Another mass shooting in the US – symptom of a dysfunctional society?
Add to the above:
“As one of the world’s wealthiest societies, the US is what Alston calls a “land of stark contrasts”. It is home to one in four of the world’s 2,208 billionaires.
At the other end of the spectrum, 40 million Americans live in poverty. More than five million eke out an existence amid the kind of absolute deprivation normally associated with the developing world.
The symptoms of such glaring inequality include:
• Americans now live shorter and sicker lives than citizens of other rich democracies;
• Tropical diseases that flourish in conditions of poverty are on the rise;
• The US incarceration rate remains the highest in the world;
• Voter registration levels are among the lowest in industrialised nations – 64% of the voting-age population, compared with 91% in Canada and the UK and 99% in Japan.”
Isn’t it about time this country took a more neutral and independent line on the world scene – keeping our distance from both the US and China (just as dangerous a country to get into bed with, imo). Looking inwards for our own prosperity and not going ‘cap in hand’ to the altar of ‘world trade’?
We must distinguish ourselves from US centeric interests if we are to thrive once the economic power shift to the East is complete.
When trade commenced in the Petro-Yuan it took just two months before 12% of trade was conducted in PY in preference to the previous standard of the Petro-dollar.
A smart country would read the writing on the wall and react now while it is easier to reposition, but yes both dangerous.
Isn’t it about time this country took a more neutral and independent line on the world scene – keeping our distance from both the US and China (just as dangerous a country to get into bed with, imo). Looking inwards for our own prosperity and not going ‘cap in hand’ to the altar of ‘world trade’?
Yes it is. Being totally dependent upon other countries is bad for a country as it leaves them vulnerable to the actions of those countries.
The NRAs current president in the US who got given the position with the help of the gun lobby is a man who has admitted under oath to being a Traitor to the US and to selling guns to people listed as terrorists by the US. The only reason he is not in Jail is the case against him fell apart because most of the evidence had to be tossed out as it was freely given by him to a congressional hearing under an immunity deal.
That is the sort of man you have running the NRA in the US and able to legally bribe their politicians to ignore the call of the majority of their voters for gun control.
Hansen is absolutely one of the good guys, but neither do I buy into the stupid totalitarian idea that any individual is omniscient.
Critically there are three things coming together which will bring renewables into a new focus:
1. PV is now being installed at utility scale (> 50 MW) at prices under 3 cents/kWhr, well under any fossil fuel generation. In Australia 60% of all new generation is PV or wind. The economics have now tilted permanently in renewable’s favour; and the smart money in town is now chasing the opportunities as illustrated above.
2. Storage technologies are coming online as engineered reality; pumped storage is one example. The other which is up and running can be seen here:
3. Smart distribution technologies are gaining more traction, allowing generation and consumption to be better matched both temporally and spatially. A global HVDC super-grid will eventually resolve this issue permanently:
So the technology is there or getting there. And the price signals are improving. We even have engineers and technicians and what not to design and build and develop whatever might be required.
And we have something over 20 years at our current rates of emissions to get it all developed, built, and up and running to (perhaps) avoid 2 degrees of warming.
I don’t think there’s much in the way of “omniscience” required to figure that no matter the amount of will power, it just ain’t possible to hard boil an egg in an open pan of water in 30 sec flat. (That being the basic situation we’re facing in terms of time with AGW and possible tech roll outs)
The history has many striking examples of what happens when a new technology reaches a tipping point; crucially where it become 3 – 10 times cheaper or better than the one it replaces.
While the first cars where marketed in the early 1890’s, in the decade from about 1902 to 1912 horses literally vanished from large Western cities as cars totally replaced them.
The first commercial mini-computers became available around the late 60’s, but suddenly from 1980 onwards they penetrated everywhere. To the point now where modern business gets nothing done without them.
Mobile phones came into use in the early 90’s, but the advent of smartphones in the mid-2000’s literally exploded their penetration to every corner of the planet.
Electric cars are on the cusp of the same transition.
In hindsight the transition always looks obvious, but what no-one anticipates in advance is how fast and how comprehensive the process can be.
Sure. But none of those instances or examples even begin to approach the sheer scale of whats required in terms of engineering in the face of AGW (if the idea is to swap out carbon while we just carry on). And none of those things were subject to the time constraints we’re looking at.
You talk of electric cars. But it would have to be electric cars and shipping and aviation and most of the world’s electricity generation plus whatever of the world’s 80% of energy needs, not covered above, that aren’t currently “vectored” through electricity.
And all in something like 20 years assuming no increase in emissions from present levels (they’re actually going up every year).
As I commented – it’s like saying you’ll take an egg and hard boil it in 30. Nice idea. Doesn’t stack up.
late edit on a mistaken assumption contained in your comment about efficiency and cost driving change. Steam was never cheaper or more efficient than water as a source of energy for mills. And yet…
RedLogix did not claim it would cure climate change.
The comments were limited to electricity generation, electricity networks, and electricity storage.
The other comments were illustrations of technological change, not as contributions to alleviating climate change.
Electricity storage, networks and generation are going to have to encompass most of the 80% of energy we use that isn’t from a zero or low carbon source.
That aside, I didn’t think for one second that RL was making any claim to having stumbled on “a cure for” climate change. But I’m pretty sure he was alluding to the possibility of techno fixes that would see us making no more contribution to global warming. Which, by the way, is feasible, just not in terms of 2 degrees of warming (avoidance of).
That’s a pretty solid response Bill; the numbers are daunting, and hard to argue with given our current position. In very rough terms the ‘big three’ contributors to fossil CO2 are in order of magnitude (IIRC):
1. Electricity
2. Transport
3. Steel and concrete
The first is 100% solvable relatively quickly within two decades, the second can be dramatically improved. The third contribution from steel and concrete are going to be the difficult one, as at present we don’t have a lot of good alternatives I’m aware of. (Other than engineered timber which I like a lot, but has limits.)
