive because they are so starved of real achievement and status. Hence "gamification" which tries to do the same thing with (hopefully) more meaningful skills like learning a foreign language.

    Quite where all this is going is something I'm still trying to work out.

    792:

    "Everyone is at their proper place as ordained by God, and you should be happy with yours".

    Yes, very true. The hymn All Things Bright And Beautiful originally had a third verse that ran:

    The rich man in his castle,
    The poor man at his gate,
    God made them, high or lowly,
    And ordered their estate.

    Although as I say, you could still be of high or low status within a social circle, whether that was amongst peasants or lords.

    793:

    ""Everyone is at their proper place as ordained by God, and you should be happy with yours"."

    Which seems to me to be a more reasonable position to take, since it's actually realistic. To be sure it misses out an important bit, in that it's not reasonable to just tell someone they ought to be happy when they lack the prerequisites, starting with having enough to eat, but in a system which does ensure that people have the basic objective requirements (which we're supposed to have if people weren't so keen to fuck it up), it saves people a pile of grief if they can learn to align their subjective requirements with what's actually realistic, instead of fixing them on what isn't.

    "For almost all of history, almost nobody had such hope - including people fairly high in the status hierarchy."

    In realistic terms, that remains true, because it's inseparable from there being a hierarchy. There is far less room on the upper levels than the lower, so while a handful of people may be able to move upwards, for any given individual the chances of them being one of those people are negligible. We may have got rid of the additional restrictions of the "you're not allowed to move to a higher level" type, but the fundamental restriction inherent in the pyramid of numbers doesn't care about whether stuff is "allowed" or not.

    From the comment you were replying to, "One factor in making people happier is the sense that their lives are under their control and their actions can make things better [...]. But how you create that sense at a mass scale in everyone is something I'm unsure about" ...that looks pretty arse about face to me, certainly with reference to the UK. We have been trying increasingly hard to "create that sense at a mass scale in everyone", in large part by dinning it into them throughout childhood via the education system (see the previous thread; the deliberate policy of fostering an order of magnitude increase in the number of people going to university is part of the "trying increasingly hard", and Sunak's proposal is by way of being about increasing the efficiency of the process through clobbering university courses that have no obvious direct relevance to the concept). It starts with parents trying to explain to children why they should go to school in terms a child can understand and coming up with things like "you have to learn things at school so you can get a good job otherwise you'll end up cleaning toilets", and then the education system itself further indoctrinates them along the same lines, when they have no mental defences against being bullshitted by adults and are encouraged not to develop them.

    So when they emerge from the education system they are beset with cognitive dissonance as they try to deal with a system that doesn't work like that using the belief that it does, with the additional handicap of part of the indoctrination having been to prepare them for this happening by giving them the explanation that it's their own fault for not working hard enough. After all, "their actions making things better" is only one of two complementary parts of "their lives are under their control", the other part being of course "...making things worse".

    So what you actually end up with is a load of people who are pissed off, basically because they are fundamentally confused. The tools they've been given to understand things don't work, and any possible path to understanding involves fighting both their own misprogramming and the continual efforts of those in power to keep them confused to make sure they can't get it together well enough to threaten that power. A lot of them, quite naturally, get drawn to simplistic conclusions which aren't actually supportable by evidence, like "immigrants taking our jobs" or "it's all the EU's fault". And when the conclusions that the evidence does support manifest themselves in practical reality, they just get even more confused and pissed off.

    794:

    And now for something completely off topic to entertain you this weekend. Some Australian lads have come up with a wood burning jet turbine.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UnhAzTMxg

    It has steam punk potential I think.

    795:

    Yeah, I thought that odd too. Particularly puzzled by "the Beatles" being in quote marks, which indicates to me that it doesn't actually mean the real Beatles as in John, Paul, George and Ringo, but instead means some other thing that gets called "the Beatles" as some kind of nickname or slang and I'm supposed to be able to figure out the proper name for it from context or something. Which I can't, because I'm not aware of any such usage, relevant or not.

    796:

    In realistic terms, that remains true, because it's inseparable from there being a hierarchy. There is far less room on the upper levels than the lower, so while a handful of people may be able to move upwards, for any given individual the chances of them being one of those people are negligible.

    That's not how I understood Paul's #785. I took his phrasing "One factor in making people happier is the sense that their lives are under their control and their actions can make things better (i.e. climb to the next level on Maslow's hierarchy)" as to mean better food, better shelter, better family. Which was beyond almost everyone in history, indeed was only possible if one's status improved. One thing technological progress made possible is to improve one's material comforts while status remains unchanged -- because everyone's material comforts improve.

    797:

    "Not sure what should be on the pedestal though."

    Two legs broken off at the knees, same as in the poem, plus an alien brain parasite wig lying near the feet. Only instead of the vast and level sands stretching far away being boundless and bare, they're boundless and scattered with turds and tampons.

    798:

    The group is defined in the paragraph, as well as the referenced link:

    ... https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/19/home-grown-how-domestic-violence-turns-men-into-terrorists-joan-smith-review ... “the Beatles”, the London gang members who joined Islamic State, [...]"

    799:

    The technological side has blurred it somewhat, but it's still there; people are supposed to believe in nebulous and ill-defined values of "better" for which the idea is still relevant. To take an example from the particularly daft end of the scale, consider two people sat at desks in an office, one desk labelled "manager" and the other labelled "clerk". In the times when the word "clerk" was the word usually used to signify that position, it wouldn't be unexpected to find that the manager was well-fed while the clerk was on the border of starvation. These days they are both well-fed, but the manager's food is still supposed to be "better" than the clerk's because it comes from Waitrose instead of Tesco and costs more money for the same stuff. The additional status of being "manager" means the manager gets more money and can therefore signalise that status to other people by bringing their food home in bags with a posher name printed on them. Me, I think this is fucking silly. But plenty of people do believe in it, and you even get people faking the status signals by scrounging the bags and carrying food from a cheaper shop home in them.

    800:

    It needs to be better written then. The phrasing "...for instance, "the Beatles", the London gang members who joined Islamic State, the Kouachi brothers and murderous angry young white men..." defines four groups, not three.

    If "the Beatles" is supposed to be an alternative name for one of the groups rather than a separate group, they should have written something like "...for instance, "the Beatles" (the London gang members who joined Islamic State), the Kouachi brothers and murderous angry young white men...", at a minimum. Better than that would be (the London gang members who joined Islamic State, not the real Beatles); better still, just leave "the Beatles" out entirely, because it doesn't add any extra information and serves only to confuse.

    801:

    Agreed. I've noticed the Guardian quite often has spots where it appears the editorial process is not as thorough as it should be.

    802:

    Also ref 801 - The notorious incident when the paper in question appeared with a masthead reading "The Grauniad" really happened. On another less famous occasion, they referred to their companion Sunday title as "The Obseverer" (sic). (in body text)

    803:

    I think Maslow's hierarchy of needs is not the best way to frame this discussion. It's old and unproven.

    Hierarchical society is itself harmful:

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(19)30248-8/fulltext

    This is just the one of the first things to come up on Google, there is loads of research in this area. All of it shows low status is harmful. Some of the comments seem an awful lot like victim blaming. But certainly fully embedded in hierarchical society. Hierarchical society seems to arise with specialisation and surplus resources. This is an example of a very developed non-hierarchical society, contrary to what Paul said :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_culture

    This is a fascinating culture if anyone has not heard of it. But, then we get hierarchical societies. Is this an essential aspect of societal organisation? I hope not. Will we get a chance to do better? I would hope so, but it seems improbable at the moment. I'm not sure where I am going with this, but it vaguely connects back to the topic.

    The current crises seem very much driven by status seekers and other aspects of hierarchical thinking, treating everything as a zero sum game etc. "If they get more, I get less" or "If I am in a smaller group, I am more important" and suchlike.

    804:

    Last night at dinner with a couple of historians whose specialty is capitalism, slavery and the industrial revolution I showed some of the posts here.

    First they laffed hard. Then, more solemnly advised, "Fox, if you're gonna waste time online ya gotta find smarter people to do it with than the smartest people in the room."

    805:

    Don't go; we'll miss you! {Foxessa}

    806:

    "'Fox, if you're gonna waste time online ya gotta find smarter people to do it with than the smartest people in the room.'"

    Doubtless good advice, but did they give any suggestions for where to find smarter people?

    807:

    I think you may have conflated Maslow's heirarchy of needs with a heirarchy social levels. They may both be abstractions, but conceptually are very different things.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

    My issue with this is that I tend to see things in a strictly bottom-up style, starting with actual an physical layer. Literally physics.

    So a few levels up (chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and neurochemistry) I may be thinking about neuroscience, not psychology. I have some doubts about neuroscience studies using FMRI scanners, but that's another subject. I have far greater doubts about psychology, while still finding things of value, like the Stanford prison experiment. I can enjoy sociology at times. I particularly enjoyed hearing about an ethnographic study of mantlepieces some years ago. However, I always want to start from the physical level.

    Perhaps that's just a personal bias. Most people seem to prefer a top-down narrative ontology. That works well for story-telling and getting voted into positions of power.

    It just doesn't work so well for policy-making. Physical reality seems to undermine the policies that ignore it. The Grenfell Tower refurbishment springs to mind, as it does. At least one space shuttle also suffered this way. Then there's Apollo 1, Therac-25, Piper Alpha, and many more.

    In the UK, politicians love the phrase, "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime." Unfortunately, nobody using it seems to want to follow the evidence, which suggests reducing inequality is the way to achieve this.

    808:

    That's a bit unclear. Who did they call "the smartest people in the room"?

    809:

    Foxessa, an unsupported claim is different than an unsupportable claim (this is probably obvious - stunningly obvious in this case - but I've got to lay some groundwork.) You've got a blog full of people who want a scientific paper to read, or an experiment they can make, or a paper trail they can follow. In short, they're the very smart version of the person who won't buy a car until they've kicked the tires themselves.

    Most of us (probably excluding yourself) are very technical, scientific, proof-oriented people who find ourselves for one reason or another - the fucked-up-ness of the world and the hope that our children will live decent lives - playing catch-up ball in the social sciences, and we're at our core absolutely shocked that the world of politics and business isn't responding to the very-well-proven oncoming train-wreck by laying down some track!

    So if you want to make an impression here, don't make unsupported claims, because they'll be treated as unsupportable claims. Give these people a tire to kick, or in this case, something intelligent to read. Don't just tell us that southern slavery financed the industrial revolution in the U.S. Give us a book to read, or a website which contains lots of factual material with cites, or someplace with easy-to-follow financial records, etc.

    Your historian friends may be the smartest historians in the world, but they gave you dick when it comes to useful advice about communicating with a bunch of techies, so go to your bookshelf and throw us some red meat, or preferably something that's easy to find online.

    And this blog... it might just be filled with the smartest people in the world - but facts are fuel, my lady, and we're running on empty!

    811:

    Foxessa
    Which shows a dangerously "blinkered" view of what is actually happening!
    Especially as "they" were clearly NOT the smartest people around .....
    { I know "IQ" is an almost-meaningless concept, but - a poster here almost has to have an IQ of 125 - 130+ }

    Waldo
    Or is it another, boring claim, that works at small lab-scale & has not been tested for scaling-up?

    812:

    Oh joy, yet another Biggest Battery Breakthrough Since Breakfast. Haven't seen one of those since, oh, last Thursday.

    813:

    It's preferable if you strip the tracking guff off the end of the link. They don't need to know your Twitter handle to show the article:

    https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/29/battery-breakthrough-scientists-invent-cheap-aluminium-sulphur-alternative-to-lithium-ion-

    814:

    Last night at dinner with a couple of historians whose specialty is capitalism, slavery and the industrial revolution I showed some of the posts here. First they laffed hard. Then, more solemnly advised, "Fox, if you're gonna waste time online ya gotta find smarter people to do it with than the smartest people in the room."

    So let's really engage, on this, without the typos and insults.

    Pigeon's skepticism about the link between the founding of the first Industrial Revolution being linked to North American slavery, has a basis.

    If I'm reading him correctly, his point is that the Industrial Revolution kicked off in England around 1760, and it started around machinery designed to pump water out of coal mines. The argument between you two was that these pumps are indelibly linked to slavery in the British Colonies and to slave-based gold and silver mining in the Spanish colonies.

    He couldn't follow the logic, and after a bit of digging, neither could I. This doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means that we're not seeing the causal arrow that is obvious to you. A simple, "here's what you missed" would have gotten thanks from me and ended the thread.

    The second part is that, to state the obvious, history is not achronological, nor is it non-spatial. By that I mean that the slave-powered cotton industry in the US in the 19th century is irrelevant to what started the industrial revolution in Britain the 18th Century. Similarly, if you're going to pull in Mexican and Andean silver from the 17th Century as the key wealth builder that enabled Britain to industrialize, that's also fine. You simply have to make it clear to us ignoramuses how said silver was being invested in Britain in the late 18th Century, not traded to China for silk in the Manila galleon trade or being used to finance Spanish warmaking in Europe. Again, pointing this out would have gotten a thanks from me anad ended the thread.

    Finally, is it true that scholars of the Industrial Revolution automatically assume that it happened only once? If so they'll automatically denigrate any alternative. This doesn't mean that they're wrong, but if they haven't given it any thought, how do they know they're right?

    The problem here is that the industrial revolution is a sacred cornerstone of modern American society, along with Progress, which is in part the notions machines will help free us from slavery by replacing the work of the slaves, without also becoming self-aware robotic slaves in place of human ones. At the same time, we're also aware that due to climate change and resource depletion, this whole industrialized civilization that we've built is in grave danger of falling apart. Our solution to these two conflicting memes is to dread the future, to fear (or hope!) we go extinct, and in general to do nothing about either because we're dealing with what feels like an unresolvable conflict.

    If some jackass like me pops up and says "hey, it looks like Song China had something a lot like an industrial revolution, it failed, and they survived," what do you think the reactions are going to be? "Shut up about medieval economics, we're talking about what happens when industrial society collapses," perhaps? How about, "those Chinese are an inferior race are different, and their history has no lessons for us," perhaps?

    Asking "what the heck does the start of an industrial revolution actually look like, and did China have one?" is justifiably low on the list of questions that any career-minded historian might ask. After all, how many scholars of the Industrial Revolution can read Chinese, let alone classical Chinese, so they can work with the original texts? Given the way China's acting right now, how many American scholars would think it wise to speculate that China industrialized and more-or-less lost it? What would that say about them and about our possible future? In today's American politics, questions like that endanger academic careers due to the unavoidable politics, as well as being freaking hard to answer from primary sources.

    So what else would you expect your colleagues to do, but laugh at how silly we are here?

    It might be useful to demonstrate that they're right to laugh, though. If only to rub it in.

    816:

    “ It's not true that the classical historigraphy is merely cycular”

    Cycular in the sense that each new crop of historians is heavily incented to come up with new, fresh takes on things that have been studied to death for hundreds of years. Many times new and fresh means disagreeing with the crop of historians that come before them. Often then there is no new evidence. Acoup mentions this a bit in his rebuttal

    Just because a crop of historians are all excited about a new theory does not in any way make that new theory any more or less valid then the n-1 theory. They are just behaving as their industry incents them to behave.

    The next crop will disagree with THEM as sure as houses

    I wasn’t trying to say that they recycle the beliefs of the historian crop (n-2). Just that it’s publish or perish and publishing “I agree with the old stuff” doesn’t count

    817:

    Don't just tell us that southern slavery financed the industrial revolution in the U.S. Give us a book to read

    Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name would be a good place to start:

    https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/douglas-blackmon

    It's not footnoted to the same level as Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust, but there's a lot of detail there about how forced labour was used to support manufacturing by Northern-owned companies. And of course there's the whole 'bill Haitians for their freedom' thing the French did, which Wall Street got in on so much that America occupied Haiti to loot it for decades. Maybe a bit late for the initial industrialization, but certainly useful money in the heyday of industrialization.

    https://eji.org/news/haitis-forced-payments-to-enslavers-cost-economy-21-billion-the-new-york-times-found/

    If memory serves, the use of slaves as collateral by Northern banks was discussed in The American Slave Coast (although I could be mixing that up with another book).

    https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/american-slave

    818:

    “ First they laffed hard. Then, more solemnly advised, "Fox, if you're gonna waste time online ya gotta find smarter people to do it with than the smartest people in the room."

    Sorry but I laffed harder

    Anyone who chose history as a profession is either born into money or really doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when demeaning the intelligence of others.

    Firstly in academia It’s not exactly known as magnet for the best and brightest these day, kinda the opposite in fact. There is literally no filter these days for that major other then you can pay for it and put some work in.

    Secondly from a purely practical career choice perspective it’s difficult to find a worse one.

    Deveraux actually wrote a whole screed on that second point as well

    819:

    The others are being too snippy. Simple question: Did your dinner partners have an answer to the question, "Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain, its American colonies, and the rest of Western Europe, rather than China?"

    820:

    "The others are being too snippy. "

    You know it is funny how posting " a bunch of my friends said you are all morons and I am smarter then you" will bring that out.

    This is actually me being restrained (-:

    821:

    The ties between the New York City financial industry (and others) and slave-based labor camps (aka plantations) is quite well documented. It comes up in The Half Has Not Been Told, too.

    Just to point out, again, that what sparks an (the?) industrial revolution, and what causes it to metastasize and/or fail, are two very different questions.

    822:

    I am aware of just how much wealth that sugar-producing islands produced for their colonial owners. So when I saw the sentence

    The British slaves didn't produce any resources at all: they produced sugar, which is basically entirely useless.

    I totally facepalmed.

    When they were drawing up the peace treaties for the end of the Seven Years War, Britain seriously considered handing back New France (a huge territory, bits of which later became Canada) to France in return for a couple of sugar islands. That's how 'useless' sugar was.

    Foxessa, you clearly know more about this subject (slavery and its links to industrialization) than most of the people here. I would be sorry to see you go. Do what's best for you, of course.

    823:

    I agree those are sperate, and we do have a documented case where the spark happened and the metastasize didn't. Ancient Rome.

    I think the "cause" is fundamentally unknowable though, you'd have to be able to show that the event would not have occurred in their absence. The best you can do is "contributed greatly to".

    824:

    Firstly in academia It’s not exactly known as magnet for the best and brightest these day, kinda the opposite in fact. There is literally no filter these days for that major other then you can pay for it and put some work in.

    Having watched numerous physicists and engineers wade arrogantly into the green swamps of ecology, only to wade out a bit later, snakebit and half-drowned, I've developed a nuanced take on "intelligence." I'm not going to pretend that I'm smarter than they are. In most things I'm generally not, so far as intelligence metrics are concerned. I've just lived in the swamp longer than they have, and that's taught me one or two things.

    One of the things I've learned is Charlie's lesson about stories, that there are far more out there than there will ever be time to write, so nurture a few good ones and treat the rest like pinatas, where you whack them to see if there's any candy inside and discard them when you have no further use for them.

    Same is true with ideas.

    I'm not wedded to the notion of a Song Industrial Revolution. I played with the idea a bit, but as a story setting it's politically fraught at the moment, it would require a lot of research that wouldn't pay dividends the way this "Successful Reconstruction" storyline is, so I'm just playing with it. Let's whack it and see if it's got some treats inside. If it provides some ideas for how we're supposed to deal with Liz Truss, Vladimir Putin, and climate change, that's not nothing.

    825:

    The Half Has Not Been Told

    Could you provide a link to the actual book to which you refer? That's a popular title, and has attracted a bunch of books along the line of 'God is really good (and is totally really real) despite all the shit I've been forced to eat'.

    826:

    "I've developed a nuanced take on "intelligence." I'm not going to pretend that I'm smarter than they are"

    That's good advice, I agree with it, Foexessa and he/she's friends would do well to heed it. If he/she and her friends had claimed greater experience or knowledge that would have been better, rather then the claim greater intelligence. Especially in a room that is honestly a pretty bright bunch overall

    As far as the Song, I think what happened could only be called an Industrial Revolution in the broadest and most nonspecific sense. The core of the Industrial Revolution was harnessing a new source of energy that far surpassed existing sources. That didn't happen with the Song. There were incremental improvements, some quite impressive ones, but not step changes.

    If you are thinking around speculative fiction I would be worried of running up against The Year of Rice and Salt but otherwise it's a neat idea

    827:

    "Anyone who chose history as a profession is either born into money or really doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when demeaning the intelligence of others. [...] Secondly from a purely practical career choice perspective it's difficult to find a worse one."

    Sorry, don't agree at all. That only makes sense if you assume that the primary justification for a choice of profession must necessarily be how much money you can get from it, and anyone who doesn't optimise their choice accordingly must be a bit twp. I on the other hand rank such choices according to how much enjoyment you can get from it, and think people who choose to do something they don't enjoy and would rather not be doing, but do anyway because they can get a lot of money from it, must be a bit twp. (cf. posts by ilya and myself above, and the whole subject of the previous discussion thread.)

    I've no idea how true your "no filter" comment is; history was seen as a bit of a soft option when people of my age group were choosing university courses, but I've no idea what it's like now and I've no idea what it's like in your neck of the woods. In the area of WW1 I've read enough different accounts by different historians of the same things to be pretty confident in saying that some of them talk a load of arse, most of them are pretty decent, and some of them are extremely diligent - which isn't to say that they don't still disagree, but they thoroughly investigate the sources, make realistic allowance for bias and factualness, argue from them coherently and rationally, etc. In other words, much the same as you find in any profession.

    828:

    Anyone who chose history as a profession is either born into money or really doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when demeaning the intelligence of others.

    this is just unnecessary

    829:

    Re: 'I can't see any chance of real improvement until there is a revolution ...'

    Rats - you beat me to it! I was going to point to France and China.

    In case some folks didn't learn this bit of world history in high school, here's a reminder of what happened leading up to the 1949 Chinese revolution:

    https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/chinese-rev#:~:text=The%20combination%20of%20increasing%20imperialist,that%20spurred%20on%20revolutionary%20ideas.

    'The Qing withdrawal led to a power vacuum in certain regions, resulting in the rise of warlords. These warlords often controlled their territories without acknowledging the nationalist government. Additionally, the reforms set in place by the new government were not nearly as sweeping as the revolutionary rhetoric had intended; unifying the country took precedent over fundamental changes.'

    There's also mention of absentee/offshore Chinese bankrolling spurring changes to gov't policy.

    Oh just one more thing: we're in the 21st century so just substitute 'industry' for 'warlord'.

    And the modern UK definition of 'unifying the country' is winning a solid majority of seats in Parliament.

    @ Foxessa -

    My impression is that Taft's 'Dollar Diplomacy' is still a thing (official US foreign policy)*. Usually sold to foreign powers as a way to stabilize their countries/economies (i.e., avoid revolutions) but the only consistent winner was/is the US. I think China is doing a version of this in Africa but using very, very expensive infrastructure programs. I'm not sure whether China's version has sparked any revolutions yet although a few countries are now drowning in foreign debt.

    *Slave/unpaid-for-labor was replaced by finance/easy-to-get loans.

    Echoing (I think it was) Heteromeles' comment - 'Just the facts, ma'am!' Folks visiting this blog come from different parts of the world therefore unlikely to know US history as taught in the US for US consumption. I'm curious what the differences might be in the standard high school US history course by State these days. (I'm betting that there are plenty of data holes - maybe your history buffs/pros* could channel their superior knowledge in that direction.)

    *There's precedent - Feynman tore into California elementary school and high school text books for misrepresenting various fundamental aspects of physics and chemistry.

    @ Charlie - a couple of ideas and more bad news:

    BoJo/Tories (DT/GOP in the US) probably won't like this any better than following COVID health guidelines. [Added spacing for easier reading.]

    'Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media

    Abstract

    Online misinformation continues to have adverse consequences for society. Inoculation theory has been put forward as a way to reduce susceptibility to misinformation by informing people about how they might be misinformed, but its scalability has been elusive both at a theoretical level and a practical level.

    We developed five short videos that inoculate people against manipulation techniques commonly used in misinformation:

    emotionally manipulative language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and ad hominem attacks.

    In seven preregistered studies, i.e., six randomized controlled studies (n = 6464) and an ecologically valid field study on YouTube (n = 22,632), we find that these videos improve manipulation technique recognition, boost confidence in spotting these techniques, increase people’s ability to discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content, and improve the quality of their sharing decisions.

    These effects are robust across the political spectrum and a wide variety of covariates.

    We show that psychological inoculation campaigns on social media are effective at improving misinformation resilience at scale.'

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo6254

    This one's paywalled but the title communicates the main idea:

    'Agricultural sustainability in Chile’s proposed new constitution'

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02320-8

    Here's the bad news:

    'Pound in biggest monthly fall against the dollar since 2016'

    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62750606

    Electricity: Lack of capacity 'holds back green energy'

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-62687064

    Integrating new into old tech is a challenge - would be worthwhile finding out how other countries are managing this.

    830:

    "but I've no idea what it's like now and I've no idea what it's like in your neck of the woods."

    I think it is safe to say the career has decayed significantly since your day.

    Read this article (from our from Deveraux again) and then tell me I am wrong

    https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/

    831:

    Oh ffs.

    I have already expanded that statement twice in some detail. I'm not going to do it again. You not only haven't refuted it, you haven't even addressed it. That the kind of political breakage which has now led to the situation described in Charlie's post was also evident, if perhaps less rampant, 240 years ago may be interesting in its own right, but it is irrelevant to the fact that Britain had all the necessary resources to get the industrial revolution started anyway, nearly all within its own shores, and none provided by the slave colonies.

    832:

    Thanks Robert. I'm waiting for Foxessa to drop some proof on us, but I already read the article on Haiti.

    833:

    "The core of the Industrial Revolution was harnessing a new source of energy that far surpassed existing sources. That didn't happen with the Song."

    They did for iron-making. They figured out how to use coal, which you can just dig up, instead of charcoal, which is a huge pain in the arse in multiple ways, to provide the huge amount of energy you need to go from rock to useful metal in useful shapes. This was just as critical for Britain's industrial revolution as the steam engine was, and if we hadn't reinvented the idea we'd have been fucked.

    What China didn't do was figure out a magic source of mechanical energy. I've no idea why, but I don't think it's safe to assume that they simply had no idea about how steam can be made to set up pressure differentials.

    834:

    Thanks to [professional ] friends I successfully trolled. Be well.

    835:

    Sorry about that.

    Edward E. Baptist The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

    I'm not going to argue that he's the gold standard for truth. As is usual for this topic, there's a lot of controversy about what he wrote. But I think it's worth looking at, at least. More importantly, I think his basic premise (as given in the subtitle) is sound.

    836:

    Coal had been burned, even for smelting metals since 1000BC or so.

    The Romans used it also to make iron

    Going strictly on wikipedia here but I don't think it was a new thing. It's just surface seams of coal weren't incredibly common

    837:

    Re: ''Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media'

    Some Nobel Peace Laureates are also commenting on the dangers of current levels of disinformation.

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/02/nobel-peace-prize-winners-call-for-action-on-online-disinformation

    838:

    Coal had been burned, even for smelting metals since 1000BC or so. The Romans used it also to make iron. Going strictly on wikipedia here but I don't think it was a new thing. It's just surface seams of coal weren't incredibly common.

    Agreed. I've tripped over references for the Greeks using it for forging. In each case, the deposits were quickly exhausted.

    There are a few places where coal is reasonably abundant. Here's a map of coal deposits from Brittanica. Every map I looked at was a bit different, and this ignores the quality of the coal. However, the same coal regions continually show up: northern Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, little bits in Basque country, the British Isles, western US (same deposit as UK, just split by Atlantic), western North America (younger and crappier, Eastern Australia, and...China.

    So we know abundant coal was critical to industrialization basically everywhere. Ignoring things like coking, there's not a lot of special knowledge to using it. Based on abundant coal and a mercantile economy, yes, we'd expect China to industrialize on its own. That Britain did it more thoroughly requires additional explanation. Somehow, I don't think the story is any version of Chinese being inferior and Europeans being superior, because then you're stuck explaining why Germany, Poland, or Ukraine didn't industrialize before England did. The fact that the last two have terrain as vulnerable to Mongols as northern China was might conceivably have something to do with it.

    839:

    The chemistry of iron-making is unusually complex, unusually touchy, and unusually hard to set up the reaction conditions for, compared to other metals that were known at the same time. There are a bunch of factors that make it difficult to do well using coal. What the Chinese were doing was very different from what anyone else got up to. They were using coal directly to produce cast iron and then decarburising it to produce a usefully malleable end result. Check out Acoup's iron-making series; on the addendum page about China there is a Chinese bloke in the comments who discusses the grades the ancient Chinese produced using (accurately) the modern technical terms dating from after modern production reinvented the ancient grades.

    840:

    Both the Romans and the Chinese were jolly good miners, the Chinese probably better. They were long past the stage of being limited to what you can dig up from outcrops and opencastable deposits.

    841:

    I think the reason the Industrial Revolution took off in the UK where in other places it fizzled out is due to the confluence of many stream supporting each other. And it didn't start with steam. It started with sheep. Stream 1. Much of the UK was suitable for raising sheep and not much else (thus geography). So important woollen industry. Cloth is very important for survival (keeping warm) in Northern Europe. And very expensive in pre-industrial times. Then in the 17th century we have the first enclosure acts. More land for sheep, and farm labourers forced off the land, resulting if extra labour in cities. Stream 2. The East India Company. They bring cotton fabrics from India which prove very popular. The woollen industry gets these banned for competing, so they start bringing in raw cotton instead. Now we have a shortage of skilled workers to spin and weave. So we invent (water powered) machinery to do that work, and use the surplus labour to run the machines. Stream 3. Transport. This starts with canals to move stuff around, and we have a nice supply of Irish navvies to dig them, due to what's happening there. Canals prove popular, but they're slow, and geographically limited. Stream 4. Finally we get to mines, pumps, coal and steam (and again geography comes into play). Then steam power get applied to factories (so they're no longer limited to places with hydro power) and transport, where the demand generated by canals now gets steam trains. Other streams. Sugar, slaves, world trade (made possible by improvements in ship building) and looting of other regions resources all come into play.

    I'd suggest that all the streams had to come together or it would just have fizzled.

    842:

    Reminds me, I should fix some typos from 839.

    AFAIK, the Carboniferous coal from the Appalachians, the UK, and the Basque region are all more-or-less the same deposit, which got split by the opening of the Atlantic throughout the Mesozoic. Much of the coal around Wyoming and Alberta is younger, late Cretaceous to Paleocene. Okay for fossils and heating, maybe not so ideal for metallurgy.

    843:

    and we do have a documented case where the spark happened and the metastasize didn't. Ancient Rome.

    In the back of my mind I tend to thing that the ability to PRINT things at much lower costs than were available at the time comes into play.

    844:

    It's not a bad idea, Eric, but much of the equipment to handle things like wool and cotton originated with working with silk in Europe (I'll cite references if you want). The Chinese had silk, cotton, hemp, and wool, they had spinning wheels and water wheels by ca. 5th century BCE, and they had IIRC the biggest canal in the world. Indeed, the Song Dynasty capital was left at vulnerable Kaifeng because it had so many canals, while a place like Chengdu was considered too isolated, even if it's better protected by mountains.

    You're likely right about multiple streams, but I'm not sure those are the correct ones.

    845:

    I'm betting that there are plenty of data holes - maybe your history buffs/pros* could channel their superior knowledge in that direction.

    What gets taught at what age varies by state. Typically you get 2 or 3 US history sessions spread over 2 or 3 years. Young, middling, older. But where it gets fun is if you move around a lot. (Think army brats.) You might miss the earlier years and then get to take a catch up class just before you graduate. Or you get 6 or 7 years of various flavors of US history. And gradually get bored to death.

    846:

    western US (same deposit as UK, just split by Atlantic)

    I think you mean eastern US coal?

    While the deposits in the US and Canada on the western half of the continent are larger in size, they tend to be lessor in "quality".

    The eastern coal, especially in Pennsylvania, tended to be very high quality anthracite. Which somewhat explains eastern and western Pennsylvania as centers of the early US steel industry. With cities along the great lakes also in the running. (They were closer to the iron ore.)

    That western stuff, like what we had in central and western Kentucky is lower quality but near the surface and not under much rock. So they keep building bigger and bigger scrapers to rip the ground off the opt of it then load it up 100 train cars at a time.

    847:

    815 - Well, to me large parts of the Industrial Revolution are founded and expanded on the British (not just Ingurlundshire, these things also happened in Scotland and Wales in a similar timeline) economy, based on mining, which allowed canal digging, metal founding, textiles and thus railway industries. Other than cotton as a raw material for textiles, none of these industries used chattel slavery (and I'm not sure they used indentured slavery except for fixed term indenture for skilled workers) for either plant or raw materials.

    Again, show me where I am wrong, and take note that "proof by assertion alone" is not an accepted form of proof in engineering history any more than it is elsewhere in science and engineering.

    I don't know enough about Chinese history to know if they did or didn't have a failed IR; what I do know is that large parts of Chinese history are a known unknown for me, and not worth attempting to discuss without first filling in that knowledge base, and that informing, rather than insulting, is the role I look for a historian to take up.

    819 - 821 - As a tl;dr of the above and my answer to these, a historian needs to supply facts as well as opinion to justify $stance.

    848:

    smartest people in the room

    A few observations on this phrase.

