Jez Weston

Jez Weston

  • Commented on Decision Fatigue
    But at least the entirely-foreseeable crypto disaster has one bright side, on top of the schadenfreude. Satellite sensing has show just how much methane is leaking from old wells. Many of these are claimed to be far from electricity grids,...
  • Commented on Decision Fatigue
    Pumped hydro isn't dead in the water but build rates are pretty flat - it's too expensive and hard to build unless you have an excellent site that hasn't already been developed AND you have a very specific need. The...
  • Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
    Yeah, electrification of railways in the UK is an example of how not to do it but the rest of the transport fleet is heading in the right direction pretty quick. Electric car uptake is getting there. Battery EVs should...
  • Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
    It's looking like Europe is serious about breaking the dependence upon Russian oil & gas, for the simple and obvious reason that it's a foolish idea to pay your enemy a couple of billion Euros every week. The EU is...
  • Commented on Obligatory Hugo eligibility post
    If you're interested in Aotearoa New Zealand's climate and energy policy, then: Puncturing the waterbed – climate policy needs more than the Emissions Trading Scheme Tricksy emissions accounting is not the outrage. Carbon offsetting is. The Emissions Trading Scheme just...
  • Commented on The Pivot
    I feel that detoxifying the Daily Mail is akin to decommissioning Sellafield. It's a fifty year job that won't be complete until the most toxic waste is entombed in concrete and buried in a deep hole....
  • Commented on A bright and shiny hell
    You'd think the Russians would be more concerned with our recent penetrations of their airspace with nuclear bombers (http://www.spyflight.co.uk/robin.htm) or maybe that our nuclear deterrent is explicitly designed to destroy Moscow. Let's face it, if countries are going to be...
  • Commented on A bright and shiny hell
    Ever higher video resolution makes new forms of surveillance possible. It's not just facial recognition and gross motor movements. Four years ago, researchers were detecting pulse rates from head movements (http://people.csail.mit.edu/balakg/pulsefromheadmotion.html) and skin colour changes from one person. Breathing rate...
  • Commented on Help Wanted at the Climate Policy Sausage Factory
    To add some global context to this - there are a heap of emissions reduction technologies and strategies. The cheapest thing any person or nation can do to reduce carbon emissions is to take those technologies and strategies and implement...
  • Commented on Rejection Letter
    We know how to build secure and reliable software for large, complex machines that will kill people when they go wrong AND will be in service for decades. That's what the aviation industry does. There's only four things that need...
  • Commented on Popcorn Time
    (OGH: It was indeed very off-topic. Your blog, your rules.) Regarding the reunification of NI/Ireland, it strikes me that there's a worryingly feasible chance that this could happen. No-one wants it, but we've had a year of things happening that...
  • Commented on Popcorn Time
    To return to OGH's topic, there's a bunch of interesting questions to discuss: 1) What a trade agreement between the rUK and NZ would have to look like, for the NZ and other former colonies to show any interest? 2)...
  • Commented on Popcorn Time
    UK ex-pat in New Zealand here. The formal relationship is simple - the Queen is head of state of New Zealand, which means approximately nothing. There's a minor independence movement here, but no one cares. We don't even care enough...
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    The Federation of American Scientists has the best publicly available estimates of nuclear forces, listing Russia at 1950 deployed warheads, USA at 1590, and UK at 120. Let's not forget, nukes are not a difficult technology. 1940s tech gets you...
  • Commented on The Day After
    Nevil Shute didn't have the advantage of global circulation models - in the event of Armageddon, almost all fallout will start in the Northern Hemisphere and stay there. NZ's biggest health problem will be the almost complete lack of pharmaceuticals....
  • Commented on The Day After
    https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas It's going to be good news economically for NZ, as we pick up a decent number of educated, working-age refugees from the US, just as we did when Bush II got in....
  • Commented on The iron law of development
    Ok, classic economic analysis applied to power tools: I've a hand plane, a Stanley No 5. It's a beautiful bit of kit. I used it this evening. I've an electric plane, a Bosch with a carbide blade. It's loud and...
  • Commented on A plaintive request
    And SpaceX just landed another rocket. That's well on the way to a drastic cut in launch costs....
  • Commented on A game of consequences
    "My standards for sociopathy are set by the friends I've had who were raped by their parents." You said that a true sociopath cannot be reasoned with and should be killed. Am I mis-interpreting your statements? Can we at least...
  • Commented on A game of consequences
    And that's exactly what I mean - this belief that all sociopaths are child rapists, just like all autistic people are Rain Man. Humans are great at using black-and-white thinking to create out-groups. Examples include the communist scare in the...
  • Commented on A game of consequences
    Just like autism, sociopathy is not an either/or condition. It's a spectrum. We now have the decency to treat people on the autistic spectrum as something other than broken and we recognise the value in people who are not entirely...
  • Commented on A game of consequences
    I'll agree that it's complicated, but: 1) The vast majority of people came after the drop-off of the native popluation and their eradication as a controllers of the land. But yes, a major factor delivering resources to the early colony...
  • Commented on A game of consequences
    I think you might be understating just how much of a difference there can be between the appearance of a political state and the reality. Stopping colonists from destroying colonies requires quite drastic limitations on those colonists, unacceptably so to...
  • Commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
    Laser/target interactions are complicated, with lots of strict thresholds and non-linear behaviour. Hit a solid with a pulse of enough laser energy in a small enough spot over a short enough time, then it digs a hole and creates a...
  • Commented on Holding pattern (part N ...)
    That's why I mentioned the 1950s, as that was the high point of the reform Democrats in the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) for an example round about then.) Of course there's still corruption. My point is that kind of behaviour is now...
  • Commented on Holding pattern (part N ...)
    The invention of the modern public service. In 1850 both the UK and the US had tiny public sectors, like 5% of national income. The public sectors were entirely nepotistic with positions bought and sold. By 1950, the public service...
  • Commented on Introducing new guest blogger: Heteromeles
    So that's IPCC Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 then? Twelve billion people burning ten times as much coal by 2100, with coal use only dropping after that coz there isn't much left. It's hard to credibly suggest worse. "A scenario of...
  • Commented on Introducing new guest blogger: Heteromeles
    "how the Earth's biosphere is likely to change in the wake of anthropogenic climate change" - should the key word there by "likely", not "possibly"? Coz there's a huge difference between the two, for any particular warming trajectory. What matters...
  • Commented on Random thought for the day
    Japan has a process for redrawing electoral boundaries, it's just ad hoc, occasional, and driven in practice by the Supreme Court arguing with the government of the day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Japan#Malapportionment). And this is the kind of thing that drives or hinders...
  • Commented on Random thought for the day
    As Noel said, arbitration clauses are not new and this is not just about the financial sector. On this side of the planet, the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations fell over this weekend because of the political power of domestic sectors. The...
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