Over the past two centuries fossil fuels have served an extraordinary purpose in moving the vast majority of the human population out of absolute degrading poverty and slavery, to on average, a modest standard of living and welfare. Turning the clock back on that is simply not an option.
In solving one problem, we have uncovered another; we are hard up against the limits of what fossil carbon can do for us.
The deep choice we face is this; do we press on down the technological/industrial path in the expectation we can transition off fossil carbon in time, or do we abandon that direction for an entirely unknown destination with wholly unknown risks? And to what extent is this choice conflated with the idea that such a crisis might offer a chance to ‘smash capitalism’?
Just to be clear for you; the un-reconstructed hippie in me still has a place in my heart for the kind of eco-technic forest garden low energy low consumption vision as patented by the 70’s. The fact that we could imagine it means something. Yet the big wide world out there never seemed to conform to our dreams did it?
We are facing a problem that we can’t roll out technical solutions for in the time we’ve left ourselves before hitting 2 degrees of warming. And things are going to get ugly and not a little frightening.
Slashing energy consumption needn’t mean dawdling back to some “sackcloth” past.
I think most of us can agree that a hell of a lot of utter shit is manufactured and distributed and that a lot of energy is used in the process. We could knock all that on the head.
Most people are also aware than many jobs are pretty pointless; that if they do serve a point beyond just keeping people occupied and in thrall to generating profit for some-one or other, then that point has never been elucidated. So, given those pointless jobs also consume a vast amount of energy, we could quite painlessly knock all those jobs on the head too.
So far, I’m not seeing any downside 🙂
But sure (and this seems central to inaction on AGW) the economy we have would be shredded if we took those steps. So we need to imagine and develop new ways to do stuff, or we’ll just stupidly knacker ourselves because one idea of what an economy ought to be was biting the dust.
I’m still not seeing any inevitably looming “sackclothed” downside.
In fact, with all that human potential freed up and a world of possibility…
The flip side is a world of bugger all possibility arriving with an economy biting the dust at the point it can no longer withstand the impacts of climate changes and AGW.
A lot of good points well made Bill, especially when you address the gross waste and inefficiency of much of our current economic activity. But then again this isn’t a unique feature of 21st century life; we’re just doing it on a grand scale our ancestors had no access to.
I’m not the only one here who has often mused that politics is an insufficient level of analysis; it’s only a small part of the story. It goes much deeper than this; it strikes at exactly what makes us human and why we behave in these apparently contradictory, self-destructive ways.
It’s entirely impossible to imagine a world for instance, where Arrhenius’ discoveries in the 1890’s would have immediately led to a rational, logical and eminently sensible cessation of fossil fuel use. People just are not like that. And we cannot, should not, try and imagine we can force them to be.
What we can do is encourage us to understand ourselves and observe all the ways we fuck things up. And then help each other, one painful step at a time to do better. I think that’s all I have to say for the moment … thank you for an interesting conversation Bill.
Steam was never cheaper or more efficient than water as a source of energy for mills.
An interesting proposition. The engineering answer is that water mills, while efficient in one sense, had strict scalability limits which horribly constrained their range of application. Nor of course was a water mill ever going to be of much use to drive a locomotive or ship.
The thing is, fossil carbon in all it’s forms came with so many immediate advantages, unprecedented energy density, portability and storage qualities … that once discovered we were never NOT going to exploit them.
And we have … to a remarkable extent. The world is a totally different place to 1818. You really don’t want to go back there, for the average person … most people … life was very hard indeed. And given this enormous progress it’s very understandable that so many people really didn’t want to accept that it came with limits, that there would come a time when this geological genie that literally popped out of the earth, might come with a cost.
There is no perfect solution here; there are risks whatever we do. But my sense is that the world is reaching a point where it is looking to build on what we have already achieved, and mass adoption of renewables will be part of that mix.
I’m not arguing against non-carbon sources of energy in terms of research, development of roll-out.
I’m simply pointing out some obvious time restraints that impact any notions around a switch to non-carbon energy happening alongside maintaining what we have, and continuing to do as we do. There’s a bin marked “false hope” for that garbage.
Industry of the early 1800s ran on water, and had no problem in terms of up scaling. (Add another wheel. Build a bigger wheel. Construct more water channels etc).
Social control and power, rather than engineering efficiency or market signals, drove the switch to coal fired steam engines.
I don’t know how “nasty, brutish and short” life really was for those in 1818 not caught up by industrialisation (as opposed to those who were). But I know that however bad or good it was,it’s probably going to look really fcking desirable from the vantage point of humanity experiencing starvation at the continental level when sea level rise wipes out the 20-25% of global food production that occurs on deltas within the space of current human lives.
“I don’t know how “nasty, brutish and short” life really was for those in 1818 not caught up by industrialisation (as opposed to those who were). But I know that however bad or good it was,it’s probably going to look really fcking desirable from the vantage point of humanity experiencing starvation at the continental level when sea level rise wipes out the 20-25% of global food production that occurs on deltas within the space of current human lives.”
Social control and power, rather than engineering efficiency or market signals, drove the switch to coal fired steam engines.
I don’t think so. Social control and power long pre-existed your pre-industrial water powered Eden of 1800; it’s not the child of capitalism or technology, rather a great-great-grand ancestor eons old.
What is true is that as we have developed more technically complex societies, at least from the invention of agriculture onward, our personal relationship with the societies we live in has clearly intensified. And that relationship, even as it brings us benefits, often falls short of any imagined ideal.
There isn’t a simplistic binary response to what your saying here; yes the Industrial Revolution brought a great deal of change, social chaos and misery. But arguably at the end of it, the average individual was a lot better off and politically a great deal freer than at the beginning.
But what I can emphatically say is that the steam engine was not invented as some infernal tool of an evil Illuminati (or whatever), hell-bent on enslaving the human race to it’s nefarious elitist dreams. It works as a metaphor in the Lord of the Rings, but Sauron is not an actual person.