    For the last 40+ years I've many times been in a room where I was NOT the smartest person in the room. (Define it as you wish.) And I find that when I am said person I tend to be bored if I clear the bar easily. A trait I do not like in myself but will admit to it.

    Things I've noticed about MANY but not all "smartest in the room" people.

    The tend to conflate their opinions / conclusions with facts. A lot.

    Many times just don't know how to be wrong.

    Many times they get belligerent if you don't see the wisdom of their position. Or even ugly. But dismissive frequently.

    Most of the ones who make a point of being the "smartest in the room" are males. I've been around a lot of females who are "smarter" than me and most are polite.

    And as a reference point I test out in the 95th to 99th percentile in most tests. So when I moved up in my schooling it was a bit of a shock to no longer be in the top of most classes by default.

    I keep hoping for more female points of view here. And while I disagreed with Foxessa a lot, I appreciated her points of view. I really wish this wasn't a male dominated blog. Now we are down to what is likely 0 female commentators.

    Guys, if you don't know if by now, well, most females don't want to be around people who call them jerks all the time as a point of disagreement.

    850:

    849 - Likewise, but as long as I'm smart enough to follow the conversation, and preferably to keep my mouth shut and not over expose my being the thickie I'm quite happy not being the smartest person in the room.
    What grinds my gears is people calling me the thickie just because I haven't studied $subject1 to the same depth as they have. I quite possibly know more about $subject2. In which context I'd like to thank Foxessa for the way she handles how she has studied history in more depth than I have.

    850 - It's true; the Indy think that you should register to even read their website. Oh and, on another site I recently set up a poll asking which of Mayhem, Bozo, Rishi Rich and Liz 2x4 was the UK's worst Prime Minister. So that article seems feasible, at least if Con Party rules allow it.

    851:

    Heteromeles @ 825:

    One of the things I've learned is Charlie's lesson about stories, that there are far more out there than there will ever be time to write, so nurture a few good ones and treat the rest like pinatas, where you whack them to see if there's any candy inside and discard them when you have no further use for them.

    Same is true with ideas.

    Absolutely. Thanks for putting it so clearly.

    I collect stuff like Maslow, evolutionary psych and transactional analysis as frameworks for thinking. These things aren't theories in the scientific sense because they don't make testable predictions, but given a framework I can start to hang up theories and facts from elsewhere, and with luck I can then squint a bit and see if a pattern is starting to emerge. Without the framework I just have a bunch of disconnected stuff sitting on the ground with no hope of spotting a pattern.

    If I am really lucky then I might spot something new that leads to an actual testable theory. Its a long shot, but I keep hoping.

    852:

    While that's a fun read, I detect a few straw man arguments. Few people today would use Maslow's heirarchy exactly as he defined it, and I strongly doubt anyone here would do that or is doing that here.

    Please let's recall the context defined by OGH. My exact words were, "The news media seem to be entirely pre-Maslow." A post-Maslow debate should include everything we've learned since Maslow. So my point wasn't so much about Maslow as a criticism of news media and public debate. While I appreciate a good criticism of Maslow (thanks for that, btw), I'd like to focus more on the topic of this thread, if that's still possible.

    How can we seperate policy-making from public debate, particularly in a mass-media world? The printing press was a catalyst, but also a dual-use technology. (Who owns the press?) We see that even more powerfully today with social media. We can see politicians trying hard to control new media, but new media also shapes the public (via social media) and political (via campaign funding etc) debate.

    Troutwater's point about tire-kicking applies. Thanks for kicking. ;)

    853:

    852 and 853 - Maslow is still taught in "history of management" type courses (yes I know that because I did one), but as "here's a superseded theory"; there are many other theories of management, most of them superseded or even just plain wrong. It is something like 38 years since I last used any of them, and then it was for passing a paper in my HND.

    854:

    Thanks, I appreciate that.

    855:

    Here is a much better write-up on the aluminium sulphur battery.

    One electrode is aluminium. The scientists used aluminium cooking foil, so that's not difficult to get at. The electrolyte is molten aluminium chloride with a bit of sodium and potassium chlorides to bring down the melting point. The other electrolyte was sulphur. Not quite sure how that works, except that the key reaction was between the aluminium and the sulphur, so presumably aluminium sulphide.

    The results showed an ability to handle very fast charging (minutes), comparable energy/weight to Li-ion and good lifetime. Only two downsides. 1. the cells need to be at around 110 centigrade to work, and 2. if any water gets in you get hydrogen sulphide gas, which is highly toxic and also inflammable.

    The material cost for the battery is much smaller than for an equivalent Li-ion cell. The high temperature is a nuisance and may make automotive applications difficult. But to me this looks like it would fit perfectly into grid-scale storage applications where heating costs can be reduced by the cube-square law and H2S precautions are well-known.

    So while I share Nojay's scepticism about yet-another-battery-breakthrough, this one looks like it has legs.

    856:

    It's not that simple. Charcoal is actually better for making iron but, as others say, is a pain in the neck in many respects. The coal needed for iron-making HAS to be high-carbon coal (preferably anthracite) - many of the most common coals simply wouldn't do. And, in Britain, the industrial revolution started when iron was produced almost entirely with charcoal from coppiced woodlands (e.g. Kentish chestnut).

    To Heteromeles (#815): the steam engines were developed for draining metal ore mines, NOT coal ones!

    The coal myth will not die :-( Yes, it was essential to the EXPANSION of the indistrial revolution, but it had essentially no part in its INITIATION.

    857:

    The sodium-sulphur battery already exists, with all the supposed benefits you mention of low weight, low cost of materials etc. with the same downsides (a molten high-temperature electrolyte). They're actually being manufactured and sold and have been for a couple of decades now by companies like NGK in Japan. They had a track record of bursting into flames but I've not seen any reports of this happening recently so they may have fixed that problem.

    Na-S battery tech still a niche product. A number of prototype installations have been deployed, some of them have now been decommisssioned, like the 1MWh Na-S battery installed at Stornoway airport to buffer wind turbine generation. Having a battery pack with a 300 deg C core and a habit of catching fire located a metre or two away from an aviation fuel storage tank was probably not a good idea in hindsight.

    Na-S batteries were used in what was the largest battery storage installation in the world, 245MWh of capacity buffering a small wind turbine farm in Rokkasho in Japan. As far as I know it's still operational. How economic it is is another matter.

    858:

    Now we are down to what is likely 0 female commentators.

    nancy still pops in occasionally

    859:

    Yes. That's the real problem with sodium batteries of all sorts. At least you CAN extinguish a fire in an aluminium battery with water, whether this one or the less toxic one mentioned in #172.

    I don't see temperatures of 100 Celsius as being catastrophic, even for domestic and vehicular use, provided the battery will survive cooling down and reheating when not in use, because we handle those all the time. There is also the advantage that cooling with water will stop them working.

    860:

    "I think you may have conflated Maslow's heirarchy of needs with a heirarchy social levels. They may both be abstractions, but conceptually are very different things."

    No, I didn't conflate the two things. I stated that relying on Maslow's hierarchy was not a good idea and then went on to discuss hierarchical society. I don't think combining discussion of the two things is a good idea, that was my point.

    861:

    The thing about the psychological inoculation study is that it only had a 5% improvement, it stuck in my mind as it seemed a bit useless.

    862:

    Sigh.

    Batteries are stored energy systems that almost always don't require atmospheric oxygen for that energy to make its way out into the wild. Water may cool the battery structures down but the stored energy still wants to be free, regardless.

    The sodium-sulphur demonstration battery pack at NGK headquarters that caught fire about ten years ago required about two weeks for the fire brigade to confirm that it wasn't actually on fire any more, regardless of the amount of water poured on it.

    https://www.ngk-insulators.com/en/news/20120425_9322.html

    The Rokkasho Na-S battery array sits in an open compound with each 14MWh battery assembly well-separated from the others and enough space for firefighting equipment to easily access a fractious and recalcitrant battery assembly that decides to go "Fwoosh!". Lessons have been learned.

    It's all moot anyway -- grid energy storage is a chimera, a distraction from the issue of actually generating enough electricity to start with. Virtually nowhere on the planet has enough renewables generation capacity to charge up large amounts of grid storage for night and periods of wind calm. What we do have is a shitload and three-quarters of fast-response gas generating capacity which used to be cheap to run because gas was cheap. Suddenly gas isn't cheap any more. At this point any snake-oil solution to the problem of not-cheap gas is going to get headlines and clicks even if it isn't actually able to do anything constructive about the real problem of gas being expensive.

    863:

    The Aaiiis have it? I wasn't expecting an attempt by Christmas, though few people were expecting her to last a year. Still, one has to get what amusement one can out of the Conservative party's shenanigans.

    864:

    The point that you are missing is that stored energy that can be released only at high temperatures (i.e. above any plausible normal ambient) or very, very slowly, AND does not react excessively with water or air, are things that we have all around us, and are not significant fire risks in themselves. Whether they are complete systems or use air doesn't make a huge difference in practice, because excluding air for long enough for them to cool down isn't generally practical; that's why firefighters mostly use water, not foam. A battery technology that has those properties is as safe as any stored energy mechanism can be.

    The aluminium oxide battery is like that; the aluminium sulphur one (and lithium ion ones) are not quite, and the sodium batteries are excessively bad news.

    Yes, the risks can be alleviated, but they drastically reduce the effectiveness of the batteries for most purposes, and increase their costs. In particular, I have said from the beginning that sodium-sulphur batteries are an insane idea for domestic or vehicular use.

    No, the issue of grid storage is not a mirage (chimaera means something different), but I agree that it's secondary to generating capacity outside Norway, New Zealand and a few other places. In any case, I was talking about the generic usability of the technologies.

    865:

    I just realised this comment was partially directed at me. I follow Devereaux closely, particularly on Roman military history, but the historian who quibbles with him on Sparta is Roel Konijnendijk, lecturer in Ancient History at Oxford, who specializes in classical Greek warfare.

    866:

    The coal myth will not die :-( Yes, it was essential to the EXPANSION of the indistrial revolution, but it had essentially no part in its INITIATION.

    What's your source? Per The early diffusion of the steam engine in Britain, 1700–1800: a reappraisal, you're right that the Newcomen engine was first deployed in a tin mine, but it also appears that they were also deployed in coal mines quite early (emphasis mine):

    The spread of steam power technology appears to have been, from the very outset, remarkably wide. There is some evidence that indicates that is highly likely that the first Newcomen engine was erected in Cornwall at the Wheal Vor tin mine in 1710. However, because of the high price of coal, Cornwall did not represent the most fertile soil for the diffusion of the new technology. The erection of the Wheal Vor engine remained a sporadic event and the introduction of Newcomen engines in Cornish mines actually took place only from the 1720s (Rolt and Allen 1997, p. 45).

    Coal mining areas represented of course a much more receptive environment for the new technology, since there coal would be relatively cheap. The Midlands coalfields (Stafford and Warwickshire) were the first location where Newcomen engines could take firm root.

    867:

    Yes, I know they were, largely because steam engines were cheaper and more effective. That's not the point. The coal mines were not generally becoming exhausted because of the inability to drain them, unlike the West Country mines, which is why there was the drive to invent them. Look at where so many of the inventors came from. Yes, I have seen references, but I can't remember where.

    However, that's STILL a digression from my point, which was that coal WASN'T the instigator of the industrial revolution (and nor were steam engines as dominant as many people make out). There were a lot of developments in many areas that used water power or no mechanical power at all (e.g. threshing, weaving and more use of iron implements), and there was a massive expansion of iron production in many areas of the UK in the 17th century. What I am saying is that the industrial revolution started well before most people think it did, and that it was NOT all about the use of steam engines.

    868:

    I should have said that some (probably most) of the delay in Cornwall was the need to build ways of getting coal (or other fuel) to the mines - unlike with the coal mines, the fuel wasn't just hanging around. If you visit Cornwall, you can see a lot of the old trackways (and some ports) built expressly for that purpose.

    869:

    Nojay said: Virtually nowhere on the planet has enough renewables generation capacity

    By capacity, do you mean already built (despite has being cheap and plentiful) or do you mean there's the available resource that would allow it to be built.

    Because one is obviously correct, we haven't built it in most places, because there used to be cheaper ways. The other, obviously bonkers. Even at 10W/sqm average output, just Australia's 5 million sq km of human degraded ground could average 50 TW.

    870:

    You know it is funny how posting " a bunch of my friends said you are all morons and I am smarter then you" will bring that out.

    One thing I've noticed over the years is that a lot of us know a lot about certain things but aren't aware of how little we know about other things. It seems to be a common failure among engineers and other technical types, which many of us are.

    Considering the snide digs people were making at historians, it was actually a pretty mild retort by someone who is a historian (and a damn good writer). No one was being called a moron. Broadly hinting that some people had fallen into Dunning-Kruger, sure — that happens here all the time.

    871:

    Quick question for those with more statistical expertise than myself (ie. many of you) — does the methodology in this article seem reasonable and able to support their conclusions?

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(22)00260-7/fulltext

    This kinda relates back to Charlie's original post, in that a significant number of people experiencing cognitive effects post-Covid is not going to be helpful in a country that has basically abandoned any attempts to control infections.

    (My own government announced this week that post-infection voluntary quarantine was reduced to 24 hours, and please wear a mask for a while afterwards but we won't actually enforce anything or provide sick leave. This just as schools return with voluntary masking and fuck-all in the way of improved ventilation*.)


    *Money for this was provided by the federal government. The provincial government used that money to fund a pre-election tax cut. Sigh.

    872:

    What I am saying is that the industrial revolution started well before most people think it did, and that it was NOT all about the use of steam engines.

    Heresy! Next you'll be saying that Newton's discovery of gravity didn't involve apples…

    873:

    If you can see a link between a heirarchy of needs and social structure, please explain it, but I fail to see one. Sure, two things may be heirarchies, but that similarity doesn't go any further. There's also a heirarchy of infinities, for example. Nevermind a network stack.

    However, "heirarchy" here is being used in the context of human needs, and this can apply to an individual human being. A society may be comprised of individuals, but the structures are independant.

    Here's another interesting way of using heirarchy: An unexpected tool for understanding inequality: abstract math | Eugenia Cheng. Like Maslow, Cheng isn't talking about the structure of society - even when dicussions of inequality can be found on social media.

    Apologies to OGH. This digression is not getting us back to the topic, which is where I'd really like to go. I was merely trying to make a point about the significant role media debate plays in this. Clearly that point is being ignored. Perhaps it's just bloody obvious to everyone here, and therefore unuseful.

    So this will, I hope, be my comment on Maslow. You're free to disagree with Maslow on many things - I certainly do - but I won't read that as worth replying to. (See the previous paragraph.) That point has been well made already.

    874:

    A quick glance indicates that it's plausible, but that sort of data is horribly prone to reporting bias.

    875:

    My own opinion about why the Industrial Revolution occurred where/when it did is the emergence of a scientist/engineering guild, at least informally. The masters exchanged information, they taught apprentices and journeymen, they tried to one-up each other. So far as I know, no place else developed the cult of the tinkerers independently.

    876:

    In terms of the U.K. I think issue is one of timing: We see the first use of a steam engine in 1712, with James Watt inventing a really useful steam engine in 1776, after which the adoption of steam generally took off. Also, by 1776 Britain is truly an empire - it has multiple colonies, including the North American colonies (which will become the U.S.) and it practices slavery.

    The idea that slavery might have financed things like the building of mills/factories for the industrial revolution is not, therefore, impossible. But was the financing direct or indirect? How much of the money spent to build mills is directly traceable to slavery? Before the U.K. emancipated their slaves, did slaves work in the mills? How much American cotton (as opposed to wool or Indian cotton) was processed in the mills? Can one make a reasonable case that the industrial revolution could, financially speaking, take place without slavery to finance it?

    Now answer the same questions and substitute "possession of rich colonies" for slavery. Then ask all the slavery questions for the U.S. and you'll be getting somewhere.

    877:

    Next you'll be saying that Newton's discovery of gravity didn't involve apples…

    I feel the need to discuss cherry trees for some reason.

    878:

    Good, cheap batteries are part of the solution. Progress in battery science are therefore generally a good thing. You're right in noting that the energy still has to be generated, and that's definitely an issue, but I'm still happy with a better battery.

    879:

    Back on the origins of the industrial revolution(s), here is some more food for thought on printing.

    See also episode 4 of "The Day the Universe Changed" by James Burke.

    The gist is that Gutenberg's combination of moveable metal type with the printing press increased book production and decreased costs by about 3 orders of magnitude compared to the engraved wooden printing blocks used by the Chinese. For the first time it was feasible for ordinary people to buy a book that could teach them a useful skill, such as mine drainage or double-entry book keeping. That in turn meant that lots of people were acquiring practical skills and making connections between them.

    Much of the discussion here has been about how Rome or China had the ingredients of some important invention, but somehow never managed to put the parts together. Perhaps that was because they didn't have cheap books which allowed the right components to come together in one head. Its no good having one bit of an invention known in one corner of the empire if the other bit is at the other side of it. Cheap books are the thing that allowed the two to come together.

    880:

    One thing I've noticed over the years is that a lot of us know a lot about certain things but aren't aware of how little we know about other things. It seems to be a common failure among engineers and other technical types, which many of us are.

    Looking back at my long comment about smartest in the room, I wasn't clear on this. Many of these folks tend to believe their opinions / conclusions are the same as facts about EVERYTHING.

    And to add. I know multiple people who many times are the smartest in the room by far. But don't have to control the conversation, don't have to make sure everyone understands they are right no matter what anyone else thinks, etc... But are polite, easy going people who know when to talk and when not to do so. And can explain why they think you may be wrong without going down the path of "Jane you ignorant slut".

    881:

    So you see the industrial revolution as having multiple changes feeding into it: More and better iron/steel, the use of mill wheels to run factories even before useful steam engines, enough improvements in farming (the threshing you mentioned) to produce a ready supply of labor, etc. In your view the steam engine was the final stage, the thing that welded all the precursors you've identified together?

    Would the gigantic increase in canal-building also fit into your scheme of precursors?

    Which brings us back to the question of how much colonialism/slavery might have financed some or all of the precursors you're discussing, in addition to financing steam engine-run factories.

    882:

    Asking "what the heck does the start of an industrial revolution actually look like, and did China have one?" is justifiably low on the list of questions that any career-minded historian might ask. After all, how many scholars of the Industrial Revolution can read Chinese, let alone classical Chinese, so they can work with the original texts? Given the way China's acting right now, how many American scholars would think it wise to speculate that China industrialized and more-or-less lost it? What would that say about them and about our possible future? In today's American politics, questions like that endanger academic careers due to the unavoidable politics, as well as being freaking hard to answer from primary sources.

    Low? Goodness no. From Litvine (accessible with a free login):

    What led to the development of modern capitalism? What caused the industrial revolution? These are two famous questions that historians of early modern and modern Europe are always challenged to address and will most certainly never be able to answer in any definitive and comprehensive way.

    That is, social and economic historians are always looking for a better answer to this question, and they're frequently prompted to look far afield for the answers. Here's a text which explicitly includes China and Japan in its analysis of the industrial revolution. Dagmar Schafer also has a fantastic manuscript which looks at the contributions of 17th Century China to the industrial revolution. And, as a bonus, this PhD student gives their candid thoughts on the topic. China simply isn't the black hole for social and economic historians you present it as, nor is there a lack of historians willing to read Chinese primary sources in their original language.

    On multiple levels, I don't think it's a good idea to read China as some exotic, perfectly optimized system. Any reading of Chinese history instead shows that it's basically people adapting to one damned thing after another. It's interesting that in the few really good times (early Song, early Ming), technological innovation appears to have surged, much as it did in the 1980s through ca. 2010 when they experimented with relaxing top-down management in favor of markets. This suggests that what held China back wasn't a conservative culture optimized to agrarian food production, but disasters and problematic governance interacting with each other.

    I resent the implication that I was. I was narrowly discussing 18th Century China in terms of its agricultural system, which you yourself described as "hugely productive and quite sophisticated", not the whole of China across its entire history. I refer you to The Great Divergence (linked above) as it details the argument more fully than I can here (not least because I'm not nearly as knowledgeable on the topic).

    [[ link fixed - mod ]]

    883:

    A very good point. I agree with Michael Cain that the scientific revolution of the 17th century is why the industrial revolution happened, and printing was essential to how it spread - once the mindset changed, then it became the most probable outcome (sometime, somehow).

    This led me a while back to wonder what the world would have been like if coal (and, particularly, anthracite) had not been laid down in large quantities. I think that an industrial revolution would have happened, but it would have been wildly different. In England, probably more canals (an aspect of the industrial revolution, with the first being 17th century), and smaller cities based around sources of water power. But I don't think we would have seen the explosive change. Anyway, your guess is as good as mine!

    Anyone who wants to use that as an alternative history plot is welcome to it :-)

    884:

    I see what you're saying, now. According to your view, neither steam engines deployed in metal nor coal mines were the instigators of the industrial revolution because the industrial revolution began much earlier. Regardless, we seemingly agree that steam engines were used in both kinds of mines quite early on.

    On your broader point, what are your numbers for the expansion of British iron production in the 17th Century? I have that annual production was around 12,000 tons in 1700, but rose to 2 million tons by 1850.

    You might also be interested in what historians call "industrious revolutions", which precipitated the industrial revolution in England and were also evident in other parts of the globe at the same time.

    885:

    In a word, 'yes'.

    I see it as the change starting in the 17th century, spreading in the period 1700-1750, and growing explosively thereafter. I don't know enough about 17th and early 18th century colonialism and slavery to comment on their relevance.

    886:

    Batteries or energy storage generally is being put forward by many as a 'solution' to the problem of not enough low-priced electricity generation from renewables. That does not compute. With fifty times as much renewable capacity as we have today worldwide then maybe storage will start to be worth investigating, until then it's a bit like the Wright brothers spending time, effort and money trying to build an modern international airport for their Flyer.

    Fix the cheap electricity generating problem, and storage is a useful edge-case addition to the grid, maybe as in Britain providing Black Start capability as a backup plus allowing a little bit of diurnal load-balancing. Without enough cheap generating capacity, storage just sits there empty because electricity is too expensive to divert to storage, what with the round-trip losses, capital expense and operating costs on top.

    887:

    The obvious solution to all this is a world-wide grid made from (mostly) renewables, but I doubt that's going to happen, at least not the international aspects.

    888:

    From what I've read, I'd have thought that slavery would work against an industrial revolution.

    Slaves are cheap labour. Labour competes with machinery, and if labour is cheap enough machines that replace labour aren't economic. Hence industrialisation is slowed down. That is why in the US Civil War Slaveowners' Treasonous Rebellion the North was able to out-fight the South: the South hadn't industrialised because it had lots of cheap slaves to do the work instead.

    I can well believe that money from slavery made its way into investments in industrial enterprises, both in the US and the UK. But that merely reflects the fact that people with money will look for good places to invest it.

    Or is there evidence that the actual GDP of those economies was larger than it would otherwise have been thanks to slavery?

    889:

    I've not seen that. They are being put forward as a solution to the irregularity of supply, especially the diurnal and seasonal ones (in the dark north). The latter doesn't compute, but the former does (in theory).

    890:

    Fix the cheap electricity generating problem, and storage is a useful edge-case addition to the grid, maybe as in Britain providing Black Start capability as a backup plus allowing a little bit of diurnal load-balancing. Without enough cheap generating capacity, storage just sits there empty because electricity is too expensive to divert to storage, what with the round-trip losses, capital expense and operating costs on top.

    I know you're having fun riding on this one, so here's something to joust at:

    It's that old, pro-oil shibboleth that sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the sun don't shine.

    That's what storage is essential for.

    Getting a bit less poetic, since I've been dealing with flex alerts for the last few days and into next week, due to a no-joke heat wave (minimum temperature last night was 29oC), let's talk about what's going on. Flex alerts ask everyone to minimize unnecessary electricity usage between 4 pm and 9 pm, which is when peak load occurs. The reason peak load hits is that's when everyone comes home, cools the house down, cooks dinner, does laundry, etc. after being out all day. Peak generation is between around 10 am to 2 pm. Storage is needed to capture surplus power from the peak and hold it for peak demand. Without this, renewables simply don't work.

    Note, this isn't base load, it's peak load, so ramping a nuclear plant up and down every day is rather suboptimal.

    891:

    I have failed to find any good figures! I found quite a few papers on "The expansion of the iron industry in Myshire in the 17th century", but no UK-wide ones. Historical economists frequently bemoan the amount of guesswork they need to do to estimate such things, but I may look again.

    My understanding is that the iron production in 1700 had reached the limit of the wood supply; that could easily have been doubled, perhaps tripled, within a couple of decades, but no more than that.

    892:

    Speaking of, I tried reading the Wikipedia entry on cotton and realised I don't know enough history of the Industrial Revolution to draw valid conclusions.

    893:

    The funny part is Foxessa calling everyone here the smartest people in the room, and a variety of posters taking umbrage and going out of their way to prove her wrong.

    894:

    It's that old, pro-oil shibboleth that sometimes the wind doesn't blow and the sun don't shine.

    That's what storage is essential for.

    If it's true can it still be a shibboleth? I repeat again, "Without enough cheap generating capacity" and there is clearly not enough of that, particularly or perhaps especially renewables generating capacity. Right now Britain is burning lots of gas to generate electricity. Through winter it will be burning lots more gas for home and domestic heating while as always burning lots of fossil fuels for transportation. All of that energy consumption needs to be switched over to non-fossil fuel as soon as possible at which time even more electricity will be needed (BOTE estimate, when the UK goes to fully electric transportation we'll face a demand for another 10GW of electricity annually).

    Britain has a significant renewables generating capacity for its population, about 25GW of installed wind providing on average about 8GW of electricity plus a chunk of mostly domestic PV solar generation (estimated to provide about ca. 6GW peak in summer). It generates about half, maybe more of its electricity requirement from gas these days and that is likely to increase soon as the remaining AGR nuclear plants get shut down over the next five years or so. There is never ever a surplus of renewable electricity over the amount of electricity being consumed, so storage is not needed today or indeed in the next few years or even decades.

    We do have, historically, about 8GWh of pumped-storage on the grid, it gets filled up and drawn down a bit at times but its modern purpose is to provide for a Black Start after a catastrophic crash of the grid. It's not there to store overabundant renewable energy for the times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine because that overabundant renewable energy simply doesn't exist.

    As for the flex alerts you mention, are you in California? Good news, it looks like Diablo Canyon is going to be kept in service past 2025 after all.

    https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Historic-California-vote-hailed-as-the-right-choic

    That's a shitload of gas Pakistani Gas and Electric won't need to burn to allow people on the west coast to charge up their electric cars.

    895:

    Slaves are cheap labour. Labour competes with machinery, and if labour is cheap enough machines that replace labour aren't economic. Hence industrialisation is slowed down. That is why in the US Civil War Slaveowners' Treasonous Rebellion the North was able to out-fight the South: the South hadn't industrialised because it had lots of cheap slaves to do the work instead.

    Since Foxessa isn't here to comment, I'm afraid I'll have to make a hash of it.

    No, slaves aren't cheap labor. You're thinking of sharecroppers, migrant workers, prisoners, and others who replaced slaves after slavery was outlawed.

    Slaves are property. They're capital investments, sometimes worth over $10,000 in nineteenth century money. As such, financially they're the same as industrial equipment.

    The Federalists won the Civil War for a bunch of reasons:

    --The Union army was four times bigger, and it included 1/4 to 1/3 new European immigrants. The latter largely went to the north, because there they could get jobs.

    --The Union army was better equipped, had railways to haul supplies, had telegraph lines to handle logistics, had larger industrial capacity to handle (re)building stuff. After California decisively joined the Federalist side (not guaranteed, as SoCal was a Confederate stronghold), California gold helped cover imports too.

    Meanwhile, the Confederacy was probably richer at the beginning of the war. Make no mistake: slavery and forced labor are immensely profitable, and this translates into massive political power. However, the slavers lacked railroads, decent roads, or much industrial base to speak of. Their highly profitable plantation/forced labor camp system worked really well at making raw materials for industrial manufacturers elsewhere, but they imported industrial goods rather than manufacturing them in-house. This doomed them to military defeat by 1865.

    ...

    The point about forced labor empowering politics continues to this day, with the Prison-industrial complex and Big Ag having disproportionately large political power in the US.

    One example of this is California water politics, because Big Ag uses about 80% of California's water. As one comparison, the almond industry (6800 farms, many corporate owned, run AFAIK using migrant labor) generated about $5.6 billion growing 80% of the world's almonds. Last year almonds were piling up in warehouses because they were having trouble shipping them out. Contrast that with southern California, home of 19 million people, which in the same period generated $1.6 trillion using 1/3 the water that the almond industry did. And that water use includes Southern California's remaining farmers and ranchers.

    The power demonstration is that the democratic Gov. Newsom has made precisely no attempt to rein in Big Ag's water use, even though the state's wracked by two different droughts, and even though most of Big Ag is in hard right Republican districts where Newsom won't get many votes. This is going on over 150 years after the Federalists won the Civil War, and hopefully it helps you understand what "the North won the War, the South won the Reconstruction" actually means. If you want to understand American politics now, this is one of the key points to understand.

    Finally, Charlie got it wrong. It's not the Slaveowner's Treasonous Rebellion because they weren't committing treason. Slavery was enshrined in the Constitution, but seceding was not forbidden by the Constitution. Technically the Federalists were breaking the Constitution with their illegal attempt to outlaw slavery and emancipate the slaves. This was, in fact, a key talking point by those who whipped up the Secession. What is legal and what is just often are not the same thing, unfortunately.

    896:

    That's a shitload of gas Pakistani Gas and Electric won't need to burn to allow people on the west coast to charge up their electric cars.

    While I'm aware that Pakistani politicians are very far from saints, please don't insult Pakistan by comparing them with PG&E.

    P's not a good letter for such initialisms (or my brain's heat-damaged), but something like Phelonius Gas and Electric would at least be accurate.

    As for Diablo Canyon, I'm staying clear of that issue, because it's a no-win for me. There seems to be real hypocrisy on both sides.

    897:

    Forgot to mention, if you want to see renewables in action, check out https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

    To clarify, this is California Independent System Operators. The link is to their graphs of electricity total demand and net demand minus renewables. It might be of interest to some here.

    898:

    I'd suggest that the explosion in canal building is a progress indicator for the earlier stage of the industrial revolution in Britain. Its interesting that, just like the railways later, each canal route was financed by separate groups who were sometimes less than keen to link up to competing companies (tolls and water usage being the main bones of contention).

    With regard to batteries, my main interest would be something I could install at home to provide backup power to the gas central heating system during a power cut.#

    899:

    That particular terminology is commonly used by someone on an email bounce Charlie and I take part in. He doesn't like PG&E either.

    As for the CAISO pages, I get twitchy when I see charts where the Y-axis doesn't go down to zero.

    900:

    I do admit that since OGH first put this post up, I check UK news first thing each morning to see if the blackouts or food riots have hit yet.

    901:

    Wait for winter. That's when the power demand ramps up, and Truss will have had time to make even more of a mess of the country.

    902:

    I'd agree, at least in part because I've read an early (period) history of the railways of central Scotland, and how both the routes and the companies evolved out of horse-drawn tramways and of canals.

    903:

    There is never ever a surplus of renewable electricity over the amount of electricity being consumed, so storage is not needed today or indeed in the next few years or even decades.

    On the contrary. Storage is very much needed today. Prices vary by the hour so with cheap enough batteries lots more windmills would be built because the owners could expect a higher average price since they could decouple sale of power from generation of power.

    In fact the price of power have even turned negative on a few windy occasions.

    904:

    Having ploughed through all that, the conclusion I draw is that doing a PhD under the US system of organisation is a bloody nightmare, and the most likely outcome of attempting it is to end up fucked in the head and without a PhD. The difficulties he describes seem to arise from three main causes: (1) you're working at a high level of advancement so it's naturally difficult anyway, (2) universities naturally tend to end up staffed by people who know a lot about their subject but aren't necessarily good at teaching, and (3) the way both universities and people's opportunities to attend them are managed, in the US specifically, sucks donkey's balls.

    Of course he is describing it in terms of the subject type in which he did his own PhD, but I can see very little in there which is necessarily specific to that area; what he conveys to me is that doing a PhD in history will be exactly like that, and doing a PhD in any other subject will be very similar. If the barrier on entry is low, then you will end up with a lot more miserable ex-students who got in but didn't make it, but it seems to me that for someone to be two bricks short of a shilling and yet still manage to fudge their way through all that to a successful result would be vastly more difficult than simply getting there by being good enough.

    905:

    I agree with all that and add 4: Which is the demand for history PhD's in the job market is falling off a cliff to the point where even with a prestigious degree from a top school there is very little chance you will ever work in that field.

    While I am sure some of this is US Specific I doubt 4: is, or else Deveraux would probably be advising his students to seek their careers abroad

    The thing is "the amount you will be paid for your labor" is a second order effect. It's a function of supple of, demand for, and desirability of the work, in the expertise you are developing. Low pay is often (I'd almost say always) correlated with low employee choice and power, high leverage that your employer will have on you, their ability to abuse you, and also even your ability to even get a job doing the thing you love at all.