We’re holding a conversation on at least two levels simultaneously here; the obvious one is about the technology options in front of us. The other is deeper and harder to grasp. Tolkien’s directly addressed it in his Hobbit narrative; his revulsion and horror of the mechanised death of WW1, contrasted with an idealised conception of the pre-industrial Hobbiton. Yet in the end, despite it’s charm and nostalgia, even Tolkien knew Hobbiton was a fantasy; it had it’s own internal contradictions and flawed beings.
On the switch to coal, I read an interesting theory years ago that argued the Romans should have developed coal/steam power, but their supply of slaves made it pointless for them to develop alternatives. So possibly not a coincidence that steam power was developed in a nation with one of the weakest monarchies at the time.
I’m not suggesting there was any pre-industrial water powered Eden of 1800. (The switch from water to steam occurred well into the 1800s btw) Neither am I daft enough to believe that power struggles don’t date back to “way back when”.
Andrea Malm has a very good book laying out the various arguments and looking at the historical record. It’s called “Fossil Capital – the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming”.
I recommended it to Carolyn Nth the other day.
Some “snapshots”.
Watt and his business partner failed to make money selling steam engines to mills in Watt’s lifetime because they were expensive and inefficient in relation to water.
Rural populations routinely abandoned the water powered mills they worked in (why wouldn’t they?) Mill owners then enslaved unpaid children from orphanages to make up the short fall (they ran away too.)
Relocating mills to centres like Manchester and running them on steam, not only accessed a larger pool of itinerant labour, but after a couple of generations, city kids knew no different – had no memory or experience of rural life and were therefore more “amenable” to factory life..
There were also bullshit arguments between owners of various workshops and mills over who should pay what in terms of upkeep for the infrastructure required to “tap” a river. Coal fired steam engines sidestepped that conflict.
An interesting argument; it certainly points to the idea that in order to become disruptive a new technology does need to be at least 3 -10 times better than what it’s replacing … something near enough isn’t sufficient to negate the sunk costs of the existing infrastructure.
The engineering response would be two words: Bessemer Process. In order for a steam engine to be efficient it needs to operate at temperatures and pressures that Roman era metals simply could not sustain. The introduction of the Bessemer process in the 1850’s produced for the first time large amounts of high quality, low cost steel with predictable qualities.
@ Bill. Which is why the early steam engines were relatively slow to gain wide acceptance. It was only when decent steel came along for the boiler tubes did the equations tip dramatically in their favour.
Much of what we think of as technological advances are in reality built on the back of advances in materials, a branch of engineering that never gets enough credit for what it contributes.
@McFlock – Steam seems simple. the Greeks made little whirligigs that seemed to be “steam powered” but that understanding is simply ignorant. Using escaping steam as a form of “jet power” is NOT how steam engines work. The early “steam engines” of the industrial age did not actually produce very much power in comparison to their cost and slow speed.
The reason is that “steam” is compressible. And because of that it actually exerts very little force on a cylinder. What made the modern “steam engine” was the accidental realization that spraying a little cold water into a cylinder full of steam caused the steam to immediately collapse… and the VACUUM created in the cylinder has a thousand times more force than the steam can possibly exert. Its Vacuum that drives a steam engines cylinder, not the pressure of steam.
But to discover this, you need to have not only sophisticated metallurgical skills, you also have to understand just what a vacuum is, and how to calculate the force of the vacuum on the materials of the engine so that you can design an engine that can withstand those forces… and, that means you need to be able to measure and quantify such parameters as ductility, tensile strength, elasticity, as well as be able to measure and control very high temperatures with precision to produce materials with reliable properties… and that means you need to have thermometers, and the maths to calculate altitudes, air pressure, and more.
For example, the Romans routinely created vacuums whenever they tried to pump water out of mines in stages longer than 10 metres. But they had no idea they were creating vacuums. They had no idea WHY the water would not go higher in a pipe than 10 metres no matter how hard you tried to pump it. They just understood they had to break pumping systems down to 10 metre lengths. And then pump again from there.
They could not understand the vacuum because they lacked the intellectual tools. Have you ever tried to do advanced calculations using Roman numerals and no concept of zero? The Romans had no concept of the modern idea of science that would have allowed them record and quantify and correlate the physical world around them in such a way as to build a cohesive scientific picture of the laws of nature.
Knowing a steam jet makes something go around is meaningless unless you know also why it makes it go round. A good example of this phenomena is gunpowder. Serendipitously inventing a formula of something that goes BANG! is not remotely as powerful as knowing WHY gunpowder explodes.
The former is a just a recipe you follow without understanding. it offers you nothing but the gunpowder, which is why all you got was gunpowder for another 1000 years.
The latter offers you the capability of creating countless other chemicals, with countless other applications, because you have a theory of chemistry you can employ to make a multitude of compounds.
Great explanation around the importance of steam condensers in the process.
The other intellectual tool the Romans were missing was any inkling of thermodynamics. That really didn’t come along until Carnot formulated the first proper efficiency calculations for steam engine around 1824:
@Bill – mate, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to the early industrial revolution.
“…Industry of the early 1800s ran on water, and had no problem in terms of up scaling. (Add another wheel. Build a bigger wheel. Construct more water channels etc)…”
Wrong to the point of laughable, because you completely fail to account for the cost of distribution. Water wheels require water. If you have a mine in need of pumping nowhere near a river, then even the biggest fucking water wheel in all existence is of absolutely no use to you. Grinding flour at a riverside mill might be cheaper than using a steam powered plant to do so, but by the time you factor in the costs of shipping the grain to the water mill and then back to the markets, it is hopelessly inefficient compared to a steam powered mill. That is because the cost of transporting manufactured goods overland to the markets that wanted them doubled every few miles. Steam engines are far more flexible, you assemble one in the place where the people are and with a hey nonny-nonny your flour mill is in business.
The first most critical requirement for steam power was for pumping water out of coal mines. Beginning in the mid 15th Century Great Britain ran out of ready sources of wood for domestic fuel use. Remember, at this time wood was an especially important strategic resource, essential to naval shipbuilding for example and the main source of construction material before the industrial manufacture of bricks. The price of wood soared, and by the end of the Tudor age much of Great Britain was completely deforested. Unlike the Mediterranean basin Britain had a lot of readily accessible coal seams near the surface, so the British switched to coal for most domestic fuel use. The amount of coal shipped to London from Newcastle grew by 3000% between 1550 and 1700, and the increase in the volume of coal mined between 1556 and 1606 exceeded the growth rate of coal mined at the height of the early industrial revolution.
As surface coal seams were exhausted, mines went deeper and new technologies were needed to pump out water. As I noted in my post to McFlock, early steam engines were very inefficient. 80% of the energy is wasted in a Newcomen engine and they used a lot of coal. But they also allowed mining at much greater depths, and advances in design by Watt and John Smeaton rapidly improved their efficiency, and over the next 150 years steams engines became dramatically more efficient and economical.
I have never heard anyone suggest that the industrial revolution could have been achieved with the steam engine, so i guess your argument has novelty. But only the novelty of the kind reserved for the prefix of a silly hat at the fancy dress shop.
We probably agree that the Industrial Revolution in Britain was predicated upon cotton, yes? (ie, it was the cotton industry that grew far faster than other manufacturies of the time)
And whatever you’re opinion of me may or may not be in terms of knowing what I’m talking about, the historical record shows that paper mills, cotton mills and other factories requiring power were overwhelmingly powered by water.
You want to argue with the historical record, (presumably on the basis that it’s laughable) then have at it.
In relation to your comments on transportation costs etc.
Do you have any idea about the extensive canal networks that used to criss-cross Britain’s industrial heartlands? (Some are still used). Or the sheer availability and accessibility of places with a high head of water in Britain? (It was no accident that mills were built at the foot of the Highlands and throughout Lancashire). Or of the number of solid flowing rivers passing though major centres of population? (I think most British cities are located on major rivers)
As late as 1826, calculations on the comparative costs of running a mill on coal or water, “including as costs associated with water rent to the landlord, outlays on dams and sluices, expenses for transporting raw materials and a manager between mill and market”…the steam engines coal consumption meant that water was more cost effective.
You want to talk of mines and coal for domestic heating purposes going as far back as Elizabethan times? That has nothing whatsoever to do with what initially powered the industrial revolution.
Now. You want to call me a clown? Fine. Me and history both.
But in that case, what hat is it you reckon you should be grabbing for yourself from the fancy dress shop?
The industrial revolution began as the result of a confluence of numerous technological, economic and political drivers. The need for cheap energy (coal) as a substitute for depleted wood supplies was an important early driver of the chain of events that led to the industrial revolution. Cotton had nothing to do with that – the explosion of inventions that transformed cotton from a rare and expensive textile into a cheap, mass produced one post date the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
the fact that the early transitional stages of the industrial revolution were powered by water more than steam (due to the inefficiencies of early steam power) does not negate the central point that coal extraction with the aid of steam power was a major trigger of the chain of events the culminated in the industrial revolution. Remember, your claim is that the move to steam power was driven by a need for “…Social control and power…” rather than any economic imperative.
Your choice of Manchester is highly illustrative of this process. Your are completely wrong in your statement “…Relocating mills to centres like Manchester and running them on steam…” Manchester became an important early centre of textile production (the reason for the supply of cheap cotton is whole other series of intertwined events) due to the abundance of water to power the early mills and, in the form of the River Irwell, to provide efficient transport to the growing port of Liverpool and the sea (which, BTW, is another example of the inefficiencies of land transportation). But Manchester then EXPLODED as an industrial hub because it is close to the cheap coal fields of Northern England and Wales and local sources of iron ore, essential to making steam engines and other machinery. Oh and your claim that “…Watt and his business partner failed to make money selling steam engines to mills in Watt’s lifetime because they were expensive and inefficient in relation to water…” is simply not true. Watt lived to be 83 and became extremely wealthy and his steam engines were wildly popular. I would be interested to know where you got this particularly egregrious piece of mis-information from!
The canal system also post dates the industrial revolution. When you think about it, it stand to reason that a canal system wouldn’t be built unless there was a need for it – in other words, a need to transport goods and commodities in large quantities – large quantities made possible by the explosion in manufacturing made possible by the industrial revolution. Again, the story of the first “proper” canal in the UK illustrates my points well. The Sankey Canal (opened 1757) was built primarily to transport coal to Liverpool. Secondly, water transport was by far more efficient than carts, reinforcing my earlier point about transport costs.
The bold claim was that “… Steam was never cheaper or more efficient than water as a source of energy for mills…” and that “…Social control and power… …drove the switch to coal fired steam engines…” Bold claims require strong evidence. You’ve not provided any.
I was actually thinking of the 18th century static engines rather when the technology matured (‘brick’ phones rather than iphones). But of course those were to respond to very specific problems without nearby water power. Necessity, motherhood, and all that.
@ Sanctuary The need for cheap energy (coal) as a substitute for depleted wood supplies was an important early driver of the chain of events that led to the industrial revolution
The historical record is clear. Water (a ‘free’ energy source following initial outlay) was cheaper than coal, and preferred by factory owners in the first 1/4 to 1/3rd of the 1800s over coal driven steam engines.
You can find some presentations by him in English on youtube if you care to search.
From the back jacket of the book.
Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy—but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China…
Bold claims require strong evidence. You’ve not provided any.
I’ve provided the source more than once, and that source offers a thorough, fully footnoted exploration of what drove manufacturing from water power to steam power. Do yourself a favour and read it instead of throwing idiotic accusations, assertions and ad homs around a thread, aye?
edit. And the canal system in Britain was going into decline by the second half of the 1800s (because rail). Their development hardly then post dating the industrial revolution as you assert.