    As a counterpoint the Computer Science PhD program is very very different. They are treated well, paid well (for doctorial students) and not driven to insanity. Because if they were, they would quit and work in industry. When I was coming up and getting my Masters (which admittedly was 1998) they had such a problem attracting PhD students that professors were literally lobbying me.

    When this disconnect in the job market gets too out of whack, the career is no longer viable and trying to make it work is no longer "smart" by at least one definition of smart.

    906:

    Having ploughed through all that, the conclusion I draw is that doing a PhD under the US system of organisation is a bloody nightmare, and the most likely outcome of attempting it is to end up fucked in the head and without a PhD.

    Having earned a PhD under the US system...yes and no.

    It took me nine years, MA and PhD, but that's because I was starting with no subject background and had to take all the coursework (MA, three years--I took the extra year to get a bunch of courses I otherwise wouldn't have). I've known people who got PhDs (physics) in two years from a BS, and I think my dad did it in four, starting from a BS, while working (engineering). Most botany PhDs take 4-5 years. I took 6 years, because I was doing experiments that took a full year to run, start to finish.

    Can you end up traumatized? Yes. I've told any number of people writing botany theses that thesis research normally is a J-shaped tunnel: there's a point where you go round the bend, can't see the light where you came in, can't see where you'll ever come out, and have to just push on until you see the light at the exit hole. And finishing is a joyous experience. For some people the experience was worth repeating. For many others....nope.

    There are multiple ways to fail out, from quitting (1/4 to 1/3), to failing to complete the research and getting a "terminal masters" in consolation, to getting booted, generally for screwing up the boss' accounting. I remember one grad student who got black-balled for telling NASA that his advisor's research wasn't going to work--without checking with his advisor first.

    The problems start once you have a PhD. Much teaching is doing by adjunct faculty (no job security, salary is at best median wage for wherever you're living--that's where Devereaux is now), and rather than go that route I went into consulting. Being a tenured sciences professor in the US isn't about teaching, it's primarily about making money. The job is to get grant/contract money ($250,000 or more/year), hire on research assistants (grad students), postdocs, and staff scientists, and also teach, help run the place, and do public outreach. It has a lot in common with running your own small business, and high-powered scientists have a lot in common with high-powered CEOs as a result. Expect the university to take half of all grant money as overhead, which pays mostly for university expenses and purportedly also for the humanities.

    907:

    P's not a good letter for such initialisms (or my brain's heat-damaged), but something like Phelonius Gas and Electric would at least be accurate.

    "Perfidious"

    908:

    "At least you CAN extinguish a fire in an aluminium battery with water, whether this one or the less toxic one mentioned in #172."

    I'm not convinced that's true, although the article doesn't provide enough information to be sure. Aluminium chloride is most familiar as the hydrate, which is an innocuous enough substance that you can smear it under your arms, but the battery is almost certainly using the anhydrous form, which is a bit nasty. It reacts eagerly and enthusiastically with water, producing lots of heat. I've only ever handled tiny amounts of it at room temperature, but apparently the reaction can be explosive if you have enough of it, and of course if it's hot to begin with it will be that much keener to explode. It's also corrosive and has an interesting set of reactions with organic compounds. So it seems to me that dumping water on a burning aluminium-sulphur battery could be a little unwise.

    How it compares with lithium in that regard is even harder to estimate. Lithium cells produce HF when you pour water on them but they mostly don't seem to actually go bang. On the other hand the aluminium-sulphur cell is only a laboratory model, and it may turn out that a configuration suitable for widespread use can be made which also strongly resists going bang; impossible to say at this early stage.

    As a matter of gut feeling, if the idea is developed it may well end up being roughly comparable with lithium in terms of the overall expectation of damage from using one, but I wouldn't be too shocked at being wrong on that.

    I'm much more confident about the aluminium-oxygen one. Aluminium will react similarly to sodium and magnesium with air and water, but it's very much harder to get it started, and it should be comparatively straightforward to come up with a configuration for the discharge cell that makes sure it can't happen. I'd guess that their proposal to use 1mm aluminium balls might be partly based on keeping the particle size large enough to be safe.

    909:

    I agree with all that and add 4: Which is the demand for history PhD's in the job market is falling off a cliff to the point where even with a prestigious degree from a top school there is very little chance you will ever work in that field.

  • Universities have a conflict of interest. Graduate students are a pool of free or almost free labor, as teaching assistants and research assistants. Once the student gets his PhD, the university loses his labor -- or has to hire him at considerably higher salary. So it is in University's interest that graduate students do not graduate for as long as possible. Which often translates into "not at all", as they lose the hope to ever see that light at the end of a tunnel.
  • 910:

    Yes, on a large scale, and also all along northern Europe. It looks like Pennsylvania and Wales split the best metallurgical grades between them, and then it gets cruddier and cruddier as you move away from that area (at least on our side it does).

    Wales also has the best coal for firing railway engines. Since South Wales was the Great Western's territory, they had an easier time designing the fireboxes for their engines than did other railways that used the less good grades from their own areas. This caused problems after WW2 when the government was frantically exporting as much Welsh coal as they could and the ex-GWR engines had to make do with grades they weren't really designed to handle.

    We're now seeing the same thing again with preserved railways. There is still a huge amount of Welsh steam coal available and not even difficult to get, but nobody can get permission to work it any more. Before Ukraine kicked off some railways were having to make do with coal from Russia, which they reckoned was like trying to burn rock and produced epic amounts of clag from the chimney no matter what you did. I'm not sure what they're using now but none of their options are great.

    911:

    Graduate students are a pool of free or almost free labor, as teaching assistants...

    Which explains in part why all large universities have pretty big graduate programs in mathematics. All those people from "outside" that have to get through at least a semester of linear algebra and differential equations requires lots of TAs.

    912:

    Michael --

    You replied to my post, yet the header says "Michael Cain replied to this comment from shrldu". Any idea how his happened?

    BTW, when I was an MS student in Computer Science (State University of New York at Albany), it was not terribly unusual to have "reciprocal TA's". I remember at least one graduate student who was a TA at a class I was taking, while I was a TA at a class he was taking.

    913:

    Deveraux is very clear that he is talking about PhD's in the Humanities and that the experience in STEM fields is very different

    914:

    P's not a good letter for such initialisms (or my brain's heat-damaged), but something like Phelonius Gas and Electric would at least be accurate.

    "Perfidious"

    I like it!

    I got stuck on "Paradise Gas and Electric", because some things need to be memorialized. Problem is that, unlike perfidious, some people might not get it.

    Ooh. Problem Gas and Electric? Not as apt as Perfidious though.

    915:

    That's a shitload of gas Pakistani Gas and Electric won't need to burn to allow people on the west coast to charge up their electric cars.

    Um, what does Pakistan have to do with America's energy supply?

    916:

    Deveraux is very clear that he is talking about PhD's in the Humanities and that the experience in STEM fields is very different

    I completely agree. Most people here are STEM, so I figured I'd share that side. Especially since I'm younger and admittedly a bloody yank.

    917:

    Once again I am not connecting Maslow and hierarchical society. From my post at 861:

    "No, I didn't conflate the two things. I stated that relying on Maslow's hierarchy was not a good idea and then went on to discuss hierarchical society. I don't think combining discussion of the two things is a good idea, that was my point."

    Various people including you connected them, or at least society and status and Maslow. I had to go back and check I wasn't going mad in what I was thinking!

    918:

    Universities have a conflict of interest. Graduate students are a pool of free or almost free labor, as teaching assistants and research assistants. Once the student gets his PhD, the university loses his labor -- or has to hire him at considerably higher salary. So it is in University's interest that graduate students do not graduate for as long as possible. Which often translates into "not at all", as they lose the hope to ever see that light at the end of a tunnel.

    Um, not in my experience. Where I got my PhD, TAs were unionized, and I got a bit more money as a TA than I did as a lecturer. TAs and RAs are paid. Granted it's below median wage for the area, but it's has benefits, so it's ca. $50k/year or more for a grad student, more for a postdoc. Adjunct faculty don't make much more than TAs, and that's the real ghetto.

    Anyway, universities are more incentivized to get people up or out than to let them hang around not being productive.

    919:

    That's a good point (I am no chemist). Aluminium metal reacts very slowly with air or water at normal temperatures, which is what I was thinking of when cooling it down. But the aluminium oxygen cell isn't even in the laboratory yet ....

    920:

    Just found out Currituck County has changed their beach driving/parking rules AGAIN. (Beach driving is the ONLY place I get to use the 4WD on my Jeep & I want to use it to practice for if I ever get to go out west.)

    The rules had been you needed a permit to drive/park on the beach between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Ten dollars for a pass good for 10 days OR a season pass for $150. I used to get the season pass so that I could go down to photograph the wild horses without knowing WHEN I was going to be able to get down there. Summer is the best time to photograph the horses because it's the best light & the horses come down to the beach, so you have the best background for them.

    Last summer (apparently) they changed it to $50 for a 7 day pass (Saturday to Friday) and you had to pick a week. No way to go down "spur-of-the-moment" like I could with the season pass.

    And this year they extended the season from the last week in April to the first week in October ... which put the kibosh on my plan to drive down there after Labor Day Weekend ... a trip I've been planning all summer knowing that was the earliest I could get on the beach without needing a permit ...

    But NOW I DO need a permit and they're all sold out. Can't go the next week permits ARE available because of medical/dental appointments ... the earliest I'd be able to go down is the second week in October when you won't need a permit. Maybe autumn will have good light.

    Fuck it! I am going to the beach on Tuesday, I just don't know what beach I'm going to and what I'll be photographing when I get there.

    921:

    Aluminium chloride is most familiar as the hydrate, which is an innocuous enough substance that you can smear it under your arms...

    Unless you're allergic to it, as I am... :-(

    922:

    You replied to my post, yet the header says "Michael Cain replied to this comment from shrldu". Any idea how his happened?

    Almost certainly some sort of fumble-fingering on my part. Software is like fictional magic: do every step in the right order and it works fine; don't, and Bad Things happen.

    923:

    Dave Moore @ 795:

    And now for something completely off topic to entertain you this weekend. Some Australian lads have come up with a wood burning jet turbine.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UnhAzTMxg

    It has steam punk potential I think.

    Interesting. Does it do anything besides set itself on fire?

    924:

    Pigeon @ 796:

    Yeah, I thought that odd too. Particularly puzzled by "the Beatles" being in quote marks, which indicates to me that it doesn't actually mean the real Beatles as in John, Paul, George and Ringo, but instead means some other thing that gets called "the Beatles" as some kind of nickname or slang and I'm supposed to be able to figure out the proper name for it from context or something. Which I can't, because I'm not aware of any such usage, relevant or not.

    Perhaps the entire musical milieu of which "The Beatles" were the premier example?

    925:

    Heteromeles @ 822:

    The ties between the New York City financial industry (and others) and slave-based labor camps (aka plantations) is quite well documented. It comes up in The Half Has Not Been Told, too.

    It's also an interesting question just HOW NYC became the financial center of the new nation after the American Revolution?

    926:

    Has Charlie offered you a job in The Laundry yet? ;-)

    927:

    Nope, I'm still not seeing a connection. I did not use the words "social" or "society" or "status" in 768, probably because I wasn't talking about society or status.

    I see no point in this line of communication. Please don't reply.

    928:

    JReynolds @ 826:

    The Half Has Not Been Told

    Could you provide a link to the actual book to which you refer? That's a popular title, and has attracted a bunch of books along the line of 'God is really good (and is totally really real) despite all the shit I've been forced to eat'.

    SWAG: He meant The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist

    929:

    obvious solution to all this is a world-wide grid made from (mostly) renewables

    Traditionally the load moves to the power rather than the other way round. Australia has aluminium smelters in coalfields, and Aotearoa has one next to a hydro dam. I would expect that as generation shifts towards the equator so will energy-intensive industries. Moving aluminium ore and iron ore about the place is apparently easier than moving the necessary fossil fuels, and I don't see any reason why the same isn't true of renewables especially in the form of hydrogen for steelmaking.

    There may even be some small advantage in playing with steel somewhere hot and dry rather than cold and wet.

    On that note, I am bemused by the people ignoring hydro as possibly being considered renewable by some people, but without explaining why.

    But yes, round #297 of "renewables suck" "no they don't".

    930:

    David L @ 846:

    I'm betting that there are plenty of data holes - maybe your history buffs/pros* could channel their superior knowledge in that direction.

    What gets taught at what age varies by state. Typically you get 2 or 3 US history sessions spread over 2 or 3 years. Young, middling, older. But where it gets fun is if you move around a lot. (Think army brats.) You might miss the earlier years and then get to take a catch up class just before you graduate. Or you get 6 or 7 years of various flavors of US history. And gradually get bored to death.

    Seems to me like there's been a lot of dumbing-down in the last 50 years or so as well. When I was in school in the 50s & 60s I was taught a lot of U.S. history we know is wrong NOW. But it seems like THEY tried their best to get it right.

    But while it seems like THEY (the historians & the academics) tried to correct the mistakes, some OTHER people got their feelings hurt by having the record corrected, and speaking historical TRUTH became a threat to their power base ...

    So they decided they weren't gonna' allow TRUTH any more. So great swaths of what really happened - stuff we might learn from to make our country a better place; stuff we might use to live up to the ideals that this country were supposedly was founded on ... are now off limits.

    931:

    Seasonal storage is possible, but for the same reason as diurnal storage isn't much used now, seasonal storage is a stupid idea. You spend a small fortune building a giant dam somewhere high, a lot of money buying electricity to pump water into it... then sell that electricity back for about the same price you paid for it. Step three is not "profit".

    Seriously. Australia has or had three pumped hydro systems, all owned by coal power companies, and they worked just like the UK one: fill them overnight when the coal systems were underloaded, empty them during the evening peak. Optionally repeat during the morning peak + daytime.

    The need for this was removed when an electricity market was created, by choosing settings that made it more profitable not to smooth the peaks like that. I'm not familiar enough with the economic of political science to understand why that was a good idea, I'm more familiar with the engineering reasons why it was built that way in the first place.

    Yes, seasonal storage would require a fuckton of water but that's more of an engineering problem than a political one. The NZ scheme is impossible for political reasons, for example.

    https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/new-zealand-pumped-storage/

    932:

    The point of graduate/doctoral level education in ANYTHING is to advance the common knowledge. Our culture has become so thoroughly infiltrated by mammonism that we have conflated the purpose of 'higher learning' with the purposes of mammonism (maximize money at all costs).

    This occurs in the endless and fundamentally stupid debate about the value of a 'liberal arts' education, mostly held by people with no experience or knowledge of just what constitutes 'liberal arts'. I know a large percentage of the people sneering at liberal arts are confused by both words - in their worldview a liberal is akin to a smelly hippy, and arts are pointless and possibly gay.

    That same disdain is often expressed by STEM persons, for slightly different reasons. I once had a (science) classmate tell me that someone told her 'only stupid people take Arts', at which point I said that one of the core elements of an 'Arts' education is where we learn that only stupid people believe what they are told without checking the evidence.

    It turns out that post-education marketability is not the only reason to study a topic such as History, or Political Science or any of the others. The reason to study them is to learn about the world, and perhaps identify ways to advance the common knowledge. The sneering disdain for people trying to build understanding of non-laboratory measurable phenomena is ultimately not helpful.

    This relates somewhat to the last 'Ends of Education' thread.

    933:

    David L @ 878:

    Next you'll be saying that Newton's discovery of gravity didn't involve apples…

    I feel the need to discuss cherry trees for some reason.

    Compare and contrast: Apple Newton and Fig Newton

    934:

    Australia has or had three pumped hydro systems, all owned by coal power companies, and they worked just like the UK one: fill them overnight when the coal systems were underloaded, empty them during the evening peak.

    My modest local power authority has an RFP out for solar and storage to do something similar. Our summer weather, when peak demand is the highest, is very consistent: glorious morning sunshine, afternoon is more of a crap shoot. The plan says charge up the batteries in the AM, then during the four highest load hours in the late afternoon, all available solar to the grid plus use the batteries as a peaking generator.

    I've been trying to free up some time to become a minor annoyance to the authority, asking to see the data on which they're making their decisions.

    935:

    On that note, I am bemused by the people ignoring hydro as possibly being considered renewable by some people, but without explaining why.

    Oooh, I can opine about this!

    The short answer is to get a copy of Cadillac Desert. For you, it'll be delicious schadenfreude, because you don't have to live it. It's entirely about the American West. As is my answer.

    The slightly longer answer is that all the good dam sites and a lot of bad ones were built 50-100 years ago, at least in the US. The current fad for dam removal reflects the fact that a lot of damaging and superfluous dams need to be removed. The reason they were built in the first place is that, largely under the New Deal regime (which fell apart in the 1960s and 1970s), dams were the coin of political pork: support this bill, get a dam in your district. Even if you don't particularly need one. President Carter, killjoy that he is, stopped this particular game about the time that some really bad dams were in the pipeline. He got blamed, of course, and of course they still want to build the damned things. But the pipelined ones really do suck, as in being immensely expensive, likely to fail, not likely to hold much water, and in need of massive financial subsidies to supply water or power to anything.

    Obviously this isn't the case everywhere, but I suspect that in the whiter part of the globe at least, any dam that feasibly could be built has been built. There's a good case for enlarging some dams, particularly in California (google news for California arkstorm from a few weeks ago), but there's not really good places for more.

    As for damming the Amazon or Congo, you'd think that people would have learned from all the problems caused by the Aswan High Dam. Evidently not.

    936:

    Rocketpjs @ 894:

    The funny part is Foxessa calling everyone here the smartest people in the room, and a variety of posters taking umbrage and going out of their way to prove her wrong.

    That's because the phrase smartest people in the room is actually a smarmy insult meaning the opposite.

    Labeling people the "smartest people in the room" actually means you're saying they're a bunch of fuckin' idiots, with a sub-text that they're crooks.

    937:

    “ The point of graduate/doctoral level education in ANYTHING is to advance the common knowledge”

    Unfortunately if you cannot follow up your graduate degree with a career in that field you aren’t really advancing the common knowledge. So “post-education marketability” (which I would rewrite as being able to feed yourself, put a roof over your head while actually practicing your field of study) is not the ONLY reason but it is a NECESSARY one.

    Note the argument is not these fields lack economic maximization but economic survival.

    No one is challenging the principles that make such a study valid and worthy. What I am saying is that the economic realities have become so grave as to make those principles unacheivable, at least for the humanities in the US, without starting off independently wealthy.

    And that anyone who fails to realize that is at best, unwise and misled.

    938:

    Seasonal storage is daft because the energy amounts to be stored start to reach amounts that are hard to make people grasp, but is most vividly accounted in "Number of Tsar Bomb equivalents", and not fractional ones, either.

    939:

    As for damming the Amazon or Congo

    With the Amazon at least you have the high headwaters where hydro might make sense. I could try to work out whether there are any and whether it would be practical, but I can't be bothered. I did study under a dude who built some early HVDC links from said mountains out to the coastal bits so I assume there's some kind of hydro scheme somewhere...

    With big water mowing horizontally dams are pretty pointless anyway, you use flow generators instead. Commonly thought of as 'tidal generators' even though they're mostly used in non-tidal rivers :) Or towed behind boats if you want sheer number of installations.

    940:

    I'd think it would be more useful as "cubic kilometres or water falling a kilometre" or something similar. In Australia we'd use Sydharbs instead because the metric system is overrated.

    I don't know of any system that uses bombs to generate electricity. I also have no idea at all how bombs relate to useful work other than by doing the maths. One kilotonne of TNT is X MJ of released energy, times an assumed 20% thermal efficiency, gives Y MWh of electricity sort of thing. But again, outside of orion ships I can't think of an actual use case involving nuclear weapons, big or small.

    The good news is that using the exact same approach we can prove that coal fired power plants don't exist. Especially not the carbonaceous earth ones using shitty "brown coal" from the swamps of Manheim or Victoria. The sheer mass of material to be moved, and the quantity of CO2 and ash produced, would make such a system utterly unworkable. Clearly therefore it doesn't exist because it cannot be commercial viable even if it would be physically possible.

    [[ link fixed - mod ]]

    941:

    "With big water moving horizontally dams are pretty pointless anyway, you use flow generators instead."

    Even with dams, it's really flow generation. The dams are there for storage, and seasonal storage (to a large extent) at that. They serve to even out variations in the flow, and accommodate variations in demand, on scales ranging from hourly up to multi-year.

    JHomes

    942:

    I didn't say it was impossible. I said it was daft.

    Here is a storage system that could scale sufficiently, isn't a safety hazard, and has decent round trip efficiency:

    "Lift rocks". Cut twenty tonne blocks of granite, stack them high with electric winches, lower them back down when you need the power. No evaporation from reservoirs, no messing up the water sheds, no limited resources used in any significant quantity, no hazard to the public.

    So what is the problem? Capital. A rock lift that is used to smooth out a day-night cycle gets to earn money every day. A rock lift which is supposed to smooth out seasonal variation gets to charge for its services once per year. That makes it very expensive.

    943:

    "No one is challenging the principles that make such a study valid and worthy. What I am saying is that the economic realities have become so grave as to make those principles unacheivable, at least for the humanities in the US, without starting off independently wealthy."

    Yes, our culture and society have become so thoroughly infested with mammonism that anything without immediate and obvious financial benefit is wholly disparaged. 'Though I lack the strength to change it, I do not accept it'.

    Note that I was also at least indirectly responding to another poster's slur to the effect that historians are stupid. Coming from a family of historians (amateur and professional) I took it a bit personally, on top of the fact that it is demostrably a stupid thing to say.

    JBS 937: I know the implication, what I found funny was the kneejerk reaction. Here we have a bona fide historian and expert on this stuff (i.e. the history of the slave trade and its overlap with industrialization) being lectured by a bunch of extremely intelligent tech people who are fundamentally NOT experts in her field. Mostly because the information she brought is not consistent with what they want to believe.

    944:

    "I don't know of any system that uses bombs to generate electricity."

    Way back in the day, probably the 1950s or 1960s, there was a proposal to drill a deep shaft, set off a nuke to create a large cavity at the bottom, then fire subsequent nukes to keep it hot, pumping in water to generate steam between shots. I don't remember who came up with that, but it has a very Telleresque feel to it.

    "One kilotonne of TNT is X MJ of released energy"

    1 kT = 4.18e12 J

    945:
    • Here we have a bona fide historian and expert on this stuff (i.e. the history of the slave trade and its overlap with industrialization) being lectured by a bunch of extremely intelligent tech people who are fundamentally NOT experts in her field. Mostly because the information she brought is not consistent with what they want to believe.*

    Can't speak for the others, but in my case, I responded because she was attacking us as wrong without reading what we were reading, confusing what went on during the industrial revolution with what caused it.

    Similarly, she earlier seemed to imply I was racist when I said that I didn't have a spiritual experience playing drums in a Diaspora style. One reason there's such a diversity of spiritual practice is because few people respond positively to all (or any) of them.

    Now it's entirely possible that there's a mutual misunderstanding going on here, but I simply wish she'd read what people like me write. That's all.

    946:

    I didn't say it was impossible. I said it was daft.

    Can you explain what "daft" means in this context? Based on the idea being physically possible and economically viable (in Aotearoa, anyway), but politically difficult I guess you mean "no-one would vote for such a thing" or "no government would dare build it"?

    Australia has different engineering challenges so is unlikely to need much seasonal storage at all - the sort of event that would cause consistent overcasts for a whole year across the whole of Australia would render the storage pointless.

    My guess is that Europe would need a relatively smaller system due to the popularity of local nuclear reactors but has much more severe political problems making the idea even more daft than where I live?

    947:

    "The dams are there for storage"

    Supplementing myself, and also to ensure that all the water goes through the turbines.

    JHomes

    948:

    The problem with Foxessa is social skills on both sides. She's making unsupported assertions and not telling us her area of expertise except by implication. We're saying "I don't believe that" instead of "where did you get this information?" It's clueless behavior on both sides.

    I haven't done as deep as dive as I could have, but slaves in the U.S. were definitely used as securities for loans. In some states this was backed by the government, and packages of slave-backed loans could certainly have been turned into other kinds of financial instruments and even sold abroad. So in the U.S. "slavery paid for industrialization" isn't an unreasonable position to take, though I'd like to see the actual path from "John the slave is turned into collateral" to "this particular money paid to build a factory."

    In the U.K. I think it's probably more like "Colonialism paid for industrialization" than "slavery paid for industrialization" but I'm not sure that's a terribly meaningful distinction depending on the date.

    The level/amount of denial about slavery is very, very deep. (Did you know slavery in the U.S. didn't end until 1942?)

    https://www.newsweek.com/book-american-slavery-continued-until-1941-93231

    949:

    to ensure that all the water goes through the turbines.

    Never seen such.

    950:

    +1

    In my working life the people who most need to be the smartest person in the room usually have some specific technical skillset that narrows their scope more than offers much in the way of insight on areas outside it. But dealing with them one at a time, letting them have their say and taking their contribution seriously on their one topic is usually helpful.

    But by golly yes, it can wear you down over time, too. It's probably the main reason I've been looking for a way out of that world. Along with the chest-thumping senior managers who like to make decisions based on how their intestines are dealing with their liquid breakfast, or some words that sound like that at least.

    951:

    Did you know slavery in the U.S. didn't end until 1942?

    If it ended in 1942 when did it restart? There's definitely slavery in the USA today, therefore if it stopped in the past there must have been a restart.

    Both in the technical "slavery is illegal without due process of law" flammery, and the brutal "illegal slavery still exists". The latter most notorious in the "white girls kept as sex slaves" moral panics that pass across the country periodically, but also widespread as one of the deliberate consequences the savage punishment of victims of human trafficking.

    Australia still has similar problems, and historically has been extremely problematic as far as legal approaches to slavery goes. Lots of "oh them, they're not slaves, they're {consults thesaurus} bonded workers". We have arguments today about whether guest workers who don't get paid are merely bad bargainers or victims of some kind of crime, and how we should deal with slaves happy workers who abscond.

    The UK is down to only a few thousand domestic slaves now, at least officially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Modern_slavery

    They also still allow marriage slavery provided it's a male being enslaved: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/slavery/modern/law.shtml (this is most likely due to undetectable levels of male enslavement... but then again, if you refuse to allow for the possibility you're not going to detect it, are you now?)

    952:

    I agree with Heteromeles: making arguments that run backwards in time, and responding to something other than what was written. (To which I would add: and apparently expecting other people also to respond thus.) But I will say no more, because I think the topic is liable to become invidious.

    953:

    Let me be a little clearer. The ongoing enslavement of Black Americans ended in 1942, not 1865 (after the treasonous slaveholder's rebellion.)

    954:

    The change in policy in 1942 that led to prosecutions was important, yes, and did reduce the amount of lawful slavery in the USA. But it did not end it any more than the 13th amendment did.

    Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime

    That "except" is really, really important, and is the basis for the prison labour system in the USA among other blights.

    The USA is very good at signing up to treaties then either not passing laws to implement them or simply ignoring them once implemented. The 2000-ish laws against more forms of slavery all carefully exclude the economically important forms of slavery still practiced. They're more about banning private enslavement than stopping the governments of the US from keeping slaves.

    955:

    "I'd think it would be more useful as "cubic kilometres or water falling a kilometre" or something similar."

    The conversion factor is conveniently close to one of those equals two and a third MT of bomb. Also somewhere around three and a bit Britain-days of consumption, apparently. Or ten Wastwaters coming down Scafell Pike. I suppose we could dam the bottom end of Wasdale if we really wanted to, to get the bottom tank capacity, but the top tank would be a bit of a sod.

    956:

    Totally off-topic (because someone might need it)...

    Question for the Brits in the audience. Presuming the Trusty Lizard becomes PM, do you think they will reintroduce the National Loaf to help with UK food prices?

    How about organizing the food supply so there's a fair share for all?.

    Would either measure help?

    957:

    I think you've just pointed at what we should put on the Boris Memorial Pedestal.

    Make it a decent height and put a reservoir on it! Genius! Much better than a bridge across the Irish Sea.

    958:

    On the energy production, I found out last week that there is a nice graph about Finnish energy production and consumption on the web. It's in Finnish only, but Google translate seems to work okay.

    What I find curious there is that at times wind power surpasses the nuclear power as the largest single component. I suspect this is because of market prices, but I don't really know. You can also see nicely if the new Olkiluoto reactor is on or off. It's being tested and not yet run at full power, but it's still a large chunk.

    Hydropower also fluctuates quite a bit. Solar is obviously quite a small component and will be more so during the winter, but I'm mostly interested in the interplay between nuclear and wind.

    959:

    Shortest version : "Seasonal storage is inherently 365 times more expensive than storage for handling daily variation, because that is how much less it gets used". That makes it pretty damn uneconomic.

    960:

    JBS / Troutwaxer & EVERYBODY ...
    If Foxessa is still reading this - please come back. Your other ( NYC & female ) insights are valuable.
    As for "Smartest person in the room" ... I think we've all done this, on both sides of the coin, as well as the really awkward ones where you have partial, but very good information, but have been blindsided, because there are other or connected aspects of $_Subject that you were unaware of, followed by the inevitable "oopsie!" moment.
    Contrariwise there is an entire group of "Smartest Arsehole(s) in the room" for whom I have nothing but contempt - MBA's - but we've already been round that one.

    Moz & others
    "Slavery today" - YES - far too much of it. Leaving the special "social" cases inside the US out of it, for the moment, there is one large state & several smaller ones that are openly practising Chattel Slavery, with virtually zero come-back from the rest of the planet: - The PRC ( Uighurs, Tibetans, etc ), Saudi & several of the "Gulf" states.
    Meanwhile idiot fuckwit supposed "academics" & ignorant bigoted immature students are going round attacking people who are 200+years dead, including some who opposed slavery ( Like "Mark Twain" ) - because, being dead, it's safe to attack them & look good.
    I might listen to their pathetic & spiteful whinings if & when they turn up outside the embassies of the countries listed above.
    The key word here is, of course: "hypocrisy"

    H
    I do hope not ...
    All my raw bread flour comes for farms in Oxfordshire - low food-miles, locally sourced & the best bread I've ever tasted, though, of course, that might be because I'm making it ...

    961:

    I assume you're using "economic" as a comparison, but perhaps you mean "the European economy could not afford to build enough storage, full stop"? If not, what are you comparing it to?

    The cost of BAU is effectively infinite. We can't build or buy a new habitable planet if we wreck this one. That's why I suggested nuclear power as the obvious alternative, because that's the normal suggestion. Hopefully you have comparative costing that come out so far in favour of nuclear that anything else is, as you say "daft". Or some other option... using less electricity, instead freezing in the dark (voluntary suicide so others can survive)?

    962:

    Nuclear + storage to make "It only runs at full throttle" not be a problem is workable. It might cost more in cash terms than renewables + cheap gas, but... well, that was always just "Kill the planet a bit slower".

    Equatorial solar + storage + HVDC also pencils out, but the politics are... generally a nightmare.

    963:

    There aren't enough places for reservoirs in the UK, or most other European countries. That's the killer.

    964:

    Er, New Zealand is just a TRIFLE more mountainous and less populated than even Scotland, let alone the UK.

    965:

    Seen on a strapline at Paddington station: Liz Trash expected to be next PM.

    966:

    I didn't think the more-or-less-United Kingdom was part of Europe? 😋

    Not being too familiar with Europe, I kind of assumed that the giant swathes of red "over 1000m" on maps like this indicated elevations high enough that 1000m of fall would be possible:

    http://transeuropalauf.de/tel_new/images/karten/strecke_europa.jpg

    There are various other little mountainous bits, but I suspect the Swiss would get a bit uppity if someone suggested making Lake Geneva 500m deeper to act as the upper reservoir... probably have more luck paying Norway to expand their hydro systems.

    I didn't talk about "individual countries within Europe" because I was thinking about political problems with, say, building a big dam in the low-population density bits of Spain to store energy that could be sold to Germany in the winter. If they were willing to talk to the crazy Australians who are trying to store seawater that might solve the problem of a lower reservoir entirely.

    967:

    Wind generation is wildly variable in output over time -- I've seen output levels here in the UK of 2% of dataplate (around 500MW total from 25GW of installed turbines) and I've also seen 12GW output (ca. 50% from the same set of wind turbines). The Gridwatch site has historical generating level data going back several years if you want to hack though it, remembering that the number of wind turbines in use has been increasing over the time period being reported.

    Nuclear power plants on the other hand tend to run at 100% of their rated output for weeks or months at the same level, years sometimes. Generally they're either on or off although some reactors do get "swung" to lower power levels sometimes for various reasons (the British AGRs are designed to be refuelled in operation, it was discovered after the first ones were built that they needed to be reduced to 70% output for this to happen due to vibration issues).

    968:

    So the crisis continues with Liz Truss as the PM. Expected, but, uh, the Tory press conference is painful to watch.

    969:

    It's still daft. The requirements for Europe as a whole are much larger than those for the UK, which themselves are are several ekajoules. And it's vastly simpler and less environmentally harmful to arrange deals with countries in north Africa for solar farms and run HVDC lines.

    970:

    My understanding is that the iron production in 1700 had reached the limit of the wood supply; that could easily have been doubled, perhaps tripled, within a couple of decades, but no more than that.

    Worse than that. According to E. A. Wrigley (Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England, p54-55), by 1700 Britain produced between 2.5 and 3 million tons of coal – about 80% of the world's total output – which would of course have been on top of the wood supply.

    To replace that coal with wood, he estimates about 1 acre of woodland would sustainably produce 2 tons of dry wood, which is equivalent to 1 ton of coal. 3 million acres is just a bit smaller than Yorkshire (3.67m acres) in extra woodland to meet the UK's heating requirements (steel production and all) at this early date.

    Incidentally, he estimates that by 1820 the UK would have required an extra 15 million acres of woodland to meet its needs without coal, which is the equivalent of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Devon, Norfolk, Northumberland, Somerset, Hampshire, Essex, Lancashire, Kent and Dorset.

    971:

    On the main topic, Liz Truss has just won the leadership contest and is about to be sworn in as the British prime minister. Time will shortly tell just how much of her posturing will translate into the government's agenda. Optimistically, having someone at the helm is better than no one, and she might be able to provide some immediate financial relief for British households (which will, at least, defer the other mounting crises for a little while).

    Pessimistically, she'll be paralyzed by a divided party, made into a scapegoat, and then unceremoniously booted in 12 months having achieved nothing except paving the way for round 2 of the Boris show. Any more realistic predictions on offer?

    972:

    New Zealand is just a TRIFLE more mountainous and less populated than even Scotland, let alone the UK.

    But it does tend to shimmy and shake. Not always in places where expected.

    And not everyone things such ground is a great place to dam up vast quantities of water. Especially those downstream.

    Oh, and that much water can, at times, trigger the shaking.

    973:

    to arrange deals with countries in north Africa for solar farms and run HVDC lines.

    Europe generally had a deal with Russia for cheap gas. Deals can be abrogated. For other historical examples see Nasser in Egypt, the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, Qadaffi in Libya etc.

    Energy security within state borders is turning out to actually have a monetary value in itself. Lots and lots of renewables are one way to go like Norway, another is to have gas underfoot (the Netherlands), coal (Green Germany) or lots of nuclear power plants like France. Britain had deals for endless supplies of cheap gas instead. Britain is fucked.

    974:

    I specifically said iron production; coal was used extensively for heating in 1700, but not much for iron (coke didn't really start to be used until later). As I said above, no way would have it supported even the iron production of 1800.

    What would have happened without coal is anyone's guess. The scientific advances would have happened, anyway, and some engineering ones (not necessarily the ones that we saw).

    975:

    Deals can be abrogated.

    Ahem.

    Unexpected maintenance.

    976:

    In theory, we don't HAVE to fuck it up. Waging war on Russia while expecting them to keep to their favourable deal for gas was just plain silly! Yes, of course, there are problems, but contracts that favour both sides are the most likely to be kept, and north African ones could be like that. Also, one of the ways you get security (as with investments, agriculture etc.) is to spread your risks - e.g. with multiple countries, separately. It's not without problems, but IS a plausible solution to our seasonal deficiency.

    Yes, the UK is fucked, but most of the reason for that is that the sheeple have allowed the demagogocracy to appoint a completely fuck-awful series of governments, with a slightly wobbly descent in quality from Wilson on, and no bottom in sight. No, hippoptolemy (#972), that's the OPTIMISTIC scenario. I can think of MUCH worse candidates that are plausible as Trash's successor.

    977:

    As noted Ms Hernia-support is now ( presumabky ) PM. The interesting bit is to see what collection of incompetents, chancers, crooks & outright liars she will pick for her Cabinet.
    The next couple of days will tell. ....

    hippoptolemy
    Time will shortly tell just how much of her posturing will translate into the government's agenda. - Far too much of it, is the likely prediction.
    On her past record, she is only marginally less damaging than the ghastly Chris Grayling for fucking it up.

    978:

    Re: 'They're more about banning private enslavement than stopping the governments of the US from keeping slaves.'

    Disagree - There's been an increase in private for-profit prisons. Most US prisons are for-profits. That's how the US gov't has been able to show clean hands. Same PR strategy as GuatBay (Cuba) re: torture.

    BTW - there's even a special US gov't dept whose specific job is to interface between (gov't) prisons and clients ... for the express purpose of making a profit for the gov't/prison and their fairly long list of clients.

    Good summary with maps, pics and summaries below:

    'American prison labor camps'

    https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/0c81132a46c64d3ba412b588c21cd578

    979:

    930 - As indeed, does Scotland, and I think Norway does too. Norsk Staal also uses hydro power to make iron and steel.

    932 - I'll accept that this was how pump storage hydro was/is operated in Australia. In Scotland, the PS and some coal stations were literally owned by the same organisation.

    941 - Your hotlink is borked, neither producing a tool tip nor an open dialogue.

    963 - But all we have to do is build a global superconnector. We know this because the Australians say so! ;-)

    969 - Painful to hear on the radio too.

    972 - I've heard rumours of the Con Party doing a vote of no confidence in Liz 2x4 in order to replace her with Bozo the clown between now and Christmas 2022.

    980:

    I specifically said iron production; coal was used extensively for heating in 1700, but not much for iron (coke didn't really start to be used until later). As I said above, no way would have it supported even the iron production of 1800.

    What would have happened without coal is anyone's guess. The scientific advances would have happened, anyway, and some engineering ones (not necessarily the ones that we saw).

    But without coal production, all the charcoal from a Yorkshire-sized area of woodland would have needed to be turned over to general heating by 1700. It seems to me that would have throttled the iron industry in the crib, unless a quarter of the country could have been turned over to extra woodland by 1800 in order to meet everyone's needs. But this, in turn, would have constrained the food supply and limited the population – with knock-on effects in the size of the labour force and consumer demand for industrial goods.

    That energy surplus for iron production had to come from somewhere, and if coal wasn't going to make up the difference then what would have?

    981:

    You are assuming the increase in demand as given; that is not so. Without coal, we would not have had huge cities - London had a population of c. 600,000 in 1700, and even that would probably not have been feasible without coal, but nowhere else even reached 100,000. So we probably wouldn't have had any city larger than 100,000; that would have made us much more like most of the rest of Europe (France was similar to us, but exceptional). That would definitely have slowed the industrialisation, considerably, and excluded a lot of the developments that happened. Whether we would have had the same population increase in the 18th century, I can't say, but I very much doubt it.

    When I said wildly different, I meant WILDLY different. For example, no railways, few (if any) steamships, few (if any) motor vehicles, much less dependence on metals (iron in 1700 was expensive (*), and would have remained so). We MIGHT have gone to a high-energy economy when we discovered oil, but might have built most of the infrastructure for a low-energy one by then. We might even have gone straight from water power to hydroelectric both of which would have meant that power was more readily available in the west and north, which would have reversed the demographic shift of the 19th and 20th centuries. And I don't think that we would have had the same empire.

    (*) c. 2 weeks' pay for an agricultural worker for a hundredweight of bar iron.

    982:

    On the 'why Britain had the industrial revolution first' tack, I think an underlooked aspect is that it's geographically small. That's not enough, obviously, by itself, but it means that innovation could travel faster, so in a wealthy, resource rich country, it probably was a factor why it happened there first.

    (I think it would have happened elsewhere, regardless, and that there are probably an infinite number of reasons why it happened to be Britain, but geography was probably significant)

    983:

    Re: '... only had a 5% improvement, it stuck in my mind as it seemed a bit useless.'

    For first-past-the-post elections, definitely not 'useless'. In the 2020 Senate race, the margin was under 5% in 4 States. Imagine how much productive policy could have been enacted in those two (wasted) years if voters had been inoculated against hate-filled polarizing BS/rhetoric.

    Start the inoculation process now so that by the time kids become voters they'll be better able to sort data from manipulation.

    Not so sure how effective this technique might be for older voters esp. those whose self-identities are almost completely defined by a particular affiliation - political, religious, profession, etc.

    984:

    I'd like to echo Greg here. If Foxessa is reading this, please come back. Some of us value your contributions, even if we don't all respond. However, please also see below.

    I'm no historian. Not even an armchair historian. My personal history interests coverge the second world war, cold war and beyond. My reading of this history began in the late 70s and is totally autodidactic. For example, last year I read a biography of Ursula Graham Bower and a book about the women at Bletchly Park. So far this year I've read biographies of Gordon Welchman and John von Neumann. My future reading list includes two books by three of the women covered in the Bletchly book (two were sisters) and yet another book about intelligence gathering. Yes, I really do love that subject.

    None of this makes me a historian. So I'll value contributions by anyone who is. However, I respect your choice, so my plea is a gentle one.

    Even at its best, I think this blog can be a bearpit. I'm a long-time reader, but only recently began posting here. As noted here already, we're mostly techies. We're used to other techies kicking our tires. Actually, techie forums can be much worse, as if random strangers were napalming your puppy. Without any moderation this can quickly descend into a flamewar. I can only enjoy reading this blog because that never happens here. However, a techie may still be suprised and hurt. I can only recommend growing a very thick skin, or some kind of an "asbestos suit" equivalent.

    Frankly, I find it hard to imagine why a non-techie would make that effort, so I applaud you for staying so long, and respect you for leaving when it became intolerable.

    So maybe this is my thanks and farewell to you, whether you read it or not.

    985:

    In case anyone is interested, I seem to have reinvented Joel Mokyr's theory; it always pleases me when I discover such things, because it proves I am not being stupid. Wrong, perhaps, but not stupid. Anyway, apparently some of his books seem to explain 'why Britain?' in terms of culture and politics, and have been well reviewed - they look interesting, if heavy going.

    986:

    The US policy of maintaining a prison-industrial system is definitely ugly. What's worth considering is that it's an extension of "convict leasing" plus "the company store" and affects - at the very least - hundred of thousands of people who shouldn't be in jail at all (either due to "drug crime" or racist policing/justice system.)

    987:

    "I'll accept that this was how pump storage hydro was/is operated in Australia. In Scotland, the PS and some coal stations were literally owned by the same organisation."

    As was also true south of the border, until the stupid fucking government in London insisted on replacing that system of organisation with a stupid fucking broken-by-design system that encourages groups of rich people to bodge and neglect the actual supply system to avoid spending money, then use the deficiencies as an excuse to skin everyone raw when it starts to break.

    Several people have pointed out that storage, which is required to overcome the inevitable intermittency of renewable sources, doesn't get built for a fucking stupid reason that derives its validity entirely from the existence of that broken system of organisation. The same apparently applies to connecting renewable sources into the supply system in the first place. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-62687064 Plaid Cymru are saying "The system should be changed so that a statutory obligation is placed on the National Grid to deliver the grid capacity the Welsh government requires in order to deliver its policy objectives and support the agricultural, industrial and renewable energy industries", or in other words "make them bloody well fix it already". Ofgem on the other hand is coming out with this sort of bollocks: "We are consulting on proposals to alter existing price controls to empower transmission network companies", which being translated signifies "spending money on thinking about thinking about how we can turn it into an opportunity for rich people to rip Wales off".

    Your prime minister, according to Charlie, now wants to unfuck it. We've just got yet another fucking idiot for whom unfucking it is too terrible an idea even to consider.

    One thing our fucking idiots seem particularly fond of doing is introducing highly direct dependencies on other countries which weren't there before, then throwing shit in their faces. We have this both in the case of the country we suddenly started getting a lot of the raw fuel from, and that of the countries we flogged large parts of the electricity system to.

    Charlie says "Small businesses are already folding as their energy contracts raise prices by 400-1000% for the next year: there are worries about care homes being unable to keep their residents warm. 8% of businesses already report that price increases to date threaten their viability, but worse is to come. There is a forecast risk of unscheduled, protracted, rolling black-outs in midwinter. The government's own forecasts of a "reasonable worst case" (which include some scheduled blackouts) still rely on the UK importing electricity via the grid interconnectors from France, the Netherlands, and Belgium - but those nations are having their own energy problems."

    Forgive me for making probably the most boring post in the thread, relating particularly to that last sentence. I got the source figures from nationalgrideso.com by the tedious process of individually downloading a bunch of single-page PDFs, one per month, and copying the figures out by hand, so it was boring for me too. The formatting is fucked because the blog doesn't permit HTML table tags, but it should come right if you copy and paste it and then apply s/ \+/\t/g .

    The figures are for input and output via those interconnectors, and total demand, in GWh, from March 2021 to July 2022. Before then they seem to have changed their minds about exactly what to report every couple of months. The "demand" figures look funny but they're less important. August 2022 isn't up yet.

    Month In Out Demand Out-In 100*(Out-In)/Demand
    M 2475 190 24000 -2285 -9.52
    A 1888 196 22000 -1692 -7.69
    M 4935 390 22000 -4545 -20.65
    J 5483 159 20000 -5324 -26.62
    J 6367 482 21000 -5885 -28.02
    A 6326 813 21000 -5513 -26.25
    S 4485 146 21000 -4339 -20.66
    O 4516 443 23000 -4073 -17.70
    N 3754 1205 25000 -2549 -10.19
    D 4258 1138 25000 -3120 -12.48
    J 4304 1066 27000 -3238 -11.99
    F 4700 643 23000 -4057 -17.63
    M 4519 801 25000 -3718 -14.87
    A 2371 2039 23000 -332 -1.44
    M 1119 3837 23000 2718 11.81
    J 1431 4983 22000 3552 16.14
    J 2123 5091 23000 2968 12.90

    While Britain has been "having an energy crisis", the interconnectors have suddenly and dramatically changed from taking in a lot more than they send out, to sending out a lot more than they take in. AFAIK this has never been the case before. For what it's worth over only one cycle, it also seems to have happened at the point when last year the flow in most exceeded the flow out, both absolutely and as a percentage of demand.

    This does not bode well for the government's "reasonable worst case" and its reliance on those interconnectors bringing juice in. It looks far more to me as if the countries on the other end, who also now own large chunks of our own system and who we have spent the last several years pissing off as much as possible, have already decided to use them to take it out.

    It would be kind of hard for the government to say "oi, you can't do that" when the other end can simply come back with "why not? it's ours". But they don't seem to want to even try anyway, instead they're encouraging people to do it even more, if the web pages I happened across the other day is anything to go by, eg: http://www.great.gov.uk/export-opportunities/opportunities/electricity-heat-solar-and-nuclear-power-10708

    There are indications that something similar is also happening with gas, although it's difficult to divine exactly what, since nearly all the figures are talking about "value" rather than something useful like energy content or mass of substance (also the proliferation of bloody useless websites that don't bloody work, and the news seeming to have largely ignored it apart from the Times and the Torygraph). We seem to be importing large quantities of liquid methane from the US and then punting it straight back out again, and this has apparently gone through the roof, although it's probably only the "value" that has gone through the roof while the actual quantities haven't changed much. Apparently also oddities of infrastructure and lack of storage are involved, but gas infrastructure is not an area I know a useful amount about. I've also found hints of similar shenanigans with oil. But it does look very much as if "Britain is having an energy crisis" isn't a matter of the energy not being there, but of us not being allowed to use it.

    988:

    On the subject of nuclear, let me point something out. If you wish to build a nuke plant, you can expect a decade of lawsuits before you start, plus further lawsuits every time someone makes a mistake. Then you have to build your plant, which is a long-and-costly process, and the final result, if you're lucky, will last maybe fifty years without expensive (and lawsuit-filled) maintenance. The there's the question of dealing with radioactive waste or dealing with some kind of disaster - a melt-down or other radiation leak.

    To say the least, all this is expensive and unpleasant.

    Or you can build a huge solar-farm (in someone else's country if you have to) plus a collection of really big batteries, and run a very long cable if necessary. Now imagine that you're going to spend exactly as much on this solar plant as you'd spend shepherding a nuke plant through the build process - that's a very big solar plant indeed, and instead of only producing power after being turned on at the end of a very long, expensive process - taking maybe twenty years in all - the solar plant gets "turned on" the second the first solar panel (or other solar widget) is connected to the grid.

    The economics of the nuke plant approach is dismal. The economics of the solar plant sound pretty good.

    990:

    »If you wish to build a nuke plant, […]«

    Do not overlook that electricity producing nuclear rectors have a catastrophic (as in Chernobyl & Fukushima) failure-rate over 1%, and slightly higher disabling (as in TMI) accident rate.

    The write-off of the TMI reactor was an ah-ha-moment for investors and why all plants built since then have needed government guaranteed loans.

    991:

    The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

    It's not just the billionaire tech-bros. This is is the "conservative" mindset both here in the U.S. and in the U.K..

    They want to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions and screw the rest of us. They apparently cannot understand that they won't survive an apocalypse unless the rest of society survives.

    But the only way to survive the coming techno-apocalypse is to build a society that doesn't end with a techno-apocalypse.

    992:

    "But the only way to survive the coming techno-apocalypse is to build a society that doesn't end with a techno-apocalypse."

    Exactly. Where you gonna get parts for your force-field?

    994:

    EC
    Thanks for that - a brilliant quote, which I can testify to the truth of ...
    Twenty five years ago, Ireland was poorer, more corrupt and more in thrall to reactionary nationalism than Britain was. Now, on all three counts, the reality is reversed.

    995:

    But the only way to survive the coming techno-apocalypse is to build a society that doesn't end with a techno-apocalypse.

    Kind of. The problem is the collapse will likely last for generations (each generation smaller than the last, until there's enough food and water for everyone), so luck will play a major role in determining who makes it. So will skills, of course, but the people who are likely to survive started preparing and teaching their kids decades ago (speaking from a few chance encounters with them)*.

    Anyway, the TechBro extremism on display in the article is an extreme version of two far more widespread and toxic beliefs, IMHO.

    The first is "climate change is a crisis for the poor. The well-off will be able to cope." This is sort-of true at best in the short run, and I really think that it really means "I don't fracking want to deal with it!" And/or "I got mine, frack all y'all"

    And, even more widespread at the moment "We've got to get back to normal!" which has been a mantra for many of my friends and acquaintances this year. I've so far bitten my tongue, because I know the fury that will erupt when I point out that American Normal behavior's pretty much what got us into this mess in the first place. The only River that's running full to its banks this year is Denial.

    *I figure that as an aging environmentalist, my job isn't to survive, it's to help as many other species survive me as possible. Silly thing to do, perhaps, but that's where I am.

    996:

    “ How can we seperate policy-making from public debate, particularly in a mass-media world?”

    The ends of policy making have to be subject to public debate or you don’t have a democrats.

    It’s when the details of policy get mixed with individuals’ struggles for power that you get deliberate poisoning of public debate.

    You can try to mitigate that by using “Indirect democracy”; institutions like a professional civil service, independent public journalism, and the UK’s House of Lords …all institutions currently being systematically destroyed.

    997:

    And apparently the French are calling her the Iron Weathercock :-)

    998:

    And apparently the French are calling her the Iron Weathercock :-)

    I like it! PM Girouette has a certain swing to it.

    999:

    Ok, that does look rather dumb taken out of context. ;)

    So how do we align public debate with reality? Right now it seems driven by whatever trollbots are promoting on social media networks, amplified by the algorithms used by those networks to promote "engagement", and further serving the interests of whoever runs the most trollbots. Any suggestions?

    1000:

    it's vastly simpler and less environmentally harmful to arrange deals with countries in north Africa

    I think that's the daft bit. There's fuck all sign that anyone is trying to do that so I'm left thinking it fall under "politically impossible". Lots of engineers drawing pretty pictures, even a few tiny initial steps, but no sign of the political will to say "why hello there valued neighbour, we'd like to talk to you about reparations in the form of great big solar farms providing your people with rental income and also electricity via a grid we would like to help you build, and a surplus that will allow you to sell electricity to others".

    1001:

    increase in private for-profit prisons

    My understanding is that at least in theory the enslaving is still done by the government, the private slave-holders are not the owners of record. There isn't a private enslaving via the arrest-trial-conviction-sentence side... yet. Just private fines leading to public convictions and sentences. I hesitate to say "trial" since in many cases it's more like "ignorant defendant coerced into pleading guilty" (or worse, "informed defendant aware they cannot afford a defense") than anything most people would consider a trial.

    1002:

    Not necessarily dumb, we may be reaching the limits of democracy’s ability to deal with complexity and long term threats. And we don’t know of any alternatives that aren’t worse.

    1003:

    Bien sur. I can work with that.

    1004:

    As Wellington is officially a windy city, how come the place isn't surrounded by wind farms?

    1005:

    My personal history interests coverge the second world war, cold war and beyond. My reading of this history began in the late 70s and is totally autodidactic. For example, last year I read a biography of Ursula Graham Bower and a book about the women at Bletchly Park.

    You might enjoy A Game of Birds and Wolves.

    By 1941, Winston Churchill had come to believe that the outcome of World War II rested on the battle for the Atlantic. A grand strategy game was devised by Captain Gilbert Roberts and a group of ten Wrens (members of the Women's Royal Naval Service) assigned to his team in an attempt to reveal the tactics behind the vicious success of the German U-boats. Played on a linoleum floor divided into painted squares, it required model ships to be moved across a make-believe ocean in a manner reminiscent of the childhood game, Battleship. Through play, the designers developed "Operation Raspberry," a counter-maneuver that helped turn the tide of World War II.

    Combining vibrant novelistic storytelling with extensive research, interviews, and previously unpublished accounts, Simon Parkin describes for the first time the role that women played in developing the Allied strategy that, in the words of one admiral, "contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of Germany." Rich with unforgettable cinematic detail and larger-than-life characters, A Game of Birds and Wolves is a heart-wrenching tale of ingenuity, dedication, perseverance, and love, bringing to life the imagination and sacrifice required to defeat the Nazis at sea.

    https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/simon-parkin/a-game-of-birds-and-wolves/9780316492089/

    1006:

    Is there any way to change password here? I clicked "Forgot password" link, and it said that a password reset email has been sent to my email address, but it never arrived. Yes, I did check Spam folder.

    1007:

    Here's a grim possiblity: there may be no system of government that can deal with the complexity of this problem. We may have reached the limits of what the human brain can cope with.

    BTW, the World Population Clock says we have 7.97 billion humans on this planet. That may be a lot of brains struggling to cope with reality.

    Sometimes I think this crisis began around a century ago. Other times I think it may be more like 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and we only began to be aware of it a century ago. Maybe we only started to find the mathematical language to talk about the problem during the last century. If that's true, we've not yet found the language for a solution. Worse yet, there might not be time to apply that solution if/when we find it.

    I have more even more grim thoughts, but we have enough in this thread already. Maybe if/when we run short I might share them. ;)

    1008:

    H
    "We've got to get back to normal!"
    You CANNOT STEP INTO THE SAME RIVER TWICE ... hell, you can't even step into the same pond twice, because it's a different pond & a different "you" ...
    But the proportion of people who realise this & why it is so, very small indeed......
    Hint: I'm told that one of the major problems of the 1920's was that a lot of people wanted to "go back to normal" meaning the world of 1913-14 .... that had vanished forever, but simply even refused to recognise that reality.

    EC
    Iron Weathercock - indeed, what name are we going to settle on, because there are already far too many, all derogatory, nyms for Ms Support, um, err ...

    1009:

    RE: 'My understanding is that at least in theory the enslaving is still done by the government, the private slave-holders are not the owners of record.'

    Just great - the land of the free has a monopoly on the rent-a-slave industry!

    The next chapter in dehumanization of a population segment came when Ronnie Raygun became POTUS and the US gov't shut down psychiatric long-term care institutions. The result was that many if not most of the former patients ended up on the streets. Of these, a good portion ended up with drug/alcohol problems or committed petty theft, public nuisance, etc. and were subsequently jailed.

    1010:

    Yes, indeed! Thanks.

    Were they the group that worked out how the U-boats were evading depth charges? I read about them sometime in the last year, I think, probably following a link from a post on this blog.

    1011:

    Ah, yes, the famed nuthouse-to-prison swap. Some people need to be institutionalised, and a good proportion of those realise it. That 'deinstitutionalisation' fad swept the western world and AFAIK few countries have come up with a better solution. Most do at least realise that prisons aren't better than mental hospitals for mentally ill people, they just don't have an acceptable alternative now that mental hospitals have such a bad rep.

    I had a flatmate for a while who worked as a carer in "community housing", mostly with intellectually disadvantaged people (not Trump supporters, different definition). One of their explicit goals was keeping their charges out of prison, which led to a lot of pressure for staff to push various legal boundaries. Very much "you risk prison because the charge will definitely go to prison if you don't" when it comes to stuff like clients {cough} who like to escape and visit playgrounds so they can play with children. 30 year olds just can't do that, sorry. But technically physical restraint can't be used until after they actually try to leave. It's a bit of a mess. Not helped by the decision not to permit long-term relationships to develop between staff and clients. That's done in the name of "free markets" but it has exactly the same result, for the same reasons, as when teachers used to be limited to two years in a given aboriginal community (which was explicitly done to prevent them forming ties).

    1012:

    "As Wellington is officially a windy city, how come the place isn't surrounded by wind farms?"

    Presuming that you are talking about my home city, We do have them, and that's not the only one.

    It does take time to get them planned, consented, and built, so there could be more later.

    And Palmerston North is even better than Wellington, because the wind is more consistent, so they have them too.

    JHomes

    1013:

    And here was me thinking that the answer was "Wellington is surrounded by sea, and not the polite sort". Cook Strait is a bit notorious for being a hole in a dam across the roaring forties. Yes, occasionally it's flat enough that people have water skied across it. Other times quite large ships decide not to enter it.

    On that note, Out There Learning has no less than four videos about the exciting rocks around Wellington, with many mentions of faults, quakes and other mobile geology. Which leads to fun abstracts like "continued instantaneous uplift of the coast has meant they are unable to reach an equilibrium state, whereby the effectiveness of wave processes in removing material is reduced by platform extension. ". I laugh reading that because this is one of the rare times when a geological instant is contemporaneous with common parlance.

    1014:

    Just great - the land of the free has a monopoly on the rent-a-slave industry!

    Um, no, not quite.

    It might be worth digging out Resendez' The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America.

    Resendez documents how the Spanish (and Mexicans, and New Mexicans, and some tribes) enslaved Indians. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, and apparently there was another underground railroad that ran south through Texas across the Rio Grande, although for some reason (cough, Texas, cough) it's not as well documented by historians as the Northern railroad.

    Problem is, especially in the area that Mexico ceded to become the American Southwest, the fact that slavery was officially illegal meant different things depending on where, and who, one was. Were peons and servants slaves? Especially when they've been baptized and given the family surname? It depended on who was enforcing the law.

    One takeaway lesson for me was that, in the late 1860s after the Civil War, Americans really debated how to treat non-whites (and also non-males). There was a point when freedom was really in the air, before people systematically hunted it down and strangled it again. Radical Republicans pushed the idea that all people were created equal, no matter skin color or sex. Like modern Progressives, they also clunked at the polls, and for similar reasons (there's a big warning here. It's a recurrent problem).

    Unfortunately, others apparently took what was happening in the Comancheria and adjacent New Mexico and Arizona as part of a playbook for how to make people unfree without violating the US Constitution. This was one of the strands that went into Jim Crow and the nascent prison-industrial complex. It also aided the US Congress in the mid-1870s when they were looking for justifications to ignore Indian treaties en masse and clear the West for homesteading and exploitation.

    Obviously I'm not a historian. I'm just trying to figure out a semi-plausible alt-history where American racism got shredded in the late 19th Century (e.g. "Reconstruction worked."). Part of that is reading up on what went so horribly wrong after 1865. Turns out that the erection of Jim Crow chronologically paralleled the Indian genocides and the failure of women's suffrage. Part of what provided ideological support for these atrocities was bigoted intellectuals looking at what had been going on in areas that Mexico had ceded to the US.

    Again, I don't blame Mexico for American failings. This seems to be another example of The Street finding its own uses for things, even the intellectual equivalent of toxic waste.

    It's also a history that is very far from dead.

    1015:

    "Cook Strait is a bit notorious for being a hole in a dam across the roaring forties."

    It's also notorious for being a short stretch of water, with large bodies of water at each end, and the tides are about ten hours out of phase at each end so that when one end is at high tide, the other is not far off low tide. This has the effects you can imagine.

    JHomes

    1016:

    _ I'm left thinking it fall under "politically impossible"._

    The problem is that it would require dealing with others in good faith, and that's clearly not, indeed could be seen as anathema to, the British Way. Or the late-capitalist way in general I guess, although you still see some win-win thinking from some quarters of neoliberalism.

    1017:

    By coincidence I just heard "Mandate" by Eye featuring the great John Howard quote "obviously I'm in a state of delusion".

    I suspect that's an edit but it's still a marvellous quote. Any prime minister able to recognise the source of their problems can't be all bad. Admittedly Howard had a damn good go at it.

    1018:

    On a serious note...

    I, for one, would be perfectly happy to donate to a kickstarter or similar effort to cover operating expenses for UK creatives struggling with operational expenses under the New Authorities.

    Anyone else interested?

    1019:

    Re: 'Unfortunately, others apparently took what was happening in the Comancheria and adjacent New Mexico and Arizona as part of a playbook for how to make people unfree without violating the US Constitution.'

    Thanks for the suggestion (Resendez' The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America). When I looked it up I saw that it had won The Bancroft Prize - a major American History book award. Will check if my library has a copy.

    https://library.columbia.edu/about/awards/bancroft/previous_awards.html

    1020:

    Moz wrote on September 5, 2022 at 03:32 in #955:

    There's definitely slavery in the USA today, therefore if it stopped in the past there must have been a restart.

    It's still in the Florida county I grew up in:

    https://ciw-online.org/blog/2021/10/latest-slavery-indictments-expose-exploitive-nature-of-h-2a-guestworker-program/

    If you are opposed to slavery, don't eat at/from Wendy's:

    https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2022/04/03/farm-workers-march-palm-beach-protest-wendys-worker-exploitation/7257624001/

    Even my very blue new state of residence has not yet made it unconstitutional:

    https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2022/09/01/yes-slavery-is-on-the-ballot-in-oregon-and-four-other-states/

    And involuntary servitude will still be legal when the subject's been convicted. Land of the free.

    1021:

    Re: 'Twitter rant] 'And endure higher temperatures and shortages of drinking water and rising prices for food.'

    A suggestion:

    For each point you want to communicate include verifiable data about some everyday/mundane example that ordinary people can relate to, e.g., average water consumption per person ...

    (a) must have's: drinking water, water for cooking, bath/shower, laundry, misc. household cleaning;

    (b) nice-to-have's: lawn/ornamental* garden watering, swimming pool/spa/hot tub, hosing down car, water slide, etc.

    Unfortunately I didn't keep it - but I saw a tweet in the past week or so from one of Bernie Sander's people using the above approach and thought it very easy to understand, therefore effective. It was a comparison of student loans in the 1970s vs. now showing average monthly wage, average rent, average annual (State) college tuition, average price of a house, etc. Guess what hardly increased between then and now? The average monthly wage!

    *Ornamental - because most USians do not have a (productive) veg garden in their backyards.

    1022:

    Land of the free.

    Or at least very reasonably priced?

    Meanwhile The Guardian is having conniptions about what the newest Dear Leader might do.

    however valiantly she now tries to rewrite history, the fact remains that she horribly misjudged the cost of living emergency at first, insisting it could be handled merely with tax cuts and scrapping the green levy on fuel bills. Thankfully she now seems to have been persuaded that a much bigger and more direct intervention will be needed, and if the mooted £100bn plan includes swallowing her pride and adopting Labour’s popular strategy of freezing fuel bills, then millions will heave a sigh of understandable relief. By doing so she may not only save the poorest from destitution this winter, but help build the confidence and certainty needed to halt an otherwise catastrophic spiral.

    the notorious political tract that Truss and Kwarteng co-authored with Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Chris Skidmore, Britannia Unchained, published in 2012. ... Britannia Unchained owes far more to the nationalistic, anti-state philosophy of the Tory Eurosceptics than to the dour technocracy of the Cameron administration. A weird book, the research for which consists largely of anecdotes gleaned from internet sources and Daily Mail articles, it zigzags between deep cultural pessimism and delusional economic optimism.

    Whatever you think about the coming Truss prime ministership, whether it will be instant chaos or more drawn-out chaos, whether she will have time to come after the net zero target or will be too busy fighting woke warriors, whether she will let people starve in the streets or filch just enough Labour policy to avert that, this does not have the whiff of a long term in office.

    1024:

    1009 - Well, I can work with "Iron Weathercock"; It neatly combines her daily policy themes, and the Margaret Hilda Roberts cosplayer thing.

    1016 - This would also mean that there is a period about mid tide when the tidal rise is about even through Cook Strait.

    1020 - Well, there the total lack of paragraphing producing the unreadable wall of text effect...

    1023 Para 6 - Unable to find a Wikipedia entry on "Bernie Sander"; the closest I can come is Bernie Sanders

    1025:

    Bernie Sanders

    That's him. Assuming he's not quoting a New England wood worker.

    1026:

    Eh? If you can point to ANY energy scheme that has ANY political will in the UK and is not either either environmentally harmful or just pushing expenditure into the far future, please enlighten us who live here. The nights are closing in ....

    1027:

    Paragraphs. Dear god, split into paragraphs. That's completely unreadable as is.

    The rest of my advice may not be so helpful, because it starts with "and skip the Twitter thing", so I won't waste your time with anything further.

    1028:

    Haven't the Cons been busy cancelling solar farms in England? A quick search for "cancelling solar farms in England" suggests one of your major growth industries is opposition to solar farms (and renewables in general).