The one thing about even burning dirty fuels like coal to create the electricity to power electric cars is that in a lot of cases it is still slightly cleaner than using petrol and diesel-powered engines. When it comes to cars used in big cities due to the amount of time a lot of them sit around at a traffic light or stuck in traffic jams with their engines idling there is a very large amount of fuel they burn wastefully, while the majority of the power generated at a power station is being used and little wasted.
Your quote immediately above with the term “never been wrong” is strongly absolute. Especially absent any clarifying nuance you didn’t feel need to provide.
And the original quote at 3.1 does of course has a few different ways to look at it; feel free to explain why you chose to use it, and the impeccable pristine meaning you intended to convey, and I so stupidly missed.
1. Being wrong once in a while builds character.
2. If your predictions are sufficiently broad, your chances of error diminish.
3. Is the “trouble” a problem for Hansen or us?
Actually we can, or indeed should have, but for the idiot reforms of the National Party which broke the system up. We already have a substantial hydro generation base, and the key to using it intelligently is to minimise using it except to meet demand when other renewables are not available.
But to do that would require a commercially integrated generation/distribution system that for ideological reasons we’re not allowed to have. Which is why NZ is the ‘not so lucky’ country.
Also doesn’t help that a few great wind farm (both large and small) proposals were fought tooth and nail by a few locals, so they were stopped.
The South Australia grid innovations have impressed our firm. Sure hope that the Tesla storage system holds up in a good storm – it’s an important precedent.
I can’t see it RL. The scheme needs two lakes at differing heights, preferably close together. Can’t be much like that in NZ without using up land that’s already being used. Huntly has heaps of lakes but IIRC they’re nearly all on the same level.
Sorry I wasn’t clear; from an energy perspective not using already stored energy in a hydro lake, is the same as actively adding to the storage, if you can substitute with other renewables elsewhere.
All that any pump hydro or storage system does is to time shift the net generation; ie moving the excess of PV generation from the daytime, to the evenings where the demand is.
You get a similar result in say NZ if you stop using the existing run of river hydro during the daytime (effectively topping up the storage) by switching to wind or pv during the day, then running the hydro harder in the evenings drawing down on what you haven’t used during the daytime.
It requires some planning and solid technical integration, and as a concept has engineering limits … but entirely doable.
They do that already don’t they RL? Our hydro is mostly on waterways so they are limited in how much they can control the flow.
Cheap storage of power has been the number one obstacle since electricity was first discovered. When you look at how the world has progressed with everything else it’s quite surprising they haven’t cracked it yet.
Some of the lesser options are quite simple but (presently) defeated by practical economics. When we have a shower in the morning the water cylinder is reheated from the grid before the sun is high enough in the sky to generate much solar energy. For the homeowner with solar panels the cost of getting a sparkie in to install a timer on the water cylinder can eat up the potential savings.
There’s plenty of potential in Otago for pumped storage. Hawea and Wanaka could work but with constraints around the natural level of Wanaka. The Waipori scheme could easily be made to work “backwards” along with the small schemes fed from the high lakes like Onslow. But any hydro dam could be configured to “recycle” water, or in effect energy.
One aspect that’s been glossed over in the video that RL put up in the OP was the efficiency of the undertaking. Wiki says 70 – 80% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity and then you’d have transmission losses on top of that. But probably still worthwhile.
Also had a quiet chuckle at Australia striving to meet “a goal of 20% renewable”. We are very fortunate in that regard.
Good catch on the relatively low in/out efficiencies. Fortunately when the marginal cost of your input energy is almost zero, anything over 60% will do.
Incidentally I instigated and commissioned a modest 300 kW hydro using a couple of existing pumps run backwards on a water supply system some years back. The in/out efficiency was never better than 62% but it just didn’t matter; the payback of the project was well under 10 months.
But otherwise yes, with our mountainous geography there must be more than a few decent pumped storage locations around. Fiordland is essentially one giant opportunity full of hanging glacial valleys with solid rock … albeit with obvious issues around it’s National Park status. The tramper in me would have to fight it boot and ice-axe 🙂
Economic efficiency and return on investment could be another thing however. Also there’s return on investment for the developer / promotor to factor in, along with entrenched utilities, the consumer just being the mug who’s paying for it.
I can see some of the dedicated hydro schemes being suitable but I’m not convinced you can do it with most dams. Dams are on river systems, start pumping it back up again and you interfere with the habitat and environment downstream of the dam. Realistically you’d want to pump from dam to dam, like what the aussies are doing, or at least catchment to dam and pumping distance would surely be an issue there (?).
70-80% efficiency is very worthwhile if they can achieve that. For large scale solar they can now buy panels for around NZ60c per watt. Allow annual generation of 1000watts per watt, lifetime of 25 years and your generation cost is 2.4c kW/hr. Installation, land and other plant would probably double that for the final cost but 30% on top for dam storage is still peanuts, doesn’t add much at that level. I thought it would be much less efficient.
But to do that would require a commercially integrated generation/distribution system that for ideological reasons we’re not allowed to have.
Actually, to do it requires power being turned back into a government service. Commercialisation won’t do it fast enough and there’d have to be all sorts of regulations around connection to get the smart-grid working. Easier and cheaper just to have the government do it.
Agree Tony with your analogy of the current state of the global health system.
I was chemically poisoned over 25yrs ago in a workplace ‘accident’ in Canada and found out the ‘hard way’ that the global governments and medical fraternity did not know anythuing about the dangers of chemical exposures to the human bieng.
This publically funded group were the one that saved my life; jion thisn group. https://www.ciin.org/
Here a a library of evidence of the exposures we continually face and fornuse in litigation proceedings.
Chemical Exposure and Human Health
A Reference to 314 Chemicals with a Guide to Symptoms
by Cynthia Wilson
The classic MCS sufferer’s volume on the known health effects of chemical exposures. Written by Cynthia Wilson, the founder and Executive Director of Chemical Injury Information Network, it remains the most valuable source of chemical information written by a lay person about the health hazards from everyday chemical exposures. The sections on Symptoms and Potential Causes, Sources of Exposures and the Chemical Directory are priceless.