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-60878403

    1029:

    Howard NYC
    UH? SPLIT IT into paragraphs - it's unreadable.

    kiloseven
    I really, really don't "get" the US attitude that after your prison sentence is over ... it isn't .... Especially if you have committed a "felony" - which can be quite minor - as well as the money-extraction system deliberately designed (?) to make sure voters are suppressed. US exceptionalism, again?

    Moz
    More drawn-ouit total chaos, so it will have to get REALLY BAD before anyone notices - nah, people will starve in the street & commit suicide.
    Given her Grayling-like ability to do it wrong, she'll concentrate on "woke" to feed red meat to the brain-dead, until it's far too late.

    EC
    Precisely - we desperately need Nuclear Power, but it takes 10 years, starting, right now, even without the fake greenies. I repeat: Expensive power is still cheaper than "No power"

    1030:

    Oh yes, wonderful snark from the Beeb:
    "Congratulations to Liz Truss, our new Prim Minister, generously donated to our Democracy-loving nation, by the by the Conservative party membership."

    1031:

    The hair signing of on Sizewell C on the way out the door is.. A sort of political will.

    The ten years thing is.. mostly propaganda. From r/dataisbeautiful Mode is five years, and this goes for modern plants too: https://i.redd.it/djub5auudfj91.png Of course, this is actual construction, so how long it takes parliament to sign on the dotted line...

    1032:

    https://www.theshovel.com.au/2022/09/06/liz-truss-not-quite-as-sht-as-boris/

    In a speech to mildly excited supporters, new PM Liz Truss vowed to continue to oversee the rapid disintegration of Britain’s economy, but with a slightly more serious hairdo.

    “I will continue to dismantle the NHS, but I’ll do it with all of the buttons on my shirt done up in the correct order,” she said.

    “Without the distraction of having to keep track of seventeen children across eight families, I will be able to give my full attention to doing nothing about inflation and rising energy prices.

    “And when it comes time to implement tax cuts that will widen inequality, you can rest assured that I will do it without reciting a quote from ancient Greek literature”.

    1033:

    "there is a period about mid tide when the tidal rise is about even through Cook Strait."

    Yes. Of course, it does not last for very long.

    JHomes

    1034:

    If a future gummint doesn't cancel it or, more likely, prevaricate until the site has been taken over by the North Sea.

    1035:

    Describing that as an energy scheme is pushing it, and describing it as one that is not environmentally harmful is pushing it harder. You seem to have got things upside down - it's not often I see that Antipodean joke enacted for real!

    1036:

    Given that we are importing an increasing amount of gas from the USA, this looks like a way to launder fracking gas into the EU. Or perhaps I am too cynical ....

    1037:

    From here (Southern Europe) article is paywalled. But from what I've read in the past few years, I would have thought that Cameron would be the genius and Johnson the sincere.

    1038:

    I really, really don't "get" the US attitude that after your prison sentence is over ... it isn't .... Especially if you have committed a "felony" - which can be quite minor - as well as the money-extraction system deliberately designed (?) to make sure voters are suppressed. US exceptionalism, again?

    You are not really talking about reality. And to be clear I don't like the reality.

    Most prison sentences in the US are not completed in jail/prison. If you behave you get out early many times but are on "parole" until your full sentence is over. While on "parole" you must keep yourself out of trouble and check in with the authorities on a regular basis. So even if released, yes, you are still serving time. Just outside of jail. But it is time you were originally sentenced to serve.

    As to court costs and fines. This is a real mess. And I think your comment is really about Florida and how the legislature didn't like the amendment that passed with a clear majority to the state constitution. So they passed some messy enabling legislation where they said all costs and fines related to a conviction must be paid before voting. But there is no way in the state of Florida where someone released from prison can find out just what they owe without contacting every single jurisdiction that was involved in the entire legal process.

    Catch-22

    1039:

    Were they the group that worked out how the U-boats were evading depth charges?

    Maybe? (Honestly can't remember — I read the book last winter and the details have gone.)

    They were the group that showed that the Navy's anti-submarine tactic wasn't working, and found one that actually did work. Got very little credit because Wrens, despite being able to consistently beat real actual Navy captains.

    1040:

    The current end game for capitalism is luxury doomsday bunkers for the uber-rich:

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff

    They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

    This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

    The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary shock collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.

    I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

    More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

    I also recommend Vice News' great series "While the Rest of Us Die".

    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vice+news+while+the+rest+of+us+die

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clFlSRxErSY

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQin210ZBAQ

    1041:

    I really, really don't "get" the US attitude that after your prison sentence is over ... it isn't ....

    What about the American attitude that prisoners should pay for their room and board?

    https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/paying-your-time-how-charging-inmates-fees-behind-bars-may-violate

    I remember when Peter Watts was convicted of failing to drop into a freezing puddle fast enough (after having repeatedly assaulted an officer's elbow with his face), he discovered that it was cheaper to pay the fine than do the time — literally, because room-and-board charges for prisoners were bigger than the fine that was an alternative to prison. Fortunately he had friends and fans willing to contribute to cover the fine (plus lawyers fees).

    1042:

    Re 1020... In my first real professional job in 1978, I was assigned to do maintenance on a program written in PL/I in exactly that style. When the guy who coded it hit the end of a statement, it was semi-colon, space, space, start the next statement right there on the line. My first piece of working code in that job was a PL/I pretty-printer...

    1043:

    When the guy who coded it hit the end of a statement, it was semi-colon, space, space, start the next statement right there on the line.

    For various reasons I'm one of those guys who might actually READ a legal document.

    My first step if I can get it into digital is to break it into lines with gaps between the clauses and some indenting at times. (I love those 300 word sentences.)

    THEN I figure out what the authors think they were saying.

    1044:

    I thought that this SMBC cartoon was somewhat apropos.

    1045:

    Ninja'd by Troutwaxer!

    1046:

    Duffy
    Almost exactly 100 years ago a trial experiment of this "survival of the most powerful" system was trialled .... SEE HERE - the wiki article dates it 1916-28, though it took longer than that to clear up. It didn't even remotely work then & it would not work now.
    - { See also: The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire - so there }

    1047:

    RE: The Iron Weathercock

    Since this is an SFF site, just to be completest, I'll pitch one more 'nym out:

    Spinlizzy

    If she's in power long enough, cities in flight seem to be a real possibility.

    1048:

    If you behave you get out early many times but are on "parole" until your full sentence is over.

    Post-prison supervision is also common for people who have been released from prison, with or without an early release.

    1049:

    Yes, that sounds very much like the group I read about. ISTR they beat a Royal Navy admiral 5 times out of 5. Then the admiral discovered that the U-boat commander who beat him was a woman.

    I think that would make a great plot for a movie, but I somehow doubt it would be made. Women are rarely heroes in war movies - unless they die at the end.

    I've seen that kind of bias in real life, between husband and wife. She was telling me how she riveted spitfires, he was scoffing. She and I ignored him.

    1050:

    Post-prison supervision is also common for people who have been released from prison, with or without an early release.

    I'd like to see an example of official supervision when the sentence time is up.

    Excluding sex offense situations. Emotionally I understand the reasoning for the sex offender laws but these give me great pause. Especially when applied after the original trial and sentencing.

    1051:

    What about the American attitude that prisoners should pay for their room and board?

    As I remember, this issue was brought up by the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) many years ago. The courts ruled that if DOC wanted to charge prisoners, they would have to provide much better facilities. DOC declined.

    1052:

    LOL, facepalm, and other relevant acronyms, emoticons etc.

    1053:

    I'd like to see an example of official supervision when the sentence time is up.

    According to Wikipedia, "More than 8 in 10 offenders sentenced to federal prison also undergo court-ordered supervised release."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_probation_and_supervised_release

    1054:

    Saw the Johnson / Truss transition described as :

    From dipso to dipstick.

    Sounds about right, I've encountered pond weed that could out-think those two.

    1055:

    "Ninja'd by Troutwaxer!"

    ~withdraws back into the darkness~

    1056:

    Not cities, but whole regions! (Unless there's a revolution!)

    1057:

    You could do it, but it would be some kind of break-up movie between the admiral and his wife, and after being beaten five-straight by a WREN (the WREN would be the manic pixie dream girl, except that she and the admiral don't have sex.) After getting beaten five-straight by the women the Admiral gives the right orders, but he also rethinks his life and wins his wife back. So simultaneously profound and massively ahistorical.

    1058:

    Successful works of fiction need to have a coherent storyline and to make sense. The Real World does not. Sucks, doesn't it?

    1059:

    In other news, Glasgow has, as expected, won the bid to host the 2024 Worldcon. GOHs include Charlie's buddy Ken McLeod. This leaves Charlie as the only prominent member of the Scottish Socialist Vanguard SF Writers group who hasn't received a Worldcon GOH slot. On the other hand, 2029 is looking good...

    1060:

    Thanks for the amusing movie pitch. I can imagine clueless audiences and movie critics loving it. I can also imagine varieties of reactionaries hating it.

    ISTR the word historians like to use is 'counterfactual'. Of course, I'm not a historian nor do I know any. Well, not anymore. Anyway, 'ahistorical' also works.

    Now I'm thinking of Herodotus for no good reason. ;)

    1061:

    I've been in print with novels for only 20 years; it generally takes a 30 year track to make Worldcon GOH, so if I'm still around and there's a Scottish worldcon in 2034, watch this space, maybe?

    1062:

    court-ordered supervised release.

    Skimming the article (I'll read it in detail later) it seems to be talking about a part of the original sentence. Not something tacked on later.

    1063:

    I noticed, being a transport freak, that der eisener Wetterhahn mentioned "Building Roads" THREE TIMES in her Downing St speech ... & she is a wannabee-Thatcher, who, famously, hated railways. The apparently-proposed "Energy Bill relief" turns out { What a not-surprise! } to ba another tory con & squeeze ... we will all be trapped into unescapable loans for years, if not decades ....
    A windfall tax, or "Excess Profits Tax" { As enacted & used under Churchill during WWII - 1940 Finance Act } would, of course not be on this collection of shysters' radar.

    Nojay
    I am now fully paid-up for Glasgow - all I have to do now is:
    1: Live long enough
    2: Make sure I have enough money - with the current loonies supposedly "in charge" that's going to be more than previously thought!
    3: Start doing more research on my proposed talk on: "Glasgow's OTHER big Engineering" - there were five major builders of railway locomotives in Glasgow & another in Kilmarnock. Albion Motors used to make buses & IIRC there is still the "Alexander" section of Alexander Dennis in Falkirk - which isn't in Glasgow, of course....
    Then there's the originally three separate underground railway systems, one on a wierd gauge { The Clockwork Orange, 4ft track gauge }

    1064:

    Make sure you fill out the paperwork to be a refugee in Scotland after Scoxit.

    1065:
    She's making unsupported assertions and not telling us her area of expertise except by implication. [...] I haven't done as deep as dive as I could have, but slaves in the U.S. were definitely used as securities for loans.

    From whom might you have learned such a thing, I wonder: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/05/because-i-am-bored.html#comment-2121174

    Click Foxessa's name; her profile links to her blog, which does useful things like list her books published, one of which Robert Prior literally cited in response to your demand for sources.

    1066:

    Getting back to the original topic, drought's reducing crop yields in the US too:

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/summer-droughts-hefty-toll-american-182619985.html

    1067:

    Nojay 3 - It's not immediately obvious from the Wikipedia articles on Albion Motors or American Axle, but Albion Axle is still extant on the Scotstoun site on South Street at 55.881147N, -4.362248E.

    1068:

    Hi Anone.

    I bookmarked Foxessa's blog a couple years back, but don't visit frequently. I was thinking more about social skills when I made my post, and that includes the idea that not every everyone will go to (or must go to) Foxessa's blog, so maybe Foxessa should tell us here what her field of expertise is, and about her qualifications. Others of us talk about our expertise/qualifications without criticism,* then everyone else knows who we're talking to. Foxessa gets to tell us about her stuff - repeatedly if necessary - but hasn't.

    The rest of us have been less receptive and less eager to ask questions than we should have been - it's a two-way street, dig? I'd be happy to have Foxessa come back, and even happier, next time she's questioned, if she said, "I've written a book on this. Here's a link," which isn't discourteous on this blog.

    TL:DR She doesn't understand the rules, the rest of us failed to reach out. (This isn't a difficult problem to solve.)

    • We know Elderly Cynic is (or was) on a standards body for a popular language, that Heteromeles wrote a book about climate change, that Greg usually gets the last word on trains, Charlie was a pharmacist, etc.
    1069:

    Again, is there a way to change my password on antipope? Clicking "forgot password" did not help.

    1070:

    VERY INTERESTING - more information needed - anyone got any more on this?
    I note that the original article mentions one of the usual difficulties - will it scale up successfully?

    1071:

    And this piece in the guardian is all about the increase in pests as soil temperatures rise:

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/06/us-farmers-face-plague-of-pests-as-global-heating-raises-soil-temperatures

    I know UK frosts have been good for killing off insect pests that can't cope with the drop in temperatures but that's a defence we'll slowly lose too. I'm sure Greg can expound on this benefit more than I can :-)

    1072:

    Oxidising hydrogen gives you an amount of energy which is conveniently close enough to 10kJ/l (at atmospheric pressure) that you can do rough estimates in very round figures. (20%-odd more if you recover the heat of condensation but more often than not you don't.) This isn't much different from 3kWh/m3.

    They seem to be claiming an efficiency which is roughly comparable with the best of current solar panels for electricity (if I remember correctly some figures gasdive posted a while back).

    So for their proposed use - per-house installations to replace a methane supply - it looks like you could cope with an alternation of sunny days and cold nights without the storage being ridiculously difficult, but if you're somewhere the requirements are more demanding it starts to creak. You'd have to have your own compressor at the minimum, unless you do have room for a huge tank.

    It looks to me like it would work out overall much the same as other domestic-solar combinations, which isn't much of a surprise since as long as your collection method does actually work that's not a major part of how useful the installation as a whole is. Could still be a clearly better option for their proposed use if someone's particular conditions happen to be a better match for it than for existing methods. Looks rather more useful as a means of generating hydrogen industrially, eg. for methods of transport like railways where you can cope with the tank reasonably easily.

    Would be especially interesting, though, if they can figure out a modification to their method that can glue the hydrogens onto carbon dioxide to produce a liquid output.

    Hernia support energy loan trap: got a link, to a textual resource?

    Glasgow locomotive builders talk: if you don't get to give it in Glasgow, it would be good to see it on here at some time when Charlie is stuck for topics.

    1073:

    We're already losing it.

    1074:

    I think your comment is really about Florida

    Not just Florida.

    https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/voter-restoration/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-map

    In Mississippi, for example, convicted felons can't vote without first getting a pardon or a 2/3 vote from the state House and Senate. In Kentucky and Virginia they're permanently barred from voting.

    The Mississippi law was recently upheld by a federal appeals court.

    https://www.axios.com/2022/08/27/mississippi-block-felons-voting-rights

    https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3617719-federal-appeals-court-upholds-jim-crow-era-mississippi-law-restricting-voting-rights-for-felons/

    It looks like the next step is the US Supreme Court, which is well-known as a paragon of toleration and open-mindedness, as well as scrupulous attention to legal principles.

    1075:

    I think that would make a great plot for a movie, but I somehow doubt it would be made. Women are rarely heroes in war movies - unless they die at the end.

    It could be made, but would need changes for Hollywood. Can't have woke women heroes, and the American Navy needs a much bigger role*.

    One of the Wrens is dating an American captain who suggests a better way to fight submarines. She demonstrates it in the game and it works. Navy brass poo-poos it, but maverick captain does it anyway and proves it works. The Wren is either snuck onto the ship or anxiously waits for news shore, but the captain gets most of the screen-time and the audience is in no doubt that he is the main character.


    *Americans need to be the heroes. Consider Argo, U-571, etc.

    1076:

    maybe Foxessa should tell us here what her field of expertise is, and about her qualifications

    It's been mentioned, at least as much as the other examples you gave. She has given suggestions for reading in the past.

    1077:

    There are lots of similar projects under the heading artificial photosynthesis:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynthesis

    Pigeon, it also covers creating liquid fuels.

    1078:

    Not just Florida.

    Florida had a referendum. It said felons got back their vote after serving their sentence.

    The legislature and governor then came up with enabling legislation which mostly guaranteed that folks would be breaking the law as they law was so confusing almost no one could be sure if they were eligible to vote.

    That was my point. States that just say no are a separate thing. Florida (the voting population at the time) said give them the vote.

    The Florida law is going to be tied up in the courts for years as it doesn't really reflect the constitutional provision it was supposed to enable.

    1079:

    Also Foxessa is a serious historian, she has nothing to prove.

    1080:

    Well, it is supposed to be "England's green and pleasant land", and that's still true for a lot of it. Solar farms are all about maximising area turned into black and unpleasant land, and there isn't even anywhere you can put them where nobody will get to see it, the country being small and the parts with the best sunshine being the parts that already have most people in.

    There's also the point that the advantage of large-scale solar generation in Britain is mainly that the actual generating units are quick, easy and cheap to install and when that's done people can straight away start patting themselves on the back about how green they're being, but to leap from there to the idea of a solar-powered Britain is to ignore so many other factors as to make the conclusion entirely invalid. There are also concerns around things like what happens to the ecology of the area with so much sunlight shaded out, what happens to the hydrology with so much non-absorbent surface concentrating rainfall into big lumps which run off too fast to be absorbed when they do reach the ground, and so on, of whose effects I believe the current assessment is "inadequately determined as yet but unlikely to be good".

    (Personal data point: fully half my back garden is bare earth because of the huge solar collector that is cantilevered over the fence from the wood on the other side :))

    Wind generators also attract huge numbers of complaints because they sit conspicuously on skylines and wave about, so you can't avoid noticing them and they fuck up the scenery over hundreds of square miles. They also attract justified opprobrium against the technology in general, because they shut down completely when there's most wind about instead of merely feathering to keep the power collected within handleable limits, so not only are they being crap, they're being conspicuously crap in the view of hundreds of thousands of people and you can't avoid everyone knowing about it.

    What we should be doing is building nuclear stations sufficient to supply the average demand, and re-using the (huge) sites of coal power stations for storage units, of the "need to be large to be practical" type (eg. thermal or metal-redox), to act as a low-pass filter with enough attenuation at 1 cycle per day to keep the nuclear plants from having to vary their output much - ie. the same kind of thing that we were partially doing with coal plants and pumped storage, only on a larger scale and without the inescapable shortage of sites. We can increase the contribution from renewable sources over a longer timescale as we manage to figure out practical methods of storing enough energy to cope with months at a time of them not doing very much.

    1081:

    Florida had a referendum.

    No, Florida had an initiative. It was on the ballot because hundreds of thousands of Floridians signed petitions to put it there. Referendums are ballot issues referred to the voters by the legislature.

    1082:

    Whatever.

    The Florida constitution now says most people who have served their sentence can vote. The legislature didn't like this so they wrote a law to make it as hard as possible (confusing) for people out of jail to figure out how to vote. And the governor is now gleefully going after those who can't follow the unfathomable rules.

    1083:

    1082 Para 4 - Oersinal account. I was driving down the M6 through Cumbria (somwhere around Rosgill at 54.541591N, -2.679540E and saw wind turbines to my right (West) somewhere over the watershed. I mentioned this on a webside; someone else replied to the effect that "there are no wind turbines near the M6", and a third party replied "I rather think that's Paws' point; he could see wind turbines that were miles away over a ridge line".

    1084:

    Pigeon
    Not "just" the loco-builders - the largest two Scottish railway companies had their works ( Build & major repair ) in Glasgow - the NB at Cowlairs & the Caley at St Rollox { The G&SW was at Kilmarnock ) - it was a huge concentration of technical & engineering expertise. The "Big Three" of builders { Neilson Reid, Dübs & Sharp, Stewart } amalgamated to form "NBL" - "North British Loco", who usually had a diamond-shaped works plate: "Diamonds are forever" - locomotives Like this

    Phinch
    Yes
    The expected increase in Slug+Snail damage, especially in Spring is already noticeable + greenfly & blackfly (aphid sapsuckers) arriving sooner & in greater volumes, too.

    Pigeon
    Which makes our misgovernment's rule-change even worse.
    It SHOULD be possible for people to have some tax/monetary advantage to covering their ( S-&-W facing ) roofs with solar panelling, but the fuckwits took it away, because people were actually using it (!)

    1085:

    apologies... when I previewed it looked fine... re-post...

    a rambling 'n raging thread about water shortage

    BADNEWS: significantly reduced seepage into aquifers

    GOODNEWS: golf will save us

    Obvious to anyone not taking bribes from Big Oil to turn a blind eye -- yeah I'm looking at you Republican senators -- climate change is happening. It has effects ongoing and unavoidable.

    Current political policy can be summarized thusly:

    DEM: "We must safeguard the future, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives there."

    GQP: "We can do what we want when we want without possibility of being held to account for our actions. Besides only unimportant people are hurt by climate change."

    Another typical Republican dogwhistle of "unimportant people" which translates "poor people" & "brown/black/yellow people". Not just the poor, so too the middle class and uppermost wealthy class all going to endure successive #ClimateChangeShitStorm 'ing.

    Whereas mainstream voters can look out their window -- never mind the evening news and YT videos -- to see the plumes of smoke. And endure higher temperatures and shortages of drinking water and rising prices for food.

    Sadly, the Republican Party is linking itself to fatally flawed environmental policies with ever more glue and denying climate change more loudly than ever. Good, whispered by attentive analysts.

    There's the hope these greedy Republicans continue to make this mistake all the way through every November election cycle. So yeah, good.

    So many grassroots DEMs & GOPs are savoring the coming election losses smacking down the Republican leadership. It will force a long overdue reset.

    Problem? Problem being this further delays any broadly reaching policy from getting critical revisions sooner rather later. At a time when we are years overdue to get started and far short of radical re-builds of over-age infrastructure.

    We've ignored how much of the roads, canals, conduits, bridges, drainage, reservoirs, et al, are all so worn down due to deliberately underfunded maintenance budgeting. For sure, none were designed for #ClimateChangeShitStorm.

    One overt consequence -- amongst un-inventoried dozens -- being changes to regional "hydrological cycles".

    Sudden, abrupt alternations in rainfall; too much or too little or too freaking fast or too close to nothing. Not just rainfall but snowfall too. Reduced snow pack in mountains (Europe, Asia, South America, North America) this past winter suggests 2023 will be drier yet.

    New York City residents drowned. Flooding in Tennessee destroyed a billion dollars of housing. California's drought threatens to wreck vegetable crops (30% losses). Overseas British Isle potato yields will fall off a cliff, knocked down 40% (55%?).

    Pakistan is still mapping out the extent of destruction, but at least one-third of farmland has been wrecked; potentially much more than 33% of harvest wrecked. Hunger? For sure. Famine? Possible.

    Public exposure of unpleasant truths is significant because our worst enemy is disinformation-ignorance-misinformation. For humanity to prevail the posting of "truth" must prevail. Sadly those profiting from misleading us have the most money to buy political influence.

    This list is incomplete because there have been too many abrupt changes and too little willingness by national governments to accurately report upon the shitstorm.

    (Apparently politicians hold to the bizarre notion, if they don't see it, then it did not happen, and therefore they don't have to admit responsibility for the shitstorm. Nor waste time on fixing it. Never mind preventing the next #ClimateChangeShitStorm.)

    (My guess is #CCSS will be the 19th most popular hashtag in 2025, lagging behind whichever Hollywood mashup couples are obsessing us.) https://twitter.com/i/status/1552913318351843328

    Trends towards drought 'here' whilst there are floods 'there'.

    Not just rainfall but retention by way of seepage into underground strata downwards to naturally formed aquifers is effected by extended drought. Soil when too dry refuses to soak up rainfall and thus becomes (nearly) water tight as concrete.

    Significantly reduced seepage into aquifers. Freshwater resources will be a directly affected in the coming years. The lack of water resources is one of the serious problems in arid areas.

    Problem with the current map?

    The recognized "arid zones" are shifting. A few are smaller. But most are larger. With new areas becoming arid zones. And possibility of yet ever more areas in the next decade being reclassified as arid zones.

    In 2021, US demand for water was 361,000,000 acre-feet (4.4E13 liters). Keep in mind US population growth typically 0.43% annually, plus ever more office buildings, houses, roads, industry, schools, data centers(!), etc, in support of population.

    Safe bet? 1.0% increase in US demand for water annually.

    TRANSLATION: another 3,610,000 acre-feet (4.4E12 liters) of production needed to added each year. Every year. Again 'n again.

    Rule of thumb: one acre-foot of water (1.2E6 liters) would supply needs of 2 typical urban households (indoor & outdoor) for a year. That's 2019.

    In the near future -- 2025 at the latest -- luxury cutting and conservation and pipe fixing will reduce consumption, one acre-foot will supply needs of 3 urban households. Achievable with only minor inconvenience if folks pay attention to detail.

    That, along with several billion dollars budgeted for nothing but repairing pipes and sealing leaks.

    By 2030, between (a) social-cultural-peer pressure and (b) reluctantly passed legislation and (c) punishing wasters with penalty water pricing... it will be 4 urban households.

    And by 2040, it will have to be <=5=>.

    Because if it isn't done by then millions will suffer from "dry taps".

    But no matter how effective reducing demand and fixing leaks will be, the supply of water is trending down and worst yet, the irregularity is worsening.

    Irregularity. Uncertainty. Unhappy surprises.

    Surprises are only fun if you like sudden sharp shocks and a horde of unexpected people screaming "Surprise!" on your 75th birthday. (Who does this shit to someone they genuinely love?)

    Predictably of the sun rising is still 100% but rainfall? And where it will decrease? Or increase? Nobody knows. Fast, heavy rainfall? Light, persist sustained rainfall? Nobody can guess alterations to regional "hydrological cycles".

    One useful resource, nobody wants to acknowledge? Synthetic aquifers.

    Storing flood waters from winter for use during drought summers. But where to build these massive storage facilities? All land is owned by someone and more-or-less used for something. Taking farmland out of service shortens the food supply at the worst possible moment.

    Golf courses. Or rather, under golf courses. According to Golf Course Superintendents of America land totaling 2,244,512 acres are golf courses (eqv 3,507 sq. miles).

    Assume 90% of golf courses are grass/roads, 10% trees/buildings.

    Peel back the sod carefully and stack off to the side. Dig down ten feet. Line with concrete. Cap with pre-cast slabs of rebar-enforced concrete. Pack atop dirt (zillions of tons of clean dirt eagerly bid upon by contractors building elsewhere). Replace the sod.

    Dig drainage canals to guide rainfall run off previously lost into these reservoirs.

    Result? Storage for 20,200,608 acre-feet of water. Enough in 2019 for 40M urban households; in 2025 for 60M urban households; in 2030 for 80M urban households; in 2040 for 100M urban households.

    Pipe dream?

    Yes.

    But. But? But even if not 20,200,608 AF of water storage, if only a tenth (2,020,060 AF) that's going to be a significant contribution in easing water shortage amongst densely packed urban centers (and their nearby suburbs). Reminder: we consume 361,000,000 AF annually.

    Why golf courses?

    Four reasons: location ...location ...location ...luxury.

    Most golf courses are placed close to cities and in midst of suburbs which have the highest demands for water. Well positioned for cross-connects to feed supply into municipal water systems.

    And it is "luxury" category of land usage. Unnecessary to minimal survival needs of the general populace. Taking those 9,052 golf courses out of service for 3 months to perform construction will not wreck national economy nor impoverish working poor.

    (When was the last time you played a brisk nine holes on a Tuesday after work? or a full eighteen?)

    The number of hardcore American golfers (those playing eight rounds or more per year) has fallen every year since 2006 from 22M to less than 10M who are 'hardcore' (some estimate it closer to 7M). That's 3% (or less) of the US populace.

    So exploiting golf courses inconveniences those 3% most wealthy. And moreover does so only temporarily.

    Also, given careful planning, whilst golf course "A" gets torn up the membership goes to play on golf courses "B" & "C" & "D". Then whilst "B" is out of service, those other three split the overload. Same rotation for "C" & "D".

    About 83% of Americans according to 2020 census live in cities and suburbs, 273.4 million. That's 273.4M voters who will steamroll over legislators at all level of government -- city, state, federal -- when they realize their own lives (and pampered lifestyle) are at risk.

    Not just minor towns like Las Vegas, NM (13,055) or neglected Jackson, MS (163,778) or that shitstorm of fire 'n drought slamming west coast. The maps of current drought and arid zones are on the web. More than 250M voters have access to the web.

    They can read about heat 'n drought crushing the British Isles (London roasted 104.4F/ 40.2C on 19JUL22).

    Water shortages in South America being deliberately downplayed by aristocratic elites lest the peasants riot if ever learning how horrid it really was.

    Then there's decades of casual incompetence now destroying Pakistan -- 33M either homeless-hungry-jobless or verging on it -- due to utter lacking at every level of government in preparing for repeats of prior horrors. Decades? Decades!

    So yeah, legislators at all level of government in the US will either start scheduling golf courses for construction (along with many other unhappy pieces of water consumption reduction laws) or they'll be retiring ahead of schedule.

    == end of rambling 'n raging thread about water shortages ==

    1086:

    Build a big dam and a bunch of turbines? ;)

    1087:

    Re: '... the increase in pests as soil temperatures rise:'

    Add to that that we'll be needing to increase food production just to maintain present nutritional levels except that an increase in food production using present methods is in turn going to add to global greenhouse gas emissions (global warming).

    Below is an open access article that mentions just how big an impact current methods of food production have on global greenhouse gas emissions as well as some data-crunching derived potential strategies.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-18601-1

    'Roadmap for achieving net-zero emissions in global food systems by 2050'

    1088:

    I suspect he's referring to the difficulty people who have a criminal history in the US seem to have with finding jobs. I have a friend in the US who had a felony conviction from when he was 18, and not only did he only have low-level jobs (think Target) for over 30 years, he had no passport for most of those and, I believe, couldn't vote. Very fortunately for him he will be able to retire comfortably now, but only because of an inheritance.

    1089:

    Here in Tasmania we are looking forward to welcoming new agricultural pests that will now be able to over-winter as temps rise. /s There are a number of serious pests we've been kept free from due to the cold winters we're starting to lose.

    1090:

    difficulty people who have a criminal history in the US seem to have with finding jobs

    "have a criminal history" applies to a lot of the US, I would have thought. You got a lot of second hand criminals from the UK for while. Oh, not that sort of criminal history. Moving along...

    I read about that a lot. It seems weird for most of the minor stuff. But OTOH it's part of the deliberate criminalisation of black people so there's no reason that racists wouldn't extend it to (black) people who've been convicted ever. And once you have that system applying it to poor white people would be difficult to avoid and why bother when being poor is just the result of bad choices anyway (/s). The USA has a lot of anti-poverty as well as anti-black feeling.

    Australia and Aotearoa both have "spent convictions" systems where minor offending disappears after two years of non-conviction. We also restrict the registration of sex offenders based on risk assessments, and limit the ability of (potential) employers to demand disclosure of convictions.

    https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/human-rights-record-recruitment-chapter-5

    1091:

    Yes, I know about NBL - very good in steam days, but I'm more familiar with them from the abject fiasco of their attempt to get into diesels... out of about three outfits who happened to hold licences for German diesel engine designs for some arcane reason dating back to before the war (I think in NBL's case it was an unimportant-at-the-time bit they got as part of a deal for something different that they were actually interested in), theirs was for the most complex and touchy design. Then they tried to build it from measurements dubiously converted from metric to imperial with a workforce used to an order of magnitude less precision, played fast and loose with material specifications, and finally got trapped into guaranteed availability contracts which sent them bust almost instantly. As you no doubt know. I associate them with the first diesel-hydraulic prototypes for the Western having almost none of the advantages, apart from simply not being electric, that they were interested in hydraulic transmission for, and with part of the initial damage to the reputation of hydraulics even though their diesel-electric versions of the same package had the same engine problems.

    Where is the steamer - Eastern Europe somewhere? I recognise the styling of the various vehicles in the photo to the extent of it ringing a bell, but not to that of reliably identifying the country.

    Snails: I keep treading on the things when I step outside my front door. I found one inside the dashboard of my mobility scooter the other day. They also crawl up my windows, and it is interesting to watch their traction machinery through the glass.

    1092:

    And this piece in the guardian is all about the increase in pests as soil temperatures rise...

    Bear with me...

    I know this has been a horrible year for wildfires in the EU. Is this strictly a current drought problem? One of the problems in the US and Canadian west is that there are millions and millions of acres of dead trees in the mountains killed by various pine beetle species. The pine beetle larva that live under the bark produce glycol before they go dormant for the winter and it requires fairly extreme temperatures to kill them. Near where I live, three nights in a row of -20 °F. This has become a rare, rather than regular, occurrence.

    1093:

    Here in Tasmania we are looking forward to welcoming new agricultural pests that will now be able to over-winter as temps rise. /s There are a number of serious pests we've been kept free from due to the cold winters we're starting to lose.

    You're not alone. My understanding from an invasives control expert giving a talk was that some researchers estimate that by 2050, all agricultural pests will be everywhere their hosts live.

    Now there are two issues here:

    One is that there's a reasonable solution to this, which goes under permaculture, polyculture, and other rubrics--diversify, both the crop species, and the cultivars or types grown. This is maximizing survivability over productivity, analogous to bet hedging rather than profit maximization. It's not perfect--a bad enough drought or cold snap is unfarmable--but it can work. However, no one's demonstrated that it works with more than a billion people to feed.

    The other solution is what we use for eight billion people: supply chains. For example, we need to grow megatonnes of #2 bread wheat to make the bread products that people require. #2 bread wheat is a buyer's specification, not a genotype, fortunately, but it's basically stuff you can mill and make bread from. Grow it in enough areas around the world, and hopefully, even if one or two of them fail, people can still live on bread from somewhere.

    This year, due to climate change and Putin getting his rocks off, it looks like wheat harvests are seriously down worldwide, and I suspect that this will become normal for many crops.

    The three possibilities we need to implement are:

    --Political. Famine is always partially a political problem, which is why disempowering the wealthy and the authoritarians is so important. So is disempowering Big Ag, in certain ways.

    --Innovate, meaning working on more future-tolerant crops AND reintroducing storage as an essential part of our food supply chains. We've got to find cost-effective alternatives to just-in-time grocery shops, or we're in real trouble.*

    --Diversify: I don't think we can yet feed eight billion people with permaculture, because annually or seasonally flipping supply chains from handling wheat to handling soybeans (which are producing well this year) is as difficult as telling everyone to go from eating bread to eating TVP, tofu, tempeh, and natto. That kind of flexibility takes enculturation and being pretty hungry. The more we can make ourselves more tolerant foodies, the better we might do. Whether you want to stash a bunch of rat traps for protein hunting this winter is up to you.

    *Storage doesn't have to be in silos and warehouses. It can be in homes and storage lockers, if these are available. Yes, I know this is a big if.

    1094:

    I know this has been a horrible year for wildfires in the EU. Is this strictly a current drought problem? One of the problems in the US and Canadian west is that there are millions and millions of acres of dead trees in the mountains killed by various pine beetle species. The pine beetle larva that live under the bark produce glycol before they go dormant for the winter and it requires fairly extreme temperatures to kill them. Near where I live, three nights in a row of -20 °F. This has become a rare, rather than regular, occurrence.

    I'm not an expert, but I think there's a defense in depth issue.

    AFAIK, pine bark beetles can be killed by a few things, including low temperatures, pine sap flooding the galleries they burrow, and predators.

    A warming and drying climate harms all three: fewer really hard freezes, less water for sap production, and more stress for predators.

    To some degree, fiddling with forestry practices (reintroducing Indian Fire) might help. The problem is that it has to be actual Indian fire experts on their home turf working within a climate they understand. As is common practice these days, Indian Fire and similar seem to be coopted for buzzword bingo and BS, the same way "forest health" was in the 1990s.

    1095:

    Diversify: I don't think we can yet feed eight billion people with permaculture, because annually or seasonally flipping supply chains from handling wheat to handling soybeans (which are producing well this year) is as difficult as telling everyone to go from eating bread to eating TVP, tofu, tempeh, and natto.

    Globally I think it's more like growing some wheat in a given area, but also a bunch of other stuff. I don't mean "we also grow barley and sometimes oats", more like in wet years we grow rice (maybe the new Chinese non-flooded rice?) and in dry years we grow... something drought tolerant?

    Yes, it will mean shipping both machinery and crops more than we do now in many cases, but it also means that even if everything goes perfectly there will be less wheat available than now. Just more cassava and soy or whatever. It would please me a lot of the giant fields of wheat and maize became quinoa and kumara every now and then.

    I wonder about perennials and even trees as crops. Breadfruit flour is hand-made for the most part but my limited knowledge of the processing doesn't identify any reason why that can't be industrialised. And soy is already almost as awful as cassava so ditto.

    FWIW it seems that a lot of farm machinery is already "power unit with accessories" so shipping machinery might be less hassle than it sounds. Especially if cutting heads can be swapped in so "the same" combine can do maize this year and oats next year (NFI though).

    1096:

    How about redesigning sewage works to enable carbon capture from food production?

    First stage is to ferment it anaerobically and collect the methane to power the later stages with. The later stages are to let the water evaporate or boil it off, then coke the solid residue in a methane-heated oven. (Waste heat can be used for electricity generation and/or district heating.) Capture the volatiles from the oven for chemical feedstocks, wash out any remaining phosphorus or potassium compounds from the solid residue to use as fertiliser, and dispose of the remaining carbon/water sludge by pumping it down old mine shafts.

    Even a less complicated/fully-integrated version is still worth doing: cooking sewage using its own methane gives you a source of large amounts of free fertiliser without any of the three Ps (pong, pharmaceuticals and pathogens) that cause trouble when you try and use it straight.

    1097:

    It looks to me as if it's not so much a case of this year will be wet or this year will be dry but at least we can tell which in advance so we know which crops to plant, but that it could be either or possibly even both and we've no bloody idea, so the thing to do is plant crops that want dryness and wetness and various stages in between, and just expect that the ones which don't happen to match the weather we actually get won't be much good. This is either more difficult or more like what people always used to do anyway, or maybe both.

    1098:

    Also, food availablity in Oz continues weird. We can get fresh raspberries in September but apples are still hard to find and blackberries or boysenberries not at all. Raspberries should be a January thing. And they're hard to chill, I thought, so I assume they're year round in Darwin or something. Blueberries chill forever so they're available year round. Hot cross buns not so much. Plus banananas are a year-round because they store too (I'm not going to argue about whether they're a fruit).

    I go purely off what's cheap(est) in terms of fresh fruit and veges, so right now there's lots of seedy mandarins and whatever berries I can get.

    Main thing I expect is that the processed food people might have to get a bit more creative/flexible. Which will no doubt upset their target markets, but if the choice is "pasta sauce from yams and apples, or nothing" I don't see a lot of people refusing to eat in protest.

    1099:

    Diversify: I can't say I really give a toss where the filling of a meat pie or the proteinaceous lumps in a curry come from, as long as the texture and taste have been properly normalised through processing. Actual meat or soya or insects or whatever, if you can't tell the difference in the final result then it doesn't matter. We just need to update the food labelling laws to pay attention to what things actually are rather than what they started off as. I remember how silly things were when DNA analysis found horse meat in Tesco burgers and everyone started shrieking even though they hadn't noticed any difference actually eating the things; I got into an argument with a chap who insisted that if it said "beef" burgers on the packet, it mattered most terribly if the reconstituted gristle which doesn't taste like any kind of actual meat didn't come from a cow, and not being able to tell any difference didn't make any difference. So there's a lot of daftness to overcome.

    Just in time: yet another example where we had a chance to learn from the plague and deliberately refused to...

    1100:

    Uh? Aren't fresh apples in September always hard to find for you? It would be weird here, but your seasons are 180° out of phase from ours.

    1101:

    I’d much prefer to see windmills and fields of solar panels than the exhaust plumes of coal fired power stations and the vile brown cloud of pollution that sits malevolently over the UK as you approach from a hundred miles away.

    Solar panels appear to work well with quite a few crops and animals when mixed on farms.

    1102:

    Apples store well so are normally year round. There's a surge of Fuji, Red Delicious and other less-storable ones around March-April when they're picked, and usually in February-ish we get a pile of technically-still-edible Granny Smiths they're clearing out of the coolstore from five years ago.

    I'm talking "fresh" in supermarket terms, not farm gate ones. In the middle of Sydney I don't get farm gate in any meaningful way.

    1103:

    apples are still hard to find

    My apple tree produced nothing this year. Lots of flowers, but no fruit at all.

    The pear produced a crop for the first time in years, and a bumper crop at that. Anyone in the GTA with a ladder that can reach the second story is welcome to drop round and pick the several dozen I can't reach. I think they're Bartlett pears, and I know they're 'organic' because I haven't used anything on the tree in the 25+ years I've lived here…

    (first dot last at gmail dot com if you're interested)

    1104:

    pasta sauce from yams and apples

    Do you have a recipe? That sounds interesting…

    1105:

    Made it almost to the beach today. Of course as soon as I left home this morning it started pouring rain. The storms followed me around most of the day, so I didn't bother going over to the beach itself when I got down there.

    But I did find a restaurant on Front St in Beaufort that was still open even though "the season" ended on Monday. And the rain let up for about an hour or so, so I was able to sit out on the sidewalk, so my little dog sat in the seat next to me.

    He's not well trained, but he is remarkably well behaved.

    I'd have had to look for a McDonalds or something like that if the restaurant with outdoor seating hadn't been open, cause I wouldn't have been able to leave him in the car while I ate. Still too hot.

    Also found the ferry that will take my Jeep over to Core Banks (where Off-Road Vehicles are permitted. No horses, but there's a nice lighthouse ... also National Park cabins you can rent & they're pet friendly.

    Today was more a scouting trip than anything else. I got a bit of an idea how far we can go on the highway before I have to find a place for him to take a break. Also got a better idea how far I can go before I have to take a break.

    1106:

    Paws said: 963 - But all we have to do is build a global superconnector. We know this because the Australians say so! ;-)

    You know this because the Australian who was a project manager on what was at the time the largest interconnector in the world, who has spent >20 years working in the largest grid by area in the world, that if laid over Europe would extend from London to Cyprus to Mauritania, has laid it out for you in words of one syllable, with numbers and citations, in multiple posts over nearly a decade. Also the Australian's Grand Father was born in Fort William and probably has more right to claim being Scottish, and a Highlander than OGH. So you can take your racist claptrap and stick it.

    1107:

    pasta sauce from yams and apples. Do you have a recipe? That sounds interesting…

    The internet.provides. In its own, inimitable way...

    1108:

    can u be racist towards australians? i didn't think they were sufficiently underprivileged

    1109:

    It takes significant effort, but it's apparently possible. Maybe you'd call it classiest? Maybe it's a bit of jingoistic licence? Maybe it's just being a general dick.

    I dunno. I'm only Australian, so I don't know the right words for when someone thinks they're better because of which rock they were born on.

    1110:

    Sorry, I'm not that sort of cook. I'm more the "what have I got" sort. I vaguely recall smoky paprika being in it, because I prefer the non-smoky sort but that's what I had. I'd just be cooking yams and apple until it was mashable, stick blending it (because I'm too lazy to mash), adding some slightly warm spice, throwing in chopped capsicum and whatever other veges I wanted, then bringing it to a simmer. A dash of vinegar, maybe? Definitely going to want to leave much of the water from the boiling stage in to keep it runny. Maybe butter if you like oily food or need the calories. And salt.

    Something like this, with apple for extra sweetness (I just did a search for the dish description): https://www.pepperbowl.com/sweet-potato-pasta-sauce/

    1111:

    classism certainly used to be the default thirty plus years ago but brits looking down on australians for their origins has been naff for ages, i don't think that's what paws had going on

    he may have been teasing, that doesn't always land right tho

    1112:

    Adrian said: he may have been teasing, that doesn't always land right tho

    He is an awful lot of "teasing" until I bite and snap back, and then he can comment on how uncultured I am.

    I know he's OGH's mate, but he really is such an awful bore. I can't imagine that anyone genuinely upper class would bother to bait the proles.

    1113:

    No "white" males in the top tier of misgovernment ... so what?
    It just shows that females & brown people can be fascists, as well ... oh SHIT.
    We can look forward to a rapid trashing of the remaining ex-EU rights & protections as a bullies-charter for corrupt employers is put in place. Not the "Iron Weathercock" but Liz TRUMP.

    As of time-of-posting, no new Minster of Transport (!)

    Pigeon
    Let's NOT go into the NBL diesel disaster - I remember them, breifly, as they broke down, leaked oil & caught fire all over the place - the NBL type 2's were a classic { Of how not to do it } - as for the "original" Warships, just don't go there - even worse than the next run!
    The loco in the picture is an NZ railways "J" class.
    Snails - they climb up my wisteria & enter through the bedroom windows - two of the buggers may have killed some of my Tagetes minuta large seedlings - the leaves are snail-proof ( The mint content ) but they may have stripped the lower stem outer, grrr ...

    1114:

    No, solar panels do NOT mix with agriculture in northern Europe, where the limit on productivity is primarily insolation (this year was exceptional). You can one or the other.

    I have been saying for years that we should place wind turbines along motorways, and in industrial estates, not our few remaining areas of open country and 'wilderness'.

    1115:

    Found another writer that agrees with Mr. Stross, if anything he is bleaker in his assessment:

    https://medium.com/eudaimonia-co/this-winter-collapse-is-coming-to-britain-72ace84ab0b4

    Right about now, Britain’s setting records. Not good ones. It’s the rich world’s worst performing country in a stunning multitude of regards — falling incomes, crashing economy, skyrocketing inflation, dwindling confidence and optimism. Twice as many people died in Britain this summer of Covid than they did last summer. They were mostly elderly people, and that’s a parable for what modern Britain’s become: a stunningly cruel, indifferent, embittered society, inured to the grim reality of its own collapse.

    Britain is the world’s preeminent bellwether of social collapse at this point in history. No nation in the rich world — and barely any in the poor one, really — come close. The rest of the world is dusting itself off after a rough few years, and restarting the engines of progress. But in Britain? Well, the engines of regress are pumping. Literally — sewage into the rivers. What kind of country wants to cover itself in its own — never mind.

    For some reason that the world can’t quite fathom, Britain has decided to turn itself a kind of Neo Victorian dystopia, by way of American style ultra libertarianism. Think about how baffling and strange this really is for a moment. The nation that was renowned for its NHS and BBC, which invented the idea of the public park and the modern public library and museum. Now? It’s the kind of place with would make Dickens entire cast of villains, from Uriah Heep to Fagin, cackle in morbid glee.

    When my British friends ask me “so, how bad is it going to get,” they’re talking about the winter. What’s expected to happen this winter? Well, when I tell you, your jaw is going to drop. Elderly people are going to freeze to death. Kids are going to live without heating, shivering under blankets, wearing coats to sleep. Adults choosing between feeding their families or keeping the lights on. Dickensian, much?

    Oh, but that’s just the beginning. What else is going to happen this winter? Total economic devastation. When I say “total,” I really mean it. This winter, Britain is poised for a self made catastrophe like the modern world has never seen. Lest you think I exaggerate, let me explain. Energy bills are expected to skyrocket — to prices that are beyond absurd. Pubs are in despair that their bills are going to from, say, a mere 10,000 pounds to 100,000. So imagine the nation that invented the pub…not having many left. Because do you know how many pubs can afford energy bills like that? You can probably count them on your fingers.

    Pubs? Just the tip of the iceberg — a metaphor, if you like, for the rest of the economy. Here, try this on for size. “Sky News has been told that care homes are facing closure this winter with some being quoted between 200–400% more for their energy costs. We’ve spent today with @sheffcare who say they usually pay around £90,000 across their nine care homes, they’ve recently been quoted £1.16m.”

    Energy bills jumping from 100K to…over a million? Not even “expected” ones, but ones they’re already being quoted today? What kind of small business do you imagine can afford energy bills rising by not just 10 percent, but ten times, an order of magnitude?

    The country feels as if it’s stoned.

    That’s because it is stoned. It’s high on its own supply — of nationalism, xenophobia, hate. Every time that someone vaguely intelligent brings up the very real issue of a collapsing society — as in literally collapsing right back to Victorian days — what happens? Well, those in power trot out a fresh form of scapegoating.

    First, it was Europeans who were responsible for the woes of Brits — because of course Brits can’t possibly make mistakes. And so the self-made calamity of Brexit occurred. And yet that didn’t solve any of Britain’s problems — how could it, when Europeans, by and large gentle and wise people, had nothing to do with them? And so the scapegoating had to find a new target. Britain’s fanatics, now the ones in absolute power, took inspiration from across the pond, and now, “wokeness” and “immigration” are blamed for every last problem in society. Good luck heating your home that way. Maybe you can burn a few books that you didn’t buy.

    Britain’s vicious cycle of scapegoating — first Europeans, then immigrants, then “wokeness,” — teaches us a key lesson. This is how societies collapse. Because along the way, something curious happened, which I’ve never — almost never — seen happen anywhere else. People’s spirits broke.

    1116:

    Someone at HBO needs to do a mini-series based on John Bruner's "The Sheep Look Up" the ur ecological collapse novel (not cli-fi, though it mentions hot weather through the winter it really didn't focus on global warming, which wasn't a thing yet in the 1970s). Give it the same treatment as HBO's superb "Years and Years".

    The opening scene of the novel is a board meeting of an insurance company discussing the shocking news that life expectancy in America was actually falling (something inconceivable back in the 70s).

    That's now happening in real time.

    The last nation to experience a sustained decline in life expectancy was the Soviet Union - right before its collapse.

    Covid-19 is not the cause.

    Not old age either, life expectancies are falling in every age demographic.

    But don't worry, the very rich are still doing well - hooray!

    Compared to other industrial nations, whose life expectancy fell 0.3 years during the pandemic, American life expectancy fell 2.3 years.

    Instead try obesity, alcoholism, fentanyl (now the leading cause of death for people between 18 and 45 - that used to be car accidents), opioids, suicide, etc.

    We are a deeply sick society, physically and spiritually.

    Because the only thing we care about is making money.

    The only thing we value as a nation is maximizing ROI.

    Profits matter more than people's lives and a burning planet.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uv1LkQ6I8

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwr9eQYOw1c

    P.S. There was a 21% increase in people diagnosed with type 1 diabetes between 2001 and 2009 under the age of 20 - and nobody knows why.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-diabetes-cliffhanger/

    Diabetes Mystery: Why Are Type 1 Cases Surging? Researchers are baffled by the worldwide increase in type 1 diabetes, the less common form of the disease

    For reasons that are completely mysterious, however, the incidence of type 1 diabetes has been increasing throughout the globe at rates that range from 3 to 5 percent a year. Although the second trend is less well publicized, it is still deeply troubling, because this form of the illness has the potential to disable or kill people so much earlier in their lives. No one knows exactly why type 1 diabetes is rising. Solving that mystery—and, if possible, reducing or reversing the trend—has become an urgent problem for public health researchers everywhere. So far they feel they have only one solid clue. “Increases such as the ones that have been reported cannot be explained by a change in genes in such a short period,” says Giu­seppina Imperatore, who leads a team of epidemiologists in the Division of Diabetes Translation at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “So environmental factors are probably major players in this increase.”

    (The US economy, for now, may be stronger but deep down inside we are much sicker than the UK.)

    1117:

    Oh, good! Are we having a competition for whose Highland ancestry is the most authentic? May I join in?

    FWIW, I was a sceptic about long-distance (especially undersea) interconnects until I looked up the figures; as you may have noticed, I am now convinced it is the best solution for the UK in the short term. I.e. the UK to a few north African countries, with a deal that makes both sides happy. The same applies to Europe in general, of course, though Spain and perhaps Italy are candidates for generation, too. Damian (#1017) has pointed out the principle problem :-(

    1118:

    Yup. The tragedy is it has been predictable for four decades, and the failure of our political system for several decades before that, but the sheeple (including the pundits) kept saying "the system is working as it is supposed to" and "it's just a few rotten apples". Well, it's broken, and will get worse - I shan't repeat my rip-off of Robert Graves again.

    He didn't mention the other scapegoat - Emmanual Goldstein, oops, Vladimir Putin. No, he did not cause the energy crisis, but he may have triggered it, because it was obviously coming anyway. At least we avoided the frog boiling effect, so he gets credit for that :-)

    Or Northern Ireland, where the gummint is determined to cause trouble, and we no longer have enough troops to restore order if that breaks down.

    Where I think that he may be wrong is the timing. I have been expecting a crash for a long time, but the ability of TPTB to plaster over gaping wounds astounds me. We shall know we are there when house prices collapse (and I don't mean by 20-30%, I mean by a factor of 2-3), which will have massive knock-on effects.

    1119:

    I have a daughter with late-onset type I diabetes, there is no known family history (not really of allergies, either), and my wife and I searched the literature for a plausible cause. We came up blank, and still do.

    1120:

    EC
    M Thatcher came to power in 1979 (?) - by the time she went, we were on a downward path, but it wasn't inevitable - the break-point was the disaster of the Brexit referendum & Camoron's abdication of responsibility. That was a true turning point downwards.

    1121:

    It was, however, predictable from after we 'won' (*) the Falklands war. I have been expecting Brexit (but not when) since Thatcher let Murdoch control our media and dumbed down our schools. Rothermere, Barclay and (worse) the Mandarins got on board later. It merely happened on Cameron's watch - he is a political irrelevance.

    The demise of our political system was predictable from the 1960s at the latest, mainly to Labour's abuse of it, but the real damage was done by the Conservatives from Thatcher on (and Blair, of course).

    (*) I and others said at the time that the victor would suffer serious social harm by enhancing the grip of the current leaders, and the loser would get a chance to throw out its leadership and rebuild its society. Yes, the winner would be the loser, and the loser the winner, which is a serious dilemma for a thinking patriot. And so it proved.

    1122:

    45 years ago government needed adjustments on both sides of the Atlantic to cope with externally imposed and self imposed stresses. Electing self referential reactionaries was not a way to accomplish these adjustments, even if "Conservatives" had the skills to perform the adjustments constructively, they would've been purged for insufficient orthodoxy. Destined to not end well from the beginning.

    1123:

    EC said: Oh, good! Are we having a competition for whose Highland ancestry is the most authentic? May I join in?

    We may as well. It's ridiculous enough to have an argument about. I'll start: before I retired I used to wear a kilt to work but only occasionally. Does that make me more Scottish?

    I did notice that you're an UHVDC convert. Yay!

    1124:

    Alloxan. The. Chemical used to bleach flour is also used to induce diabetes in lab animals….

    1125:

    "If you reduce the power output of a nuclear reactor to 70% for some hours, you will either have to shut it down or run it flat out 100% for approximately 72 hours, in order to keep the control domain stable."

    It has occurred to me that 1GW of heat for 72 hours corresponds to the melting or solidification of about 240,000 tons of salt (NaCl). So if you build a 1GW reactor in conjunction with a cube of salt 63 metres on a side, you can use the salt as a buffer, run the reactor at an output corresponding to the average load, and not need to vary its output over awkwardly short timescales.

    Of course, that's a lot of salt, but on the other hand there is a lot of salt. You could use the first bit of output from the reactor to boil a load of seawater, for instance. The cube is comparable in size with the reactor building, and with its capacity being proportional to the cube of the length of side it looks rapidly less formidable as you consider bigger versions (which also makes the crudity of the initial estimate less important). There is no tricky chemistry with radioactive materials because all you're doing with the salt is melting and freezing it. The heat comes at a conveniently constant and conveniently high temperature to help you make an efficient heat engine to convert it to electricity, and you don't get the losses of converting electricity to heat and back that you would with using thermal storage as a buffer for other energy sources.

    You can build them on the sites of old coal power stations, and point out to people who worry about radioactivity that they never bothered about the radioactivity that came out of the coal plant so they have even less reason to worry about the nuclear one, including that story about the nuke plant that had problems getting going because the coal plant upwind of it kept setting the radiation alarms off by way of illustration.

    1126:

    My surname is as Highland as it gets (*). My paternal grandfather was born in New Zealand, but his father in Edinburgh. However, my clan is perhaps the most scattered of all, as it was declared landless and chiefless after it told Malcolm Canmore to FOAD when he and his English wife imposed the fedudal system on Scotland. I don't approve of a Canadian agreeing to be recognised by Lyon King of Arms as the chieftain (in the 1950s), because why should WE recognise an official of the feudal system?

    You may recognise a certain inherited stroppiness :-)

    (*) Looking up Balquhidder will dox me, even more easily than my other posts.

    1127:

    We [the U.S.] are a deeply sick society, physically and spiritually.

    My guess is that a lot of our problems (such as obesity and diabetes) are caused by some of the millions of new chemical compounds we are exposed to daily. There are way too many new compounds to test all of them for safety, and their bad effects may be too subtle to be detected by standard testing anyway... :-(

    1128:

    Let me add that it's not just these new chemical compounds used by corporations that may be causing problems. No chemical manufacturing process is perfect, and weird trace impurities that nobody even knows are there may be causing problems too.

    1129:

    VERY interesting. Thank you. Looking up the references in Wikipedia, it has also been found at higher levels in the blood of children with type I diabetes than without. It's not actually used for bleaching, but is a trace byproduct of the modern process. The timeline is right, too, but is true for SO many other proposed factors. It's certainly plausible.

    1130:

    Haha, stroppyness is often well founded.

    I'm actually not all that highlands. My grandfather was born in Fort William, but the family came from New Cumnock as far back as we know, mid 17th C. That is nearly England. The other side from Lancashire, the Shuttleworth side of the family (who made steam engines). On my dad's side it's tea planters in India and some scallywag who was out in Australia in the early 19th, doing this and that.

    1131:

    It just shows that females & brown people can be fascists, as well

    That's hardly a surprise.

    When the system itself relies on having some one top and many on the bottom, it's hardly surprising that anyone who climbs the greasy pole will show the same behaviours no matter what their plumbing or pigmentation.

    I read Bad Medicine recently, an autobiographical account by a former judge about what's wrong with the criminal justice system in Canada as it pertains to Indigenous people. One of the things he mentions is that chiefs often run their reservations like the Indian Agents ran them (this being the only governmental model they know), so the same colonial abuses keep happening even with self-government — the poor majority are just colonized by the less-poor minority.

    https://rmbooks.com/book/bad-medicine-revised-updated/

    Like the generational trauma of residential schools, colonialism is a gift that keeps on giving…

    1132:

    "Alloxan. The. Chemical used to bleach flour is also used to induce diabetes in lab animals...."

    It isn't used to bleach flour. It's formed in flour during the bleaching process as a minor product of oxidation of natural constituents of the flour, and has been found in food made from such flour at levels <1mg/kg. It does destroy islets of Langerhans. I guess the moral is "don't feed your kids white bread".

    1133:

    the sheeple (including the pundits) kept saying "the system is working as it is supposed to"

    But it is working as it's supposed to — keeping the multitudes under control while they're exploited by their betters.

    1134:

    Or cakes or pizza or pies or .... As with loo roll, we would not impair our quality of life by not bleaching the stuff, and it would be ecologically better, and slightly cheaper.

    1135:

    I guess the moral is "don't feed your kids white bread".

    I've been baking with whole wheat flour for decades. Or unbleached white in the (few) recipes I need white for. Never understood the 'need' for bleached flour.

    1136:

    EC
    Err ... NO - Argentina is not exactly stable & prosperous, is it?

    1137:

    Compared to Galtieri and his junta? Look up "Argentina disappeared". If they had 'won', they would have been able to tighten their grip still further, and God alone knows how many they might have killed.

    1138:

    Pigeon
    HERE is a post WWII NBL 4-8-2 built sor South African Railways

    1139:

    But it is working as it's supposed to — keeping the multitudes under control while they're exploited by their betters.

    Yeah, but not quite.

    I agree that God-kings, aka authoritarian men who managed to slime their way above accountability, are an old curse. Indeed, I think we could make a case that they're the cause of what we regard as civilization (ignoring all those other cities that didn't have them), and dealing with them seems to be one of the basic dramas of civilization.

    This feels different to me. I think the "spiritual brokenness" reported among some MAGAts and others may be real.

    What's different is we currently have two apocalyptic narratives vibing with each other.

    On the one hand, we've got the ultra-rich, who are getting schooled by books like Keeping It In The Family that wealth is very hard to transfer from generation to generation, that the wealthy power civilization through their genius and beneficence, and that at the extreme, this justifies just about any action to hold onto wealth. This is the basic god-king narrative, also used in vampire stories.

    The other narrative is the apocalypse du jour, which says that people are the problem, and most or all of us have to die to solve it. This isn't quite the same as the climate-extinction crisis, because it's also showing up in zombie stories and, so far as I can tell, somewhat in the new civil war and ecofascist bullshit that's churning out there.

    I'm beginning to wonder if what's hit the UK is a confluence of the two streams. The toffs want to stay on top, and a bunch of them have decided that the only way this happens is if they survive the coming apocalypse. This justifies not just vulture capitalism but good old-fashioned rape and plunder capitalism, directed at their own people, not at a colony somewhere.

    The spiritual brokenness isn't in these particular chaotic evil bastards, it's in their followers. They know they're cannon fodder, but what else can they do? Who wouldn't break under such a lost-lost worldview?

    The nasty part is that it's hard to grow memes of rebuilding and hope for a livable future against that kind of broken nihilism.

    1140:

    Your last three paragraphs are what I have been saying for over 50 years (*), but failing to persuade people that cooperating with the 'better' of two evils is NOT the way out of the hole. We need radical change and, if that makes things worse in the short term, that's a price worth paying.

    (*) Except that there was no expectation of apocolypse 50 years ago, and it wasn't as extreme as rape and plunder capitalism, but 'merely' tribalism and corruption. We still have both :-(

    1141:

    Oh, good! Are we having a competition for whose Highland ancestry is the most authentic? May I join in?

    Based on incredibly thin evidence (but the only evidence I have) my male ancestors were serfs/peasants/tenant farmers/whatever they were called at the time, who where shipped over from Scotland to Maryland in the early 1700s as indentured servants so their landlords back home could switch to more profitable sheep.

    1142:

    From what I can tell people have been wanting to sort themselves about others for 6000+ years. Widespread literacy and cheap printing / publishing just allow us to talk and write about it more.

    1144:

    Oh, good! Are we having a competition for whose Highland ancestry is the most authentic? May I join in?

    Supposedly, my maternal grandmother's grandmother was a Scot. Do I get to be Scottish?

    1145:

    Your last three paragraphs are what I have been saying for over 50 years, but failing to persuade people that cooperating with the 'better' of two evils is NOT the way out of the hole. We need radical change and, if that makes things worse in the short term, that's a price worth paying.

    Perhaps the examples of all those failed communist revolutions worked against your proposed solution?

    I'm not trying to be snippy, because this is a real problem. My limited experience with the Green New Deal a few years back was cringe-inducing, because they were earnestly process-driven, and their process was designed to produce lowest common denominator unworkable stuff in the name of fairness and inclusion. I agree with Ilya that if the ones I interacted with get close to power, the most likely outcome is another Stalin or Pol Pot, not a green paradise. And if we must have a dictator (which I'm not convinced of by a long stretch) we need someone more like an Ataturk.

    1146:

    1085 - It's understandable that the G&SWR had their works at/in Kilmarnock; the majority, if not all, of their metals were South and West of Glasgow.

    1099 - Most soft fruit don't freeze (or thaw) well. The Scottish strawberry season is usually also known as "June and July".
    Also, in large parts of the World, hot cross buns are only baked and sold by that name during Lent.

    1100 - Well, my view on the "Tesco beef and horse lasagne" is that it was a failure of ingredient tracking; I'd be fine with horse lasagne as long as that's what it said on the packet.

    1103 - At an estimated 18_000 km^2 Sydney is a fairly big place, but you do have trucks and trains... ;-)

    1147:

    Or you could spend the money for a reactor of this type on a really big solar farm, a big battery, and some long cables - and get the whole thing done in half the time!

    1148:

    That was one of their arguments. What I was trying to persuade people (and still sort of do) is that we need to fix the governance system, restore and enhance checks and balances, and add mechanisms to discourage tribalism and similar corruption. I was and am NOT really pushing for a particular political solution (*), but tribalists really, really can't get their heads around such things :-(

    (*) https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/alexander_pope_159987

    1149:

    Troutwaxer @ 993:

    "But the only way to survive the coming techno-apocalypse is to build a society that doesn't end with a techno-apocalypse."

    Exactly. Where you gonna get parts for your force-field?

    More fundamentally, how many Dunning-krugerands will it take to buy the loyalty of your mercenary guards when there is no food for them to buy with them?

    How many bitcoins (or whatever the crypto-currency de jure) does it take to convince a mercenary to die for you? Especially AFTER the society that made Crypto-currencies "a thing of value" has collapsed.

    If you want something that will still hold value after the techno-apocalypse, build a vault to hold a couple tons of coffee beans.

    Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

    Truth is, they CAN'T leave us behind. They need US more than we need them.

    1150:

    David L @ 1039:

    Catch-22

    More like Catch-222

    1151:

    Martin Rodgers @ 1050:

    Yes, that sounds very much like the group I read about. ISTR they beat a Royal Navy admiral 5 times out of 5. Then the admiral discovered that the U-boat commander who beat him was a woman.

    I think that would make a great plot for a movie, but I somehow doubt it would be made. ...

    I don't see why not? They made a pretty good movie about the women "computers" who worked for NASA in the 50s & 60s.

    Hidden Figures

    Not only were they women, they were African-American Women! And it was a great movie.

    1152:

    But technically and historically it wasn't very accurate. To the point where some of us who liked the movie grimaced at those parts.

    But I also understand that reality over a year or few is hard to condense into 90 minutes without some fudging.

    1153:

    We're now seeing the same thing again with preserved railways. There is still a huge amount of Welsh steam coal available and not even difficult to get, but nobody can get permission to work it any more. Before Ukraine kicked off some railways were having to make do with coal from Russia, which they reckoned was like trying to burn rock and produced epic amounts of clag from the chimney no matter what you did. I'm not sure what they're using now but none of their options are great.