The book was originally priced at $55.00 and is no longer in print. 345 pages $25.00 plus $5 s/h Used but unscented copies.
Since 1993 I have lived mostrly outside of the whole medical system, – living on the age old method of first listening to my body and responding to the signals it sends me to respond to it. No medical Doctor could even contemplate doing this nor could they physically carry this out unless 100% monitoring of my system and brain functions.
Some claiim that a monitor can be placed on our body but still they do not treat the systoms with any thing else than thiose toxic invasive prescription medications who I was found to have “adverse medical reations to”.
No toxic ‘prescription medications’ are used today in my life long slow recovery from almost certain death after the workplace accidental exposures to well documented chemical toxic soup I was exposed to without a workplace adequate ventilation during the six month place accident/incident that affected over 40 workers on that worksite during that time and several have since died who were medically documented very healthy proir to the accident.
We need to look at our own woeful agency called OSH ‘Occupational Safety and Health and re-train the medical community in “toxicology” as we now live in a toxic chemical soup daily nowdays and it is getting worse by the day.
I unapologetically post yet another Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez video. She is a rising star, and unlike the morbidly aged senior house democrats (Americans really need to talk about the age of their representatives. Maxine Waters is 79. Nancy Pelosi is 78. Senator Dianne Feinstein is 85. The average age of the top four house democrats is I think 76 years old) she is young and in touch with her district.
Sam Seder basically dissects the default position of hostility the establishment MSM has towards left wing change agents (TL,DR – anyone outside the establishment is treated as a freak and interviewed with an air of condescending cynicism with an aim to write them off using gotcha tactics. You hear this style ALL.THE.FUCKING.TIME. from establishment toadies like Guyon Espiner and Susie Ferguson).
The lesson for the NZ Labour party is how easy it is to deal with the ambient passive aggressiveness of the establishment media IF YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING BELIEVE IN DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.
Interesting Ocasio-Cortez when asked what she would replace ICE with argues that the purpose of a border agency is to ensure “safe passage”. I’m curious what she means by this. By itself this seems an inadequate definition of what a border is about, surely there is more to a border than handing out coffee, donuts and a ‘welcome to the USA pack’ to anyone who cares to turn up.
The good news is that Mexico is likely to elect a strongly left-wing govt:
Hopefully this will turn the country around and lead millions of migrants to head back to their homeland. Maybe Mexico will finish up build a wall to keep out hordes of fleeing Americans. 🙂
(I’m thinking of an American couple I met at Tocumen Airport last week, who were doing exactly that. They’d just purchased a new home in Ecuador specifically to get away from the “fear which saturates America”.)
The point of the interview wasn’t to interrogate Ocasio-Cortez in order to allow voters to better understand her beliefs and satisfy your curiosity. Poppy Harlow missed a couple of opportunities to pin Ocasio-Cortez down on potentially interesting answers because she wasn’t listening to Ocasio-Cortez’s answers – she was looking for an opening to attack Ocasio-Cortez based on a tired establishment narrative.
Poppy Harlow approached the interview from a well worn position of establishment superiority with a well worn interviewing template designed to serve a well worn agenda.
It is reflexive, non-thinking, lazy and complacent journalism informed by ambient hostility to anti-establishment thinking.
Sam Seder’s commentary is entirely about how the only new information that came out of this interview was for those viewers intuitive enough to perceive the meta data of the interview.
It does really matter what she thinks of ICE. It is not as if becoming a congresswoman confers the power of the government on that person. The US, irrespective of who is the next president, or the president after that, is not suddenly going to have an open border policy. That would be true even if Ocasio-Cortez became president.
What she will be a fresh face for her district with the sort of appeal of the PM.
Look at Obama. The process of becoming president, and making the inevitable compromises that involves, mean you can’t do a sharp U turn in the overall direction of government. He did end the Iraq war, but wasn’t able to decisively win the Afghan war. He did do Obama care, but with huge compromises.
Perhaps a better example of a revolutionary president is Trump. He did pull out of TPP (which had not come into force anyway). He has done a tax package but that is standard fare for a Republican. There is a lot of things he can’t do. He can’t unwind Obama care.
What he has done is change the overall tone of the Presidency (for the worse). It will be changed back at some point. Obama had the rhetoric, but what else?
None of this is to say Ocasio-Cortez can’t make a difference. She can. But she can’t start a socialist revolution, not in the US. Even the most radical president (in the sense of ushering in big government), Franklin Roosevelt did not turn the US into a socialist paradise.
FDR was against a “socialist paradise ” in a 1913 essay.
“The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.”
It is said that Roosevelt was something of a patrician, and that much of his social activism came from his wife. But he legislated strongly against monopolists, while our local Gnats (and some others who should be ashamed) bow before them as abjectly as any Persian peasant prostrated themselves before their satraps.
Thanks for this, Sanctuary – and definitely no need for any apologies. I had a quick look and decided it is a Must View in full later when there are fewer distractions as at the moment.
Coincidentally I had just read a Guardian article that had popped up in my ‘you may be interested in this’ list. This is an article by one of their Australian columnists, Van Badham entitled “The future of the left is bright if it looks like Jacinda Ardern and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes”
IMHO the article provides a refreshing view of the rise of Ardern and Ocasio-Cortes and is well worth reading. As a taste, it concludes with this:
“Strong men” of the right are now lining up governments from Italy to Turkey to the USA. The times of the now are ones in which we can construct majorities of a diversity they cannot – and do not wish to – represent. We can hope the influence of Jacinda Ardern and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes spread, or we can ensure that it does. The stakes for the marginalised remain life and death.
The article contains much more, however, particularly on Ardern and NZ; and this is just one of a number of comments that I found interesting from someone looking from the outside in:
Observe, also Ardern – who is Pakeha, not Maori – meeting the British queen wearing a Kahu huruhuru: a Māori feathered cloak “bestowed on chiefs and dignitaries to convey prestige, respect and power”. It was a demonstration of a status conferred, and not stolen, and a representation of a New Zealand unafraid to show pride in its indigenous past even as it engaged in diplomatic pleasantry with its colonial one.