    Some years ago visited this place: https://no9minemuseum.wixsite.com/museum An old coal mine in Pennsylvania. The interesting part was that the tour guide was part of a group that was still mining the site as a hobby . (He coal mined in his day job as well). He said that his Grandfathers were miners, and it was in the blood (I didn't mention that my Grandfathers worked in the coal mines as well, no way I want to do that for a living).

    Anyway, perhaps you can get some anthracite from Pennsylvania for engine?

    :)

    1154:

    Troutwaxer @ 1069:

    • We know Elderly Cynic is (or was) on a standards body for a popular language, that Heteromeles wrote a book about climate change, that Greg usually gets the last word on trains, Charlie was a pharmacist, etc.

    I've got a high school diploma. 🙃

    1155:

    Can I just point out that the sewage overflows into the sea are not a new problem? It goes back to the original design of the system back in the Victorian era. I can remember as a boy seeing exposes on Nationwide about the amount of sewage in the sea, complete with underwater pictures of used bog paper rolling around in the waves. I also read in a technology magazine (I was that sort of boy) a passing note about the stupendous amounts of water leaking out of pipes before they got to our taps.

    So its no good blaming privatisation for these problems because the nationalised industry had plenty of time to fix them, and failed to do so.

    Of course the blame for the ongoing failure still lies squarely with the government of today. All that the nationalised water system had to do was persuade the Treasury to stump up the funds for fixing it. All the government today has to do is increase the fines for sewage overflows from "cost of doing business" to "no profit this year" and the companies will find the money. That they haven't done this is entirely at their door.

    1156:

    Greg Tingey @ 1071:

    VERY INTERESTING - more information needed - anyone got any more on this?
    I note that the original article mentions one of the usual difficulties - will it scale up successfully?

    At the end of the Guardian article is a link to the study published in Nature Communications.

    The Nature Communications article contains the following illustration showing the device configuration.

    1157:

    Magnificent. They did have some excellent steam power out there. Shame about all the rest of it...

    1158:

    Yeah. Me too. ~High Five!~

    1159:

    Yes, the actual problem was the failure of the checks on whether the meat was fit for human consumption (although it didn't actually turn out to be bad). To object over the loss of confidence was valid. But nobody thought that far, we just got hordes of people screaming "euwww" at something they'd been perfectly satisfied with when they actually ate it.

    1160:

    I was given one. As to where it is now....

    1161:

    Truth is, they CAN'T leave us behind. They need US more than we need them.

    Just try to convince them this is true, though. Like most of us, their fantasy beats reality, and they'll learn the truth only after the rest of us are gone...

    1162:

    David L @ 1083:

    Whatever.

    The Florida constitution now says most people who have served their sentence can vote. The legislature didn't like this so they wrote a law to make it as hard as possible (confusing) for people out of jail to figure out how to vote. And the governor is now gleefully going after those who can't follow the unfathomable rules.

    I don't think the Florida legislature set out to make the law confusing to entrap former felons; that was just a serendipitous (for the right-wingnuts) byproduct.

    All the legislature was trying to do was move the goal-posts for when the sentences would end (i.e. adding all imposed court costs & fines & fees & INTEREST on same to time served).

    A person may have served their time, but the state doesn't have to restore their right to vote because their sentence does not end UNTIL they have paid their DEBT to society; until all the fees, fines & court costs PLUS INTEREST have been paid.

    This violates both the Florida and U.S. Constitutions, but that's what the law passed by the Florida legislature actually says. Don't believe the legislature is made up of super-genius Machiavellis deliberately entrapping former felons. They're not that smart.

    They just wrote a stupid, hateful law whose unintended consequences are even worse than the intended consequences.

    1163:

    There are still blokes in South Wales who would do it for a hobby, age and decrepitude permitting. Sounds daft at first but it's not impossible to at least partly understand their point of view. When their own pits got closed down a lot of them emigrated to places like Australia or even South Africa so they could still work as coal miners instead of taking some ostensibly more pleasant option.

    Your idea might work if a bunch of preserved railways got together to all chip in for the shipping. Trouble is they're all struggling anyway at the moment because of not being able to operate under plague conditions.

    1164:

    Robert van der Heide @ 1087:

    Build a big dam and a bunch of turbines? ;)

    ... or maybe a bunch of damn big turbines?

    1165:

    They're not that smart.

    DeSantis is. And he got what he wanted. And then asked for and got almost what he wanted to go with it.

    An election police force.

    He asked for $6 million per year and 52 people. He only got $1.9 million and 15 people. So far they've arrested 20 people at a cost of $800K each arrest for the year. And so far it seems they all thought they had met the requirements as the local election boards issued them a voter ID.

    It's a part of Catch-22. The local boards can't tell who is allowed to vote but they are responsible for creating the voter rolls.

    1166:

    When their own pits got closed down a lot of them emigrated to places like Australia or even South Africa so they could still work as coal miners instead of taking some ostensibly more pleasant option.

    Deep mining in the US is almost a sure early death. The amount of anthracite coal that can be deep mined for a profit is almost nil. And the seams that are deep mined are much smaller than before. So basically the deep miner in the US are really heavy equipment operators that use low powerful wall grinders that chew out the rock and coal.

    While coal dust used to be responsible for black lung disease now it is the ground up rock that causes the problems. It is smaller and worse on the lungs than the coal dust is/was.

    I can't imagine anyone missing this.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/life-working-in-coal-mines-in-america-photos-2019-10#coal-mining-is-still-dangerous-in-2010-west-virginia-had-the-worst-coal-mining-disaster-in-the-us-in-40-years-when-an-explosion-killed-29-people-29

    1167:

    AlanD2 @ 1128:

    We [the U.S.] are a deeply sick society, physically and spiritually.

    My guess is that a lot of our problems (such as obesity and diabetes) are caused by some of the millions of new chemical compounds we are exposed to daily. There are way too many new compounds to test all of them for safety, and their bad effects may be too subtle to be detected by standard testing anyway... :-(

    I don't think we're yet seeing the effects of the NEW chemical compounds. We're seeing the effects of chemicals dumped into the environment during our grandparents and parents lives. It's our grandchildren who will have to deal with the toxic effects for current day chemical compounds.

    The worst is yet to come.

    1168:

    "It goes back to the original design of the system back in the Victorian era. I can remember as a boy seeing exposes on Nationwide about the amount of sewage in the sea, complete with underwater pictures of used bog paper rolling around in the waves."

    Hence my suggestion for decorating the vast and level sands. Turds to make sure people got the reference, and tampons because that's what you actually found on the beaches; the seagulls ate the turds. Somewhere off every little coastal town there was a spot where there were always seagulls wheeling and swimming about and picking something out of the water, and if you went over in a boat to see what they were up to you'd find an underwater fountain of turds all floating up to the surface. Bits of bog roll wrapped around anchor warps and buoy ropes were not unknown either.

    I don't know exactly how bad the current problem is, not having been to see. Having done the work to re-route the sewage to sewage works instead of the outfalls I wouldn't have thought they could simply switch it straight back again. What I do know happens is that exceptional peak flows - often because of storm and foul drainage going into the same pipes - overload the sewage works so they start discharging surplus water without it going through the treatment process. Someone downstream then measures increased levels of nitrates and bacteria, and before you know it there are headlines about rivers full of shit with no consideration for anything as dull as accuracy. This has always been an expected mode of operation under overload conditions, and the regulations aren't so simple as "it mustn't happen or else". We could be seeing deliberate malpractice, regulatory failure, or changes in rainfall patterns, or some mixture of indeterminate proportions; and the increase in news reports may indicate an actual increase in incidence or just a shift in journalists' attention.

    1169:

    I don't think we're yet seeing the effects of the NEW chemical compounds. We're seeing the effects of chemicals dumped into the environment during our grandparents and parents lives.

    I think it more likely that graphing the number of new chemical compounds over time will give you an exponential growth curve, which means that most new chemical compounds are relatively recent.

    But being more recent, they have had less time to impact us. So you're probably right that any current effects are due to older chemical compounds.

    The worst is yet to come. Agreed. :-(

    1170:
    FWIW it seems that a lot of farm machinery is already "power unit with accessories" so shipping machinery might be less hassle than it sounds. Especially if cutting heads can be swapped in so "the same" combine can do maize this year and oats next year (NFI though).

    Yes, swappable headers are existing technology. Have a poke around the New Holland website for all your GIANT MACHINE wants. :-) (Combines are a bit more complicated than "power unit and accessories" - they're called combines because they're combined reaping and threshing machines, the big header at the front does the reaping, the threshing happens in the machinery inside - and there's been a bit of a trend towards "self-propelled" special purpose machines instead of tractor-mounted or -drawn ones in the last while, but in the vast majority you're right.)

    1171:

    Robert Prior @ 1145:

    Oh, good! Are we having a competition for whose Highland ancestry is the most authentic? May I join in?

    Supposedly, my maternal grandmother's grandmother was a Scot. Do I get to be Scottish?

    One of my college room-mates claimed to be descended from Flora MacDonald 1 - grew up on a farm in Red Springs, NC where the Flora MacDonald Highland Games were first held in the 50s or 60s. All I really know about the games is they moved to Scotland County, NC in 2009 after being discontinued in Red Springs.

    Red Springs is in the next county over to the east, Hoke County. MacDonald settled in Anson County which is two counties over to the west.

    My Mother's maiden name is Moore. She was from Princeton, KY - about 50 miles from where David L grew up - actually Fredonia (pop 420), a "suburb" of Princeton (pop 6500). From the minimal research I've been able to accomplish, the Moores were a subsidiary family to Clan MacLeod of Lewis.

    My own family name is "English" (Norman?), with a "progenitor" who came to Jamestown in 1664 as an indenture, originating from "Briston".

    1 Flora MacDonald's link to North Carolina

    1172:

    That method of extraction more often than not fails dismally in South Wales, because there's a lot of faulting and not that many bits of seam which are long enough in one piece to let it work properly. It works in a few places, but most pits did better with other methods that are better able to cope with irregularities.

    Despite the long history of mining in South Wales, there is still a whole lot of coal there and even still reasonably accessible. There are deep mines that were still viable but were closed out of policy, leaving the steel works to ship coal in from overseas instead of getting it from over the road. There are innumerable places where miners operating off their own bat in ones and twos drove their own levels to get their own coal during strikes, often getting better coal than they were used to when they were working, but which haven't been worked "officially". Quite a few farmers also have done a bit of personal mining of seams on their land until the law noticed and shut them down.

    Although the geology is unusually bad for modern mass-scale extraction methods, it's also about the best in Britain for hobby-scale operations, because there are so many places where valleys have cut down through the seams leaving the edges exposed on the hillside so you can just drive a level straight in. For the kind of quantities that our preserved railways get through, you could basically supply them with coal from small-scale mining for as long as you like. You could even in theory operate the mine partly as a tourist attraction, if you were incredibly lucky, though it's a lot more likely to be a terrible idea. The problem is that the regulatory burden is insupportable for a volunteer effort; even proper mining companies can't cope with it these days.

    The miners knew fine about the health problems; they grew up seeing all the old men in the village struggling to breathe and seeing all the details of their own male relatives' progress to an early grave. It's similarly impossible not to be very aware of both present dangers, and past disasters which still cause pain generations later. The ones who emigrated to other coal mines were not going in ignorance. They just loved mining that much.

    1173:

    All you potential Highlanders... there can be only one :)

    1174:

    David L @ 1153:

    But technically and historically it wasn't very accurate. To the point where some of us who liked the movie grimaced at those parts.

    But I also understand that reality over a year or few is hard to condense into 90 minutes without some fudging.

    Hidden Figures

    The author of the BOOK, Margot Lee Shetterly had this to say about the movie:

    For better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie. Timelines had to be conflated and [there were] composite characters, and for most people [who have seen the movie] have already taken that as the literal fact. ... You might get the indication in the movie that these were the only people doing those jobs, when in reality we know they worked in teams, and those teams had other teams. There were sections, branches, divisions, and they all went up to a director. There were so many people required to make this happen. ... It would be great for people to understand that there were so many more people. Even though Katherine Johnson, in this role, was a hero, there were so many others that were required to do other kinds of tests and checks to make [Glenn's] mission come to fruition. But I understand you can't make a movie with 300 characters. It is simply not possible.

    Hidden Figures, the book ...

    The book reached number one on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers list and got the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2017. The book was adapted as a film by the same name, released in 2016, that was nominated for three Oscars.

    ANY TIME you make a movie from a book there are lots of things that get cut or mashed together. This is just as true for Hidden Figures as it was for Harry Potter, Gone With The Wind and The Ten Commandments. A 368 page book turned into a 127 minute run-time movie gives approximately 20.7 seconds to represent the contents of each page.

    If you think ANY movie tells the complete story, you're fooling yourself.

    It's like Billy Joel said:

    "If you're gonna have a hit you gotta make it fit
    So they cut it down to 3:05"

    1175:

    because there are so many places where valleys have cut down through the seams leaving the edges exposed on the hillside

    Sort of watched a documentary the other day about the start of mining in West Virginia. Someone with money went to see rumors of a 13 foot or so seam of exposed quality coal. And the race was on to supply coal to the mills in Pittsburgh.

    1176:

    AlanD2 @ 1162:

    Truth is, they CAN'T leave us behind. They need US more than we need them.

    Just try to convince them this is true, though. Like most of us, their fantasy beats reality, and they'll learn the truth only after the rest of us are gone...

    I don't think it will go that far, so I feel no compulsion to "convince them".

    The other side of the coin is the growing realization we don't really need them and I'm satisfied for them to find out the hard way before it's too late for the rest of us.

    1177:

    Yeah. But the really jarring one was where one lady started supposedly going in to learn the new computer at night. And it wasn't working and the techs couldn't figure it out.

    The lady moved an oscilloscope probe from one wire wrap terminal to another and the computer started working. Iiiiieeeeeee.

    And I'd be curious to hear from some of our top flight math wizards here about her doing reentry calculations in an hour on a single blackboard without any prep. Not just the equations but the solutions.

    1178:

    Pigeon @ 1174:

    All you potential Highlanders... there can be only one :)

    ... and he's probably number two (rhymes with poo).

    1179:

    1160 - I think we're on similar lines, with the note that I've said that I would knowingly eat horse.

    1154 and 1164 - And up in North Wales you can find redundant/retired slate quarrymen leading tours into places like Glodfa Gonol and Lechwed (both sp, due to lack of practice in Welsh)

    1172 - JBS, did your ex-roomie actually know about South Uist, where Flora MacDonald was born and grew up, and indeed then left for Skye with "her maid", "Bonnie" Prince Charlie dressed in drag?

    1180:

    David L @ 1178:

    Yeah. But the really jarring one was where one lady started supposedly going in to learn the new computer at night. And it wasn't working and the techs couldn't figure it out.

    The lady moved an oscilloscope probe from one wire wrap terminal to another and the computer started working. Iiiiieeeeeee.

    Only one 'I' and 3 "EEE".

    And I'd be curious to hear from some of our top flight math wizards here about her doing reentry calculations in an hour on a single blackboard without any prep. Not just the equations but the solutions.

    How would you visually represent the underlying processes - both the autodidacticism and the successful struggle for acceptance in an organization that is structured to dismiss you due to both your gender AND your race ...

    Explain it visually to a theater audience that wouldn't know the difference between a mainframe computer and a HAM sandwich (not to mention a HAM radio); a theater audience steeped in the trope that all it takes to fix a broken TV is to bash it on the top & wiggle the rabbit-ears.

    PLUS the scene has to accomplish these objectives in no more than 5 minutes screen time (probably less).

    It's a MOVIE, and it was NOT a movie made to explain things to engineers, computer programmers & rocket scientists.

    It was made for people who wouldn't be able to teach themselves FORTRAN from a book.

    Movies are NOT reality and their visual language often includes short-hand that is NOT a one-to-one representation of the real world. It can't be because often the audience doesn't even know the real world exists and wouldn't recognize it if it poked them in the eye with a sharp stick.

    1181:

    paws4thot @ 1180:

    1172 - JBS, did your ex-roomie actually know about South Uist, where Flora MacDonald was born and grew up, and indeed then left for Skye with "her maid", "Bonnie" Prince Charlie dressed in drag?

    I have no idea. It was around 1970 or so and he was a comp-sci major, so how much history he actually knew is debatable.

    That's 50+ years ago for a guy I shared a college dorm room with for approximately 9 months - he had other attributes [quirks] that are more vividly memorable, but I remember him telling me he was descended from Flora MacDonald & who she was. At the time I wouldn't have known enough about her to ask.

    I'm pretty sure what I did know about her at the time came from Junior High or High School North Carolina History classes ... so maybe a single one hour class period devoted to the subject some time in the 10 years before we were assigned to be room-mates?

    That would have been Six years before the Apple I and at least 10 years before the IBM PC, with Wikipedia still 30+ years still in the future. I really didn't have much interest in verifying his genealogical claims (note also this was 7 years before the Roots TV mini-series sparked interest in genealogy here in the U.S.). That's why I wrote he claimed to be descended from her.

    But Flora MacDonald & Red Springs, NC, where he was from, were popularly linked at the time; at least in that part of North Carolina. I did know Highland Games were held in Red Springs and that Flora MacDonald had something to do with Bonnie Prince Charlie and that was how she came to be "exiled" to the colonies, and North Carolina was the colony she was "exiled" to.

    PS: I also had a room-mate who claimed he was #648 in line to the Greek Throne, behind Pavlos, Crown Prince of Greece and 646 others. He never explained the chain of succession, but he introduced me to Ouzo, so I never interrogated him regarding his claim.

    They're just some of the odd factoids I remember from life.

    1182:

    My limited experience with the Green New Deal a few years back was cringe-inducing, because they were earnestly process-driven, and their process was designed to produce lowest common denominator unworkable stuff in the name of fairness and inclusion. I agree with Ilya that if the ones I interacted with get close to power, the most likely outcome is another Stalin or Pol Pot, not a green paradise.

    When did I say that? I am confused because this is something I would say, but do not recall doing so.

    1183:

    Sure, NASA. I'd like to share your optimism but I doubt WRENs would have the same appeal for a Hollywood audience, at least not without some heavy rewriting, as has been noted.

    Otherwise your points about Hidden Figures may apply. If there's a big enough demand for female-lead movies in the coming years, that would surely help.

    So I'll simply note that some rewriting was applied there, too. (15 women conflated into 3.) I would prefer to read the book, and yes, it's on my reading list. It's a long list, so there are many books I might not live to read. I hope that won't be one of them.

    1184:

    hot cross buns are only baked and sold by that name during Lent.

    ALDI officially call them spicy fruit buns or somesuch, but they have crosses on them. Sadly not on the website right now, which may explain why they weren't on the shelves last week when I was shopping. The labels were though so I'm hoping that was just a random variation in stock levels.

    1185:

    I'd be fine with horse lasagne as long as that's what it said on the packet.

    Heck, I'd pay more for it! Horse meat is usually healthier than beef.

    1186:

    When did I say that? I am confused because this is something I would say, but do not recall doing so.

    Maybe I misremembered, but IIRC you said something about your parents not liking AOC because she reminded them of the people who accidentally paved the way for Stalin to gain power. If I misquoted you, sorry about that.

    1187:

    I've got a high school diploma.

    And he's got a yellow hat!

    There's a funny song that features the lyrics (~0:50)

    I've got a lunch box
    I've got a bourbon,
    and he's got a yellow hat.
    After lunch we'll clearfell a forest
    and that's be the end of that!

    1188:

    I remember what happened to Glorfindel in Peter Jackson's movie. I didn't mind, of course. I simply smiled and thought, "Oh, poor Glorfindel." Yet another victim of the movie-making process.

    However, I remember a 12yo telling me how he was unhappy with the differences between the Harry Potter books and the movies. I smiled then, which was a mistake. I should've simply suggested he read LOTR. He'd seen the movies too, but not yet read the books. This was his 12th birthday, so I think he was the perfect age to read them. I read LOTR when I was 18, which for me was much too late.

    1189:

    Maybe I misremembered, but IIRC you said something about your parents not liking AOC because she reminded them of the people who accidentally paved the way for Stalin to gain power. If I misquoted you, sorry about that.

    Ah yes. I did write that. I just did not connect it with "earnestly process-driven, and their process was designed to produce lowest common denominator unworkable stuff in the name of fairness and inclusion".

    1190:

    It's not to my taste; I find it a bit sweet.

    1191:

    FWIW I vaguely remember something similar. And that it's a common theme among émigrés from the former Soviet bloc.

    It's something I find a bit invidious, because the implication is if you advocate for any kind of social justice you're in the same category as Stalin, even when all you do is work within a neoliberal model to make it less unfair. I see it as understandable to a limited extent, but hopelessly skewed toward an egocentric model of the world in terms of understandings about power and (especially) merit. To my somewhat awkward perspective about privilege and ability, such a viewpoint is deliberately blind to a range of unarguable facts and on that basis alone its values are not really any better than the totalitarianism it hates and defines itself around. But you have to at least hold a working assumption it's not coming from a place of evil intent and you can work with people like this, maybe at the micro level on specific issues by showing the facts in a morally neutral way.

    1192:

    I'm not trying to be snippy, because this is a real problem. My limited experience with the Green New Deal a few years back was cringe-inducing, because they were earnestly process-driven, and their process was designed to produce lowest common denominator unworkable stuff in the name of fairness and inclusion. I agree with Ilya that if the ones I interacted with get close to power, the most likely outcome is another Stalin or Pol Pot, not a green paradise. And if we must have a dictator (which I'm not convinced of by a long stretch) we need someone more like an Ataturk

    I should point out that I'm not against fairness and inclusion, if that got lost. My point is that fairness and inclusion are critical goals, and having fairness and inclusion as part of the process may be essential. Conversely, locking a group into a process that's notionally fair and notionally inclusive may not produce anything useful as a result. Part of the problem is that slow, clunky processes can be easy to hijack, maneuver around, or simply ignore. Speed and sharp elbows are useful, especially in the face of MAGAts and other functional invertebrates.

    1193:

    horse lasagne as long as that's what it said on the packet.

    Yeah, labelling matters. I'd be grumpy if it turned out my kangaroo steak was beef or horse. OTOH if I could buy roo or camel more easily I'd be happy... well, provided it was feral camel, the Australian farmed stuff is just as much an abomination as beef or mutton.

    1194:

    We make lasagne using haggis - much tastier !

    1195:

    1182 - That's fair; I learnt a lot of this history when I lived on Benbecula (next island up the chain).
    Well, the Wikipedia entry is accurate enough for government work.

    1185 - Oh, we do get "spicy fruit buns" but usually not with crosses on them.

    1195 - Wild haggis or farmed haggis?

    1196:

    FWIW I vaguely remember something similar. And that it's a common theme among émigrés from the former Soviet bloc. It's something I find a bit invidious, because the implication is if you advocate for any kind of social justice you're in the same category as Stalin, even when all you do is work within a neoliberal model to make it less unfair.

    See what I said in 1993, because I realized it could be taken wrong.

    My point is if a group takes a week to respond to some power-hungry authoritarian saying "go away silly people," they are going to have real trouble attaining their goals.

    Again, I'm not against fairness, inclusion, justice, diversity, or equity. However, I prioritize responding in real-time to changing conditions above all of these. As I'm learning, when things move fast, groups with fast response cycles have an advantage, and having one or a few deciders can make things move really fast indeed, although their responses may be inept or wrong.

    That's why I think fairness, inclusion, justice, diversity, and equity should be goals, not necessarily integral parts of the process to attaining the goals.

    For hypothetical example, if whoever won that $1 billion in the powerball lottery decided to devote that entire billion to completely subverting Florida politics to favor Blacks, Latinos, and the full rainbow of genders, that would both be completely authoritarian and achieve social justice goals. Would it be wrong for someone to do this if they could? Possibly, depending on what they did. But possibly not.

    1197:

    The other side of the coin is the growing realization we don't really need them and I'm satisfied for them to find out the hard way before it's too late for the rest of us.

    You mean like France in 1789? Long live the guillotine! :-)

    1198:

    On the subject of the U.K. getting ugly and dangerous, if anyone needs to leave we have a spare room and could put someone up for a month or two. Don't be afraid to ask.

    1199:

    We make lasagne using haggis - much tastier !

    As one who ate haggis on many Burns Night celebrations with other Scottish Country Dancers, I have to disagree... :-)

    1200:

    having one or a few deciders can make things move really fast indeed, although their responses may be inept or wrong.

    Australians have just had a few years of Scott Morrison being consistently wrong, admittedly sometimes only after a period of running away and hiding. It wears off really quickly. I suspect the UK is in for a round of that, the Truss government seems to be heading vigorously the wrong way restrained only by critical responses to their desire to slaughter thousands of their subjects.

    One of the slightly scary things about Vietnamese politics in Australia is the ready use of "communist" as an insult to close off political discussion. But only in areas like "helping people is communist", "changing the way we do things is communist" etc, never "a jackboot on a human face is communist" or "secret police enforcing secret laws is communist". Part of the context is "invading another country to change their government is good".

    It makes some discussions very difficult. During the protests against the invasion of Iraq quite a few of the Asian-Australian kids were really struggling at home because their parents were like "fuckyeah, bomb Iraq into the stone age and steal everything"... sorry, I mean "bring democracy to the people and liberate their natural resources". The looting of Russia wasn't a useful counter-example to people who would rather die than live under communism.

    1201:

    There's also the issue of a less stable climate. For example we've had a reasonably warm winter and some early warm spells, so my fruit trees are in blossom. We're about to get a cold snap though, which might, like last year, kill off those blossoms. Combine that with the fact that, even in the 9 years I've already been here, it's no longer possible to know for sure whether the things people have always planted here will even produce anything. It's been a few years since, as one example, I could guarantee a tomato crop from plants not in a greenhouse, which hasn't been a problem here until recently. The weather patterns aren't currently stable enough, so a lot of experimentation lies ahead.

    1202:

    Ahh, the interactions between colonisers and colonised. I can highly recommend The Dystopia in the Desert, which is about the result of 200+ years of white fellas in Australia and their dealings with the oldest culture on the planet. Consider this: there are Indigenous people alive now whose grandparents were alive when Australia was colonised. One of the most interesting points the book makes is that the Indigenous people in these communities have basically decide that white fellas have no law, they just make it up as they go along. It certainly answered a few questions I had, as someone who's worked in Indigenous health for some years now.

    1203:

    One of the slightly scary things about Vietnamese politics in Australia is the ready use of "communist" as an insult to close off political discussion. But only in areas like "helping people is communist", "changing the way we do things is communist" etc, never "a jackboot on a human face is communist" or "secret police enforcing secret laws is communist". Part of the context is "invading another country to change their government is good".

    So the Australian Vietnamese community came from evacuating South Vietnam at the conclusion of that war? If so, I've got similar stories from the US, because I know a number of ex-pats and the children thereof. The weirdest one was from the offspring of a South Vietnamese military intelligence officer, about how much of a pain in the ass it was to clean out his house after he died. He'd hidden all his valuables in elaborate ways, left decoys for thieves to find and grab, packed bug-out bags and defensive equipment, etc. They weren't at all sure they'd found everything when they sold the house.

    Anyway, I'm wandering. The real point is that American Vietnamese politics (surprisingly Republican) parallels your comment about Aussie-Vietnamese politics. So does Cuban-American politics (anti-Castro authoritarian conservatives). The joke about the latter is that, if you believe all the property claims that Cuban-Americans make about land Castro took from their families, you'd have to assume that Cuba was the size of China.

    1204:

    Very much so. In a way understandable, a lot of the older folk literally chose to risk death rather than live under communism. And most of them knew people who realised the risk.

    On a much happier note, there's a museum with a big collection of "standard mains plugs and sockets" because XKCD was not wrong about standards... and they even have a death adapter section. https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/index.html

    1205:

    On the subject of the U.K. getting ugly and dangerous, if anyone needs to leave we have a spare room and could put someone up for a month or two. Don't be afraid to ask.

    I'll second that.

    I'd also add that if people want this blog to evolve into situational reporting of what's going on across the UK and what the needs are, I for one wouldn't mind.

    1206:

    "or maybe a bunch of damn big turbines?"

    It's been considered. However, to call the engineering problems related to the site severe would be a severe understatement, so nowt as yet.

    JHomes

    1207:

    I'd nominate the UK situation as something we should add to the blog's list of what I call 'strange attractors,' that is, the subjects we always discuss.

    But my read on the situation is that anyone living the U.K. should decamp as soon as possible - the UK's reckoning with reality is clearly coming up soon and getting out while the going is good is something I'd strongly recommend - we seem to be looking at the cannibalistic stage of late-period capitalism.

    As far as "where in the U.S. you'd live," I'm in Southern California.

    1208:

    Some of us don't have the option to leave.

    1209:

    I'm aware of that, but I felt I should make the offer - I generally consider everyone on this blog to be a friend, or at least a serious acquaintance - so the door is open if someone needs it.

    There's not much I can do for those who can't leave, but I hope all goes well.

    1210:

    Gloddfa Ganol and Llechwedd... been round both of them, although it was a while ago now, also Honister in the Lake District. I believe Gloddfa Ganol has closed down now after the Oakeley quarry found some cracks where there shouldn't be any and reckoned there was an unacceptable chance of the whole lot falling down.

    Slate quarrying wasn't noticeably better than coal mining for your life expectancy, but for different reasons, like generally much more primitive living and working conditions and managements who responded to the slower-responding geology by massively taking the piss around safe working practices. It's comparatively easy to operate it in a safe-as-houses tourist-compatible manner by simply keeping an eye on things and not being bloody stupid. The coal seams in South Wales, especially the steam coal areas, are a different kettle of fish; weaker rock which can collapse more easily and unpredictably, unexpected water inrush from poorly mapped or unmapped old workings, explosive dust underground, sudden emissions of explosive, asphyxiating or toxic gases. Trained miners who understand the dangers and watch each others' backs cope with it, but trying to shepherd parties of green dumb tourists around with acceptable levels of safety while still working the mine is incredibly unlikely to be a good idea, even though you'd certainly get people being keen to take the tour (me, for one).

    1211:

    I am reminded of a Cave Clan trip where someone lowered a portable oxygen meter down a shaft we were thinking of descending and it started beeping. We decided that the "less than 15%" alert level wasn't worth putting to the test. It's technically survivable...

    I expect that similar events today use much better sensor setups. You can definitely buy battery-powered atmosphere monitors that read all sorts of things. And are much better than "flick a lighter and see whether it blows up or refuses to light" :)

    1212:

    Geez, I go away to visit friends, then Worldcon for a week and a half, and there's a thousand posts to catch up.

    About the industrial revolution - someone asked why the spinning jenny wasn't powered much sooner. Um, gents... and most of this blog is, because spinning was ->women's work<-, and (satire!) they've got nothing better to do, might as well get some use out of them, other than having children, washing clothes, and making dinner. (/satire).

    Let's go bigger - a lot of work in and around mines was done by children (and I mean under 7 years old). Who cares... certainly not the mine owners.

    Now let's look at what else was involved: a quick google tells me the first recorded patent was in `1431. That meant that whatever he had done - the patent was for 3 years - was then AVAILABLE TO OTHERS. And a few years later, we started with cheap paper, and M. Gutenburg. This breaks the whole system of secrecy, and only the students of x know how to do y. These two things are humongous.

    Then, in the Great Britain (we are talking early), with the Enclosures, you had a large class of cheap labor... and if you could do something faster with more labor, here it was.

    1213:

    Ah, psychiatrists. There are some good ones, I suppose. But the majority... I suggest you read/see One Flew Over The Coockoo's Nest, or, if you want really grim, Joe Haldeman's 1968.

    1214:

    Oh, and about psychiatrists, and hierarchies? My take on Freud was "society drives you crazy, I'll help you figure out how to live in it"... rather than "we need to change society, if as it's practiced it drives so many people crazy.

    1215:

    Um, Foxessa, you don't tell us which posts you showed them - clearly, you didn't show them all of them.

    And I don't quite understand you - did you troll us... or them?

    In any case, do please hang around.

    1216:

    Historians... I'll bring up again what I've read, that in the sixties, 70% of professors were tenured, and now it's 30%. And people with not merely no tenure, but no guarantee of anything.

    A good friend of mine, in Toronto, with a Ph.D. in history (specialty is the French Third Republic), who never got tenure track, in spite of consistently very high ratings from students. One time, he dragged himself to Vancouver (?) on his dime, taught for a year... then was told "go away boy, we don't need you".

    We'll skip the fact of how little any are listened to by politicians, much less the media.

    1217:

    1200 - I won't argue, but I will ask "Why?" Haggis can be too dry, too fatty or too peppery. So that's 3 ways if can classify as bad, even to a Scot who likes it.

    1201 "Australians have just ... of their subjects."
    Well, the French have nicknamed Liz Support "the Iron Weathervane" (presumably because she's a Margaret Hilda Roberts cosplayer who's views change with the wind), and a comment I heard yesterday was that when she arrived at #10 yesterday, she was carrying her plant pot (so she could stand in it and get watered).

    1211 - Thanks, and agreed.
    I haven't been yet but the Scottish Mining Museum supposedly contains a restored working face, and once again, uses redundant (coal) miners as tour guides.

    1218:

    I won't argue, but I will ask "Why?" Haggis can be too dry, too fatty or too peppery.

    As I remember (this was 40 years ago), it was pretty dry, and not much taste.

    1219:

    I was also living in the Los Angeles area at the time, which might have made a difference. Although a number of the dancers had immigrated from Scotland, so you'd think they would have ensured authentic haggis.

    1220:

    Yes, that can be an issue. As to immigrants, well US Agriculture have banned the import of real haggis to the USA.

    1221:

    Pink Floyd "Southampton Dock" might become the theme song for Mz Truss: https://genius.com/Pink-floyd-southampton-dock-lyrics

    All agreed with the hand on heart To sheath the sacrificial Knifes But now She stands upon Southampton dock With her handkerchief, and her summer frock Clings to her wet body in the rain In quiet desperation Knuckles white upon the slippery reins She bravely waves the boys goodbye again

    Lyric video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaTJ5xgNNeQ And of course The Final Cut does rather reflect the tone of moment too.

    1222:

    a lot of work in and around mines was done by children (and I mean under 7 years old). Who cares... certainly not the mine owners.

    Arsenic production at Devon Great Consols mine did not exactly follow best health and safety practices. The arsenic ore was roasted in ovens (Just above the word "Devon" in the Devon Great Consols" marker on map linked above) and the results sent up a long flue to a chimney up the hill a way (Right and a bit below the "Tavi Woods" marker you can see the shadow). Every now and again the fires were doused and the kids were given a sack, dustpan and brush and sent up the flue to collect the metallic arsenic that had condensed on the brickwork.

    It's a lot less obvious now due to some of the vegetation on the site being cleared when the price of tin made it viable to rework the spoil, but there used to be a different shade of green in the trees in a triangular area downwind of the chimney. An aerial photo of the site with that visible was the cover of an industrial archaeology book from the 70s.

    1223:

    Moz said: I am reminded of a Cave Clan trip

    Of course you were in the Cave Clan.

    One of my regrets is not following up on CC. I had some contact with a guy from CC in the early 90's. I was trying to get some leads on interesting dives in Sydney. I'm struggling to recall his name. Something to do with electronics? Or radiation? Triode? Phasar?

    Anyway they didn't have any leads and I was fully occupied with diving every day and I never got around to going on one of their intro trips, but I did pen a trip report for them on the Sydney Harbour Tunnel (the fun one with cables, not the boring one with cars). I don't know if it still exists in some archive.

    1224:

    Australian Vietnamese community came from evacuating South Vietnam at the conclusion of that war?

    Yes, but more than that. Wherever that war led to any humanitarian disaster (and there were many such instances), people left by boat for somewhere safer, and many of those boats came here. After Australia withdrew (in 1972) many Australians including many Australian veterans who had been there felt a moral obligation to Vietnamese people fleeing the war based on the idea that the whole premise for our involvement was flawed, therefore we bore some responsibility to help displaced people. In stark contrast to recent (at least in the last 26 years) refugee policy, we opened our doors to refugees from Vietnam, took in many thousands and suffered no harm as a result. Same deal for people from Lebanon in the 80s.

    1225:

    Real haggis is banned in the USA, full stop. It can't be made and sold there, either, because lungs are not permitted to be used in human food, though it's probably legal to make your own if you butcher your own sheep (or deer?), so I am not surprised it was grim. As I have said, my Scottishness is indirect, but I am another haggis-liker - unfortunately, my wife is not.

    https://www.mashed.com/197299/the-real-reason-scottish-haggis-is-banned-in-the-u-s/

    1226:

    And in Cornwall. Arsenic was valuable as an insecticide.

    1227:

    SOMEWHERE up-tread was/were a couple of "views from the US" of how bad people think it's going to get here ... but I can't find them.
    Could I grovel nicely & ask for a re-post of the links?
    I want to forward them to other people, that's why.

    Meanwhile the slow-motion screw-up & car-crash continues.

    Prediction - it's going to be like the description of: "How did you go bankrupt?" ......
    Gradually, then suddenly (!)

    Those of us who have already seen this coming, will of course be blamed, in a classic shoot-the-messenger trope, whilst the actual crash gets even worse.

    1228:

    The website is still up. http://www.caveclan.org/

    Names are really not my strong point, but Diode apparently. I got involved via Pred through CAT and my habits with gadgets.

    1230:

    That's kind, but I think that it will be mainly a gradually decomposition rather than a sudden breakdown - the English generally are not prone to action, and the communities that did take it are largely no more. I don't foresee anything more than increasing misery, economic decline, and decreasing environmental and social standards, at least for a year or so.

    Northern Ireland is, of course, different - and God alone knows what would happen if Scotland votes for independence and Truss or whoever tries to quell that by force. Or if whoever is in power in a year or two's time says that we cannot any longer afford state-funded medicine, social benefits, energy price caps, employee protection etc., so you peasants are on your own.

    1231:

    Indeed, though perhaps not as severe as building a tunnel under the Cook Strait :-)

    1232:

    Oh, thanks for the link. Stumbling around on that site I think it was Trioxide I was talking to. It really sounds like a grand adventure. Much regret at having not taken up the opportunity.

    1233:

    It seems the Queen is not in a good health, which is of course to be expected, as she is quite old. The Guardian

    So, that's one more thing for the crisis pile.

    1234:

    For those not in the UK, the BBC have just spent 30 minutes and counting saying "The Queen is ill".

    1235:

    When the family is being told "you'd better be here now", that's not good news at all.

    Yesterday I saw some scathing cartoons about the Queen feeling ill just by meeting Truss, and now that she may be actually seriously ill - oh, this is going to be "interesting times".

    1236:

    JBS @1172:

    actually Fredonia

    See here for the song "These are the laws of my administration" from the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup. Song includes the chorus "Hail, Hail Freedonia!"

    Groucho Marx (in character as Rufus T. Firefly) would probably be a better PM than Liz Truss. Julius Marx (Groucho's real name) would definately be a better PM. Julius was apparently pretty smart IRL.

    JBS @1175:

    ANY TIME you make a movie from a book there are lots of things that get cut or mashed together.

    "Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes." — John le Carré

    1237:

    Do we actually have a PM or a government at this moment?

    The Privy Council meeting where they were supposed to be sworn in was cancelled yesterday, so there's a question there for anyone with more constitutional knowledge than I possess.

    Interesting times indeed...

    1238:

    Yes, she swore in Truss a day or two back. All she has postponed is appointments to the the Privy Council, and all of the holders of the Great Offices are already on it. Whether we have a functioning government is moot, but we have one in theory ....

    1239:

    Oh hell. I'm reading that the BBC has gone black tie.

    1240:

    Do we actually have a PM or a government at this moment?

    As we in the US have found, much of our "how power transfers" is based on everyone playing nice.

    What would happen if the Queen had fallen and gone into a coma just after Truss won her inside the party election to be the next PM? Would the Queen have to recover or die and then Charles handle the transfer? And if she lingered unconscious for a day or year what happens?

    Of course it would be just more irony if she's unconscious in an ICU ward in Scotland for a year or so.

    Not trying to make fun of the Queen medical issues but just curious as to what happens legally.

    1241:

    Damian
    Many thanks - yes, that's it - will bookmark.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    I really hope HM makes it through this difficulty, as her death would give thr tories an opportunity for MORE distraction & lying that we can just do without.
    AND
    I & many people would miss her - I remember The Coronation in '53. { I was seven }

    1242:

    Meanwhile ...
    Creeping Closer - to a sustained fusion reaction.

    1243:

    No, Charles would be appointed Regent if she were in a coma; there are no major constitutional issues here. The only one would be if she had gone into a coma or died after accepting Johnson's resignation and before swearing Truss in, when there would have been a (very) short interregnum before Charles took over and a slightly longer one without a Prime Minister (i.e. direct rule) until he swore Truss in.

    I wish her well, but am not optimistic.

    1244:

    One of the most interesting points the book makes is that the Indigenous people in these communities have basically decide that white fellas have no law, they just make it up as they go along.

    So pretty astute observers, then :-/

    1245:

    American Vietnamese politics (surprisingly Republican) parallels your comment about Aussie-Vietnamese politics. So does Cuban-American politics (anti-Castro authoritarian conservatives).

    I knew Filipinos absolutely convinced that Marcos was a good leader, and Spaniards who yearned for the days of Franco.

    Any expat (refugee) community tends to be pretty hardline against the reason they left. And increasingly out of touch with the reality of what's actually going on in the 'home country'.

    1246:

    Ok, the crisis is no longer gathering, it's here: Ellen just told me that QEII just died 20 min ago.

    1247:

    No future, no future, no future for you.

    1248:

    Moz @ 1188:

    I've got a high school diploma.

    And he's got a yellow hat!

    That's fun, although I hope the magistrate DID keep them from clear-cutting the forests ... and continues to do so.

    OTOH, we partly have poor ecological practices by the timber industry in the early 20th century to thank for Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

    If the timber companies hadn't devalued so much of the land with clear cutting, it's unlikely the government and the donors could have afforded to acquire the land for the park. Today, GSMNP is the U.S.'s MOST VISITED national park.

    It's been almost 90 years now and the land seems to have recovered to a great extent.

    But I was just having a bit of fun with the paean to advanced degrees in the comment I was replying to.

    1249:

    Confirmed on the above Guardian link. Probably Truss either poisoned her or coughed plague all over her to deliberately obtain the effects Greg mentioned in #1242.

    1250:

    Many thanks for that link. Now occupying top spot on my list of things to see on any prospective visit to Edinburgh. The further north you go the less I know about the idiosyncrasies of the coal fields, so I expect it to be very educational.

    (Haggis: had some once, liked it. Don't think it was wild, but it was probably free-range rather than battery.)

    1251:

    Martin Rodgers @ 1189:

    I remember what happened to Glorfindel in Peter Jackson's movie. I didn't mind, of course. I simply smiled and thought, "Oh, poor Glorfindel." Yet another victim of the movie-making process.

    However, I remember a 12yo telling me how he was unhappy with the differences between the Harry Potter books and the movies. I smiled then, which was a mistake. I should've simply suggested he read LOTR. He'd seen the movies too, but not yet read the books. This was his 12th birthday, so I think he was the perfect age to read them. I read LOTR when I was 18, which for me was much too late.

    I was unhappy with the differences between the Harry Potter books and the movies even though I was already in my late 40s when the first book came out and was already familiar with the limitations of the movie format by the time it was made into a film. That really hit home with the second film which completely elided the S.P.E.W. subplot.

    But I got over it because I DO understand the differences in the two mediums. I mostly prefer the books to the movies made from them because the pictures in my mind are always way better than anything Hollywood special effects artists can come up with.

    In general my judgment of a film adaptation of a book is based on how well the film-maker is able to handle the themes of the book given the limitations of film. I think the film-makers did an Ok job of that with Hidden Figures.

    As the author points out, you can't make a movie with 300 main characters.

    1252:

    arrbee @ 1195:

    We make lasagne using haggis - much tastier !

    You can't get real haggis in the U.S.

    1253:

    AlanD2 @ 1198:

    The other side of the coin is the growing realization we don't really need them and I'm satisfied for them to find out the hard way before it's too late for the rest of us.

    You mean like France in 1789? Long live the guillotin

    Yeah, I dunno. I have no love for "Aristos", but I'm reluctant to do away with "due process" and all that. I think it protects me from persecution more than it protects them from getting their just deserts. How would you have France in 1789 while preserving the due process that protects me?

    1254:

    "You can't get real haggis in the U.S."

    I checked on Amazon and apparently there are various Ersatz-Haggises you can get in the US. I've never had any haggises, ersatz or the real thing, so have not much of an opinion on the matter. Wouldn't mind trying it.

    1255:

    I remember The Coronation in '53. { I was seven }

    I was nine, and I remember seeing movie newsreels showing the coronation while living in North Dakota.

    1256:

    One of the most interesting points the book makes is that the Indigenous people in these communities have basically decide that white fellas have no law, they just make it up as they go along.

    Pretty much the same thing happened here in the U.S. with native Americans... :-(

    1257:

    Any expat (refugee) community tends to be pretty hardline against the reason they left. And increasingly out of touch with the reality of what's actually going on in the 'home country'.

    The anti-Castro Cuban community in Florida is another example of this.

    1258:

    Ok, the crisis is no longer gathering, it's here: Ellen just told me that QEII just died 20 min ago.

    Sad, but not surprising. The end of an era. Good luck to those of you on the other side of the pond!

    1259:

    "But I got over it because I DO understand the differences in the two mediums."

    I don't consider that an adequate excuse, especially when the result no longer makes sense, converts militarily logical strategic and tactical situations into militarily stupid ones, converts noble characters into bellends for no reason, etc. etc. etc. If they want to make a film of a story that resembles what they've got in the film then they can jolly well make up their own story, not pinch someone else's and roger it and pretend it's still the same thing.

    I think it's particularly undesirable when far too many people watch the movies, especially as kids, without ever having read the books, and grow up thinking that the silly plot and characters are actually correct.

    "I mostly prefer the books to the movies made from them because the pictures in my mind are always way better than anything Hollywood special effects artists can come up with."

    I agree with that, definitely. Though I would make a partial exception for stories that are set in real locations that I'm not familiar with myself, and the film is then made in those same correct locations. Unfortunately it nearly always isn't.

    1260:

    Yeah, I dunno. I have no love for "Aristos", but I'm reluctant to do away with "due process" and all that. I think it protects me from persecution more than it protects them from getting their just deserts.

    Here in America, "due process" serves the wealthy much more than it does the average person. Funny how the best lawyers are usually the most expensive ones...

    1261:

    Apropos of nothing, I keep wondering if it's possible to design a "working" political system along the following lines:

    --It's some flavor of representative democracy.

    --When someone becomes super-rich, they automatically become ennobled.

    --Nobles have no right to vote in elections or participate financially in elections.

    --Instead, their job is basically to caretake a White Elephant, in this case some critical infrastructure, carbon sequestration, or whatever. A suitably-sized portion of Crown Lands, basically, which their fortune leases from the Crown on a long-term basis.

    --They also get a chain of office: a blockchain. The blockchain system keeps track of their wealth and the wealth of their vassals. Screw up that blockchain, and they not only lose control of their wealth (can't prove they have it anymore, after all), they have a bunch of really angry vassals ready to appropriate their fortune to make themselves whole again.

    --They and their heirs get lifelong education in the importance of Duty and Service to their Country at all times. National and local service is strongly encouraged, as is substantial charity.

    --They can, at any time, turn their fortune over to the Crown and become commoners again, with no fortune but full common rights restored.

    The question is, has anyone in SFF proposed such a system?

    The point of this is that billionaires are fracking political systems all over the globe with their extreme wealth. I'm trying to figure out how to put them to good use without allowing them to consume the planet. Getting from here to there of course requires a miracle (or aliens), so this is just a thought experiment.

    1262:

    The anti-Castro Cuban community in Florida is another example of this.

    What I find weird about anti-Castro Cuban community in Florida is that it is not original refugees -- it is their grandchildren. I am not nearly as right-wing as my parents (by European standards I am somewhat right-wing), and my children are not at all. That seems par the course with other 2nd and 3rd generation Soviet immigrants I know. Why do Cubans stick to it?

    1263:

    Why do Cubans stick to it?

    Did your parents and grand parents talk non stop about the future day when they get back their stolen property?

    Do your local politicians talk about how they will work long and hard to wrest your home country from the evil commies?

    It so bad in southern Florida that politicians play election ads on Spanish radio that bears no resemblance to their English talking points. It is all about Cuba, Castro, and taking back what is rightfully theirs.

    1264:

    I can't see it. You'd be asking them to perform an instant about-face, from seeing everything in terms of making money, to looking after something real and useful which does not respond to finding a different way to make some numbers up as a control input. I think the outcomes you'd get, in order of decreasing desirability but increasing likeliness, would be: they're just useless at it and might as well not be there; they're bad at it and fuck it up; they devote their efforts to finding ways to subvert the system and carry on doing the same kind of thing as they were before, fucking their caretaking job up if they fail and fucking it up worse if they succeed.

    I note the "lifetime education" bit but of course that won't begin to apply until after the transition, and I can't imagine a way to make the transition actually work. Of course if the setting includes functional magic (ie. either real magic or sufficiently advanced technology) then you could postulate that Those Who Are Really In Charge have the means to completely erase someone's lifetime experience and reboot them from scratch after installing a non-pathological OS, but that sort of thing has so many other implications that I'm not at all sure it would sensibly lead to the right sort of story.

    1265:

    I agree with your skepticism.

    This is sort of the hostage-taking scenario that kings have done for quite some time, where the rich and powerful surrender something valuable to stay rich and powerful (and alive).

    One thing that might drive people into this is the equivalent of negative interest. This would be from financial systems being so comprehensively hacked that the cost of demonstrating that you actually have the funds you say you have produces a large use fee, effectively a negative interest rate.

    In these circumstances, using the money to buy real property is a good strategy (this happened in Medieval times, with kings periodically recoining for a percent of coin value). Having your fortune bought up by the Crown Lands in return for a equivalently sized, secure, but subsidiary role in that system might be worthwhile.

    This might even conceivably play a role in fighting climate change: for example, if a forest is worth more standing than cut down (because the value of money after it sells starts decreasing immediately, while the future value of the wood grows as long as the trees do), then the financially savvy might invest in forests, so long as the cost of forest care is less than the cost of caring for one's money.

    Anyway, I'm just goofing around. My real purpose is to find a way to weed out the billionaires. You're quite right that some of them are real crooks, and bringing them into the system won't make them honest. For some, strapping suicide vests around their heirs wouldn't make them honest, apparently.

    1266:

    I was just having a bit of fun with the paean to advanced degrees

    Yeah, you just reminded me of the funny song and I thought I'd one-up your (lack of) qualifications. Sometimes it seems that all it takes is a hardhat and bingo, the wearer is an authority.

    The forest fight is a long slow grind, with occasional outbreaks of sanity from higher up the chain but there's always a government department who have always been and will always be the "Department of Logging Native Forests". They don't care about economics (pointed-headed academic bullshit) or environment (fucking hippy bullshit), they care about decent jobs for hard-working real men doing honest work.

    The time to stop improving unused land is when it's all in use. Ie, there's no native forest left at all. Luckily sometimes even right wingnuts ask questions like why are we paying taxpayer dollars to collect hard-to-sell native woodchips that no-one wants, leaving behind rough as guts land that no-one wants to use for anything?

    The latest round of legislative improvements from the religious hardliners explicitly talks about a timeline to end all native forest logging on state owned land. But it also has a pile of exceptions and ministerial discretion that suggests logging could continue. So it mostly depends on getting a green-ish government in who can use that legislation to say "oh gosh, is that the time? Logging has to end by two years ago, stop immediately".

    1267:

    What I find weird about anti-Castro Cuban community in Florida is that it is not original refugees -- it is their grandchildren.

    Not weird at all to me. The crazy Sikh extremists we have in Vancouver are third generation. I once read somewhere* that the first generation survives, second generation assimilates, third generation goes back to the roots that their grandparents remember (or that they remember their grandparents remembering).


    *Can't remember where.

    1268:

    Kardashev @ 1255:

    "You can't get real haggis in the U.S."

    I checked on Amazon and apparently there are various Ersatz-Haggises you can get in the US. I've never had any haggises, ersatz or the real thing, so have not much of an opinion on the matter. Wouldn't mind trying it.

    Yeah, they sell something called "haggis", but AFAIK, it doesn't have all of the ingredients a Scottish haggis would have and you CANNOT bring a Scottish haggis into the U.S., even for personal consumption. If you're flying into the U.S. your baggage has to go through an inspection and the USDA (or someone?) confiscates it.

    That's if you declare it on your customs forms. If you don't declare it & they catch you, they're not only going to confiscate it, but you're probably going to be detained ... maybe just refused entry and your passport stamped PERSONA NON GRATA, but possibly charged with a crime and STEEPLY fined, if not jailed.

    1269:

    I once read somewhere* that the first generation survives, second generation assimilates, third generation goes back to the roots

    The pattern I see at least that often is the third generation can sort of speak the language enough to keep the grandparents off their back, but really hate the culturally inappropriate bullshit that the grandparents try to force on them.

    I might be biased by spending a lot of time in queer communities, but it's a pattern I see in random friends of the ex-gf as well. Watching some hairy feral dress up in cultural drag to visit their parents is funny for me, and often painful for them.

    OTOH the second gen ones often have family relationships with people in the home country and are more comfortable visiting them than their parents who fled the place. My ex was back in Vietnam recently going to a wedding and showing her new man the place. She said I would have hated it, the wedding was basically a week of intense drinking and socialising as everyone came to visit. New man apparently survived but did spend a couple of days off looking at sights while she stayed with relatives and enjoyed the festivities. Both were sick when they got home, but not covid just visiting new places and collecting new bugs.

    1270:

    In our case it comes from dealing with a culture that has Law -- everyone knows the Law and everyone knows the consequences. Everyone suffers the consequences, no matter what -- because they all the Law. An alien concept I understand, but preferable from my point of view. Add to that a predominantly matriarchal system; from my somewhat limited understanding from Arnhem Land the elder women make the decisions for the group and their brothers make it happen. Quote from an Indigenous colleague:"A man who has no land and no woman has nothing". I asked him if he could explain the domestic violence rates considering that and he very sadly replied that he couldn't.

    1271:

    People who get fucked by the system take it out on whoever is around them. When your experience of the powers that be is nasty, brutish, and irrational it's difficult to stay above it and remain polite and reasonable. When authority means harsh control and hitting people, it's easy to take that approach with people you have authority over.

    And of course the settler society says men have authority over women and children... you see many female cops and female soldiers policing black communities?

    everyone knows the Law and everyone knows the consequences

    In theory that's the case with British based legal systems, "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and all that. Mind you, Australia has secret laws that no-one may know the detail of as well as the aforementioned platitude, so I guess we just have to hope none of those laws apply to us.

    My limited exposure to first nations law here is that Law has been deliberately broken by the colonial governments. When there's two sets of laws and one regards itself as inherently, inescapably superior... enjoy that uranium mine in the middle of your sacred land.

    One place I visited in WA they told me that the local mining company had deliberately targetted a couple of sensitive areas in the 1960's in order to remove their ties to that land. You can't make a land claim based on connection if what you're connected to has been removed... if you also can't bring your kids up in culture because of that so what? It's not the colonial government's problem that you're broken and defective in that way as well.

    When I moved to Sydney from Wellington I was shocked by the racism against first nations people. Seeing one of my friends angry/crying at an invasion day event after she was abused was really hard to deal with. It's like... people do that, here? WTF?

    Then I visited Broome and got exposed to third world Australia and the colonial police. Hoo boy, there's whole new levels of racism that I hadn't even imagined still existed. Since then I've visited Alice and seen the town camps and stuff... just keep digging, Australia.

    If nothing else it made me really hard on myself for my lingering "nice white boy from New Zealand" type racism. I AM NOT like (other) Australians.

    (this is a bit hard to write, sorry. And it's not always that bad, I've stayed with people who have their shit together but somehow they're always penalised by racism. And especially mistakes... a black person making a mistake does so because they're black (subtext: to recover they need to stop being black. Coconuts and colourism, here we go))

    1272:

    A lot of your suggestion sounds similar to the good aspects of the British landed nobility thing. They had a natural interest in preserving their lands for future generations, and they had positions of status conferred in a well-defined manner by circumstances beyond their control, which were more prestigious than the ersatz status pretended by people who just had a lot of money. (A poor lord is still a lord, but a rich merchant is still just a pleb.) It didn't mean they couldn't still be arseholes, but it did tend to mean that they would at least be rationally preservation-minded arseholes, rather than dumbly destructive arseholes happy to burn stuff down to enjoy the warmth instead of putting a coat on.

    Of course there is the big difference that there was not a mechanism for switching between the two status categories of "lord" and "merchant" in response to circumstances, rather it depended on the value system that maintained those categories in their relative positions and kept them strictly separate. It came apart through people gradually adopting a different value system which recategorised status as a univariate function of money. Neither system would work to stabilise your idea; you'd need some new kind of value system, such as one which is principally defined in terms of conservation and repair. I dare say you have plenty of experience in the practical difficulties of promoting such a system...

    1273:

    AlanD2 @ 1261:

    Here in America, "due process" serves the wealthy much more than it does the average person. Funny how the best lawyers are usually the most expensive ones...

    Perhaps, but I still think us "average persons" would be worse off (far worse off) without it.

    And many of our current problems stem from the extent some OTHER people are trying to take it away from us.

    1274:

    Some odds & ends

    "The goal of the Republican party is to make its control of the US government as immune to democratic opinion as Putin’s regime remains for the moment."

    -- I stole this quote from somewhere, but I can't remember where. I agree with it 110%.

    We've had some discussions here before regarding right-wingnut influence in the U.S. Military impinging on the government. It kind of works the other way around. When the fascists control government they try to force the military to violate the Constitution and the military has only a narrow window to push back against such misuse.

    Best Practices for Civil/Military Relations

    Pay particular attention to item #2

    Civilian control operates within a constitutional framework under the rule of law. Military officers swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not an oath of fealty to an individual or to an office.

    ... also item #8 "must implement them provided that the directives are legal."

    They don't really come right out and say it, but this is a response to Trumpolini's abuses.

    Signed by EIGHT former Secretaries of Defense and FIVE former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs

    1275:

    I note that a lot of social media in Aotearoa people are struggling with the idea that Charles won't be Queen. Seeing far too many "change of Queen" and "a new Queen" type remarks.

    I mean, he could become Queen I assume. But he hasn't shown any sign of wanting too and he's getting on a bit for that kind of change.

    1276:

    There was a comment being quoted on Twitter being (ironically) outraged that Charles was going to be a King and that this wokeness was going a bit far.

    1277:

    Her Majesty's Ship Queen Elizabeth recently set sail for the United States to take part in military exercises there, replacing HMS Prince Of Wales which broke down outside its harbour after setting out on the same mission a couple of weeks back. The actual Prince of Wales is now Charles III and His Majesty's Ship Queen Elizabeth is continuing on its voyage, being the same ship but with a slightly different name.

    The manufacture of postage stamps, coins and banknotes will all have to be reworked since they all bear the Monarch's visage. I presume plans were already in place for this changeover, we will find out the details in due course.

    1278:

    I went on a tour of the Canadian Mint many years ago (mid 80s?). I asked someone just that, and they confirmed that they had dies for all potential successors ready to go.

    Maybe they'll run out the calendar year with QE2's visage before changing to KC3's. Presumably by now they have ones for KW5 and KG7 in case our current monarch quickly snuffs it like Pope John Paul I. Or Edgar Ætheling.

    1279:

    More odds & ends ...

    RepubliQans - Theocratic ethno-nationalism weaponized in the service of plutocracy!

    U.S. mid-term elections in 2018 - a little bat in China was saying, "Guys, I'm sure it's just allergies!" [Stephen Colbert]

    Lets see if this works ...

    Meanwhile back in the States ... Exclusive: Georgia probe into Trump examines chaplain's role in election meddling [Reuters via Archive Today]

    1280:

    "In theory that's the case with British based legal systems, "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and all that." That's sort of the problem, we are assumed to know the laws and their consequences and we really really don't, and that's without starting on "everyone is treated equal under the law". Right. But they actually DO know that, at least in the communities where they didn't lose an entire generation of initiated men to jail and alcohol and other drugs. There actually are female cops in the various communities I've worked with over the years, and not just in the DV/Sexual Violence units, which is often the case. But Indigenous people living in remote and very remote communities have all the problems of low socioeconomic people everywhere, with side helpings of racism, being hundreds of miles from anywhere else, English as a second/third/fourth or even none language and people in authority saying thins like "living in remote communities is a lifestyle choice". When we're talking about people who are so attached to the country they can literally die from homesickness if kept away from it, I can't even.

    1281:

    "...they're going to make a MAN queen..." To which my response was:"But they're all men in Queen, I don't understand."

    1282:

    Men can be queens too. Especially in Australia :)

    Maybe that's why he wanted to buy land here and be Guv'nor General?

    1283:

    Well, I guess the fact I live in Queensland gives me a perspective on this. The queen of the name died over 120 years ago, not just this week. And the name is like that because "Victoria" was already taken. The reasons why it wasn't just named for someone else seem to be muddy and turbid, but I suppose of the the likely contenders (PM's between the first petition for Queensland's independence in 1851 and the Act establishing it in 1859), Palmerston, Derby, Aberdeen or Russell, none are very inspiring. Earl Grey was instrumental in getting the Act that established a process for new Australian colonies to separate from NSW passed, so perhaps the most likely alternative name for Queensland would be Grey. Because that wouldn't be confusing at all...

    1284:

    Reported conversation between Her Majesty and a guest at a garden party:

    And what do you do?

    I'm a photographer.

    Really? I have a cousin who is a photographer.

    That's a co-incidence! I have a cousin who is a queen!

    1285:

    So it's not just the money that changes, we have to get used to having a state called Kingsland?

    1286:

    Nah, that would be Elvis. You're fine sticking with Freddie.

    1287:

    More odds & sods or whatever ...

    Trump has OTHER legal difficulties in addition to the theft of government documents & mishandling of CLASSIFIED documents at Mar-a-Largo:

    • The Fulton County DA is investigating Trumps attempt to overturn (steal) GA 2020 election results
    • The DoJ IS investigating Trump's involvement in the Jan 6 insurrection
    • The Manhattan DA is investigating whether Trump org misled investors about Trump's wealth (and what involvement he might personally have had in that)
    • The NY State Attorney General is investigating Trump's finances for tax evasion & fraud
    • The DC Police & House Democrats are suing Trump for inciting Jan 6 violence
    • E. Jean Carroll is still suing Trump for Defamation (arising out of an alleged sexual assault). In addition to denying the assault, Trump called her a liar, which "damaged her reputation, substantially harmed her professionally, and caused emotional pain"
    •Trump's niece Mary Trump is suing Donald Trump for swindling her out of her share of an inheritance
    •Michael Cohen is suing for "retaliation for his protected speech.". Cohen was released from prison to home confinement due to Covid. When Trump found out about Cohen's book, Cohen was sent BACK to prison and held in Solitary Confinement until a Federal judge ordered his release. The suit includes Trump, Attorney General William Barr, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and the Warden of the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York.

    These are just the ones I've heard about. Trump uses litigation as a smokescreen and delaying tactic. But his current opponents are NOT going to be cowed or run out of money.

    Why Fulton prosecutors are interested in Coffee County data breach

    Handling of Georgia election breach investigation questioned

    America Is a Rich Death Trap

    And finally (for now) - I spent most of today down at the DMV to renew my driver's license, which NOW will NOT expire soon. I expected to spend a long day there. I went down this morning and was told I had to have an appointment. Fortunately they will MAKE appointments between 8:00AM and 10:00AM, and I was able to make an appointment for 1:00PM. It only took a little over 3 hours from my appointment time before I was able to go through the process & get my temporary renewal (the real license will arrive in my mailbox within 15 days or so).

    I noticed they are excruciatingly under-staffed. And I believe this IS a DELIBERATE PLOT.

    Back several years ago the North Carolina Legislature was controlled by RepubliQans who passed a voter PHOTO ID law. They tightened restrictions on who could issue acceptable forms of ID, and mainly you have to have either a NC Driver's License or a NC DMV issued non-driver PHOTO ID. There are other IDs that are acceptable - Military ID, U.S. Passport, ... but NOT College IDs.

    At the same time they cut the DMV's budget so their offices will be overwhelmed most of the time by just the regular issuance of Driver's Licenses. The added burden of providing the non-driver PHOTO ID (and the restrictions on what documents are acceptable to obtain it) are deliberately designed to discourage people who don't drive from voting, by denying them acceptable ID.

    This overwhelmingly affects Black Americans and other poor Americans (who for whatever reason do not drive), which is why the courts have stayed implementation of the Voter PHOTO-ID law.

    But the bottom line is the wait times at DMV are deliberately intended to deprive American Citizens (who are not likely to vote RepubliQan) of their Constitutional Rights. I lost count of the number of people who were turned away because they didn't have an appointment, but I did notice they were overwhelmingly non-white.

    To repeat ...

    "The goal of the Republican party is to make its control of the US government as immune to democratic opinion as Putin’s regime remains for the moment."

    The RepubliQan party was a corrupt, anti-American organization long before Donald J. Trumpolini came along. He didn't steal the party, he is the apotheosis of the RepubliQan party.

    1288:

    Trump is definitely the symptom rather than the disease, but what an ugly, drippy pustule he is!

    1290:

    On the bright side, Australia's apparently in the market for some nuclear submarines. You could sell us some of your spares to raise a bit of revenue.

    1291:

    BREAKING: Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel behind Bill Clinton's impeachment, is dead at 76

    Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is DEAD. I feel sorry for myself that this makes me so happy. I know it doesn't say nice things about me as a person.

    But he deserves it.

    1292:

    I try very hard to be classy about a death, regardless of who died or how vile they may have been in their personal or public lives. That said, some people make that classy behavior easier and some people make that harder... 'nuf said, I think.

    1293:

    I have no doubt that he was a disgrace, but weren't (and aren't!) there a lot much Wickeder Witches than him in the GOP?

    1294:

    Search for Ken Starr Baylor. His record as a human being had some real weaknesses.

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    This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on August 22, 2022 1:13 PM.

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