This really is shocking. Practically giving away public land for a song and taking away the amenity of neighbouring houses and apartments with sweetheart deals for a developer, while creating a monopoly for boat owners and high prices.
Similar lack of thinking and deregulation happened in the CBD in the 1990’s, they let these developers do what ever they like with little planning, which has resulted in both owners, developers and banks losing confidence in the integrity of the process and two decades of CBD growth being stopped due to leaky building and values being wiped out by neighbouring builds that are poorly planned in relation to existing buildings, and lack of public walkways and public areas for existing residents to enjoy the city.
Nobody wants to buy an apartment and have the amenity halved by the council doing a dirty deal with someone and allowing though their ‘relaxed’ RMA interpretations which has been taken to mean anything goes and be as greedy as you can, by environmental lawyers and the courts to wreck surrounding amenity at any time.
If you get your views wiped out and the apartment buyers continually get screwed either through leasehold (Princess wharf) or Body corporate charges (everywhere) that are designed as a rout or through lack of regulation in surrounding developments (wiping out views/light at the stroke of a council pen).
Even the banks know apartments are not good investments, they are very reluctant to lend on apartments unless a person has at least 30% deposit. Banks know that the value can be wiped out at any time by the lack of regulation that has developed around apartments and central city and anywhere apartments spring up, from outrageous charges, to bad building design and techniques to lack of planning in preserving existing apartment amenities.
Even the banks will not approve of wiping out exisiting housing values in the area to help some sort of Phil Goff rout. Where is the public transport and who pays for it? So far not much interest in making the developers pay the public transport costs for more people and instead it goes to the ratepayers who in many cases are being screwed over by bad developers and having to share ever more with the pathetic services offered.
How can you sell marina land for $5million for 200 apartments & a Marina? Is obscene and against the so called public living around the waterways that should be driving more people to live in those areas.
When one or two apartment blocks are allowed to steal amenity and devalue everyone else then nobody wants to live there and banks don’t want to lend there, the opposite of what the council should be wanting!
They fit nearly 9 million into London and they do that through very strong planning laws to protect neighbouring amenity which includes things like privacy (an unknown concept in NZ RMA) and making it difficult for greedy people to get planning through so people feel they can trust their housing is protected. London prior to the worst of the neoliberal dogma believed in social housing being part of new builds of apartments.
NZ has gone to the opposite degree and now we leaky building, chaos and a lack of trust in the NZ planning and building process due to the profit and deregulation model being the favoured way to develop here. Cheap and deregulated building with high profits and a rip off after service with lease hold and Body corps and future surrounding developments.
Good apartments are selling well still. Crappy ones will lower in value, just as they did in 2005-2010.
Most of them are right next to ferry terminals. Taxpayers and ratepayers pay for them.
The need for more housing across Auckland completely overrides the need to protect sight lines, unless they are very well bedded down into the Unitary Plan, such as the Mt Eden sight line.
The biggest sale of public land for apartments that I am aware of is the Wyndham Quarter, and through Wyndham tank farm. Half of those storage tanks will be gone within 2 years to make way for the Americas Cup. Then they go straight into apartments. They are designed to be 5 metres minimum above expected sea level rise in the coming century. Those apartments start at over $1.5m
All of this looks like Panuku doing its job: getting the market to build good quality houses in Auckland at low risk to public funding.
@AD – Clearly does not work that way. Look at London, and Europe, good density planning to protect existing rights means there is integrity in the system. That is not the NZ way, and we are getting boom and bust. Soon there will be a bust, because we develop Ponzi style, the only reason there is no bust is due to immigration. But if they keep that up, we have Asian poverty.
Also ordinary people can’t afford good apartments. You think like a Natz supporter aka you don’t think teachers and nurses and police should be able to afford a good apartment, let alone one on the waterfront.
Thinking like that would be ok if you were a Nat, but you are supposedly Labour supporting the ordinary person and not much from the Greens either on this.
Hence Labour policy, not good for ordinary people. Who now have that petrol tax on top of the fact the apartments springing up for the wealthy earners only or for Ponzi speculation.
Whatever an ordinary person is, they will not be buying seaside apartments. The whole of Auckland needs more apartments of all kinds, but you won’t find seaside Kiwibuild apartments and nor would any logical person expect to. There are a few exceptions – such as the Metlifecare apartment blocks in Titirangi over looking the Manukau Harbour, and the Orakei retirement village (now condemned). But in reality it has and will always be the case that a really good beachfront view is beyond the means of anyone except the very rich. And no government is going to change that.
You just need a good cold drink of reality.
There may well be a property bust. We’ve had one in 2007, 1997, 1987, and 1977. So who knows. So far pretty good.
It’s noteworthy the Hobsonville marina land is leased by the council, presumably at market rates with a regular rent appraisal. It makes no commercial sense to sell land that’s bringing in a rental income which would surely be exceeding the cost of borrowing. It’s also an inflation proofed income.
There was similar issue over the sale of the freehold land at Bayswater, which sold for less than $5 million. The reason why the price for the freehold title was so low is because the marina already had a 105 year registered lease on the property with very low rent. The existence of the lease meant the freehold title basically had no value except to the marina owner.
The Bayswater community is divided on the issue of apartments. Most people recognise that some apartments would be ok, but that 120 or so is too many.
In terms of the sale and retained values of the proposed apartments at Baywater, with a freehold title they will be more attractive to would be purchasers.
I watched it (for free!) on Snagfilms (another recommendation; it also has a category Climate Change & the Environment and much other interesting stuff): https://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/alive_inside
Is it a rush to forget, or are so imbued with a 24hr news cycle we can’t see the tree for the woods?
Just a reminder that the Palestinian “Great Return Marches” have not stopped. Israel is still shooting people, who at their most stupid do throw stones. Like a stone will be effective against a well dug in and heavily armed military force intent on killing unarmed civilians.
Mind you, in the worlds biggest open air prison – the occasional rock is all the future you have, that, or a bullet.
Stuff: Renters are being warned to expect landlords to want better rental returns from their investment properties, in the absence of capital gains. “This can’t continue. If property investments aren’t “washing their faces”, something will have to be done”
Gee here’s an idea. Stop buying existing homes for capital gain. Invest in businesses that actually manufacture or produce something. Help grow the economy instead of just shuffling more money from renters to landlords.
Help grow the economy instead of just shuffling more money from renters to landlords.
Well if you own the house you’ll be cutting out your bastard landlord (who provides the equity you don’t have, pay the rates and insurance you don’t want to pay and get the maintenance done you either don’t know how to do, or can’t be arsed doing) ….. and shuffle the money direct to the bank.
The vast majority of us bastard landlords are ordinary working kiwis who lived through a succession of rip-offs and betrayals by our local stock market and finance industry from the 70’s onwards. That burned off so much trust, we just cannot believe anymore.
For the past ten years we’ve been looking for an alternative commercial investment that would provide a better cash flow; but without finding something that we had much confidence in. In the end I took the hard way out and went overseas, working high stress 70 – 80 hr weeks in crazy remote places to pay the mortgage down.
There are of course enough bad landlords, and bad tenants, to create plenty of angry stories; but really much of the resentment directed at landlords is misdirected. We’re only one component of a much larger problem with many, many components.
Well more power to you; but I am puzzled. Unless you were fortunate enough to inherit or be given a free house, I assume you spent some decades paying down a mortgage to a bank.
In which case why are you so concerned about ‘shuffling money from renters to landlords’, but apparently quite pleased you shuffled even more money to a bank?
I’m not trying to attack you personally here, I’m genuinely curious about the apparent contradiction between the two attitudes.
(who provides the equity you don’t have, pay the rates and insurance you don’t want to pay and get the maintenance done you either don’t know how to do, or can’t be arsed doing)
Capitalists never provide anything – they just steal from everyone else.
Fair enough DtB, if you promise never to give me any of you money, I promise never to let you live in one of the homes I built. That way you don’t have to put up with me stealing from you, and I don’t have the risk of you trashing the place.
If you need a tent for the wintertime, I have a few old ones left over from my early tramping days that should still keep the worst of the rain off. You’re welcome to hang onto it 🙂
1. All the capital was actually provided by the community. It can be no other way. The raw resources belong to the community. The processing of the wood and the glue and the nails were done by the community.
2. Rent that you demand for living in the house is what’s paying for it thus you didn’t even provide the financial capital.
Despite these two facts yet you get to call the house yours because of the capitalist system we have that makes such theft legal.
That argument really does have a problem with boundaries. Why stop and wood, glue and nails? What about that nice laptop you’re typing on? Obviously it too belongs to the ‘community’ and your monopolization of it is also theft. My turn with it now thank you. (What historically happens at this point degenerates very rapidly into mass murder … but I’ll get to that below.)
The other obvious point to be made is that all that nice collectivist materials (steel concrete and some wood actually) didn’t magically leap into the form of homes all by themselves. It took a number of hard years of planning, funding, and high pressure work to achieve. At a number of points we could have easily lost the lot.
And finally what you completely miss is the notion of reward for risk. While classic marxism recognises physical labour as the ONLY unit of value, it completely excludes any sense of achievement beyond a pedestrian shoveling of shit for a living. It’s blind to the idea that if you undertake virtually anything worthwhile in life, it innately engages with risk of failure. Unless that risk is compensated for, everyone avoids that possibility and little of new value is ever created. Exactly as observed in ALL the historic marxist experiments.
Here’s the thing; your argument clearly identifies me as the soviet equivalent class of kulaks; modestly successful farmers who through their skill, entrepreneurial risks and hard work, had accumulated just a little more than the other miserable peasants in the villages. Remind yourself of the consequences of that policy:
While clearly I’m a kulak, absolutely I’m not one of the 50 or so hyper-wealthy who have more combined wealth than half the world population. Again you’ve failed to draw a boundary between pretty ordinary working people like me, and the clear-cut outliers whose excess wealth really is a problem.
The devil is in the detail here; clearly the kind of extreme inequality as embodied by the hyper-wealthy has a corrosive impact on society. But as with Stalin, you’ve targeted us kulaks first because we’re the soft, visible target for populist resentment. Very quickly it degenerates to the condition where if you have achieved anything of value and someone else looks on with envy … it’s off to the gulag with you buster. Yes inequality is a very real and deep problem; but this is the worst possible solution.
I realise quite well you don’t intend for this to be to consequence of your marxism. We probably share a lot of the same motivations, we’ve both inhabited this socialist space for many years now. But if you think that somehow your version of marxism would turn out any better than all the catastrophically failed versions that have gone before … well I politely suggest you”re wrong. There is absolutely no apriori reason to think that you or any other neo-marxist would not behave exactly as everyone else did when thrust into that long collectivist nightmare … with deceit, betrayal and cruelty.
About 18 years ago I had the chance to work and travel in Russia for a period. Burned into my memory are shards of the soviet horror; my pathetic words can do no justice to some of the things I saw … and that in their removed, diluted form. As I said above, we share much in common, you’re intelligent and interesting, and have always behaved impeccably here which is why I’m attempting to respond in kind. But you need to think about the boundaries.
Good morning Corin from the Q&A show on tv1 on today .
I don’t think it is fair that the transgender people should be treated any diffidently from Ladys if people are not affecting anyone negatively than they deserve to be treated with respect full stop some people should get a life and stop being so judgemental Eco Maori knows how this type of behavior can affect ones life.
Peter Gluckman putting fluoride in OUR water is a no brainer lets get on with it and save our mokopunas teeth there is a wealthy organisation that will lose money when we put fluoride in all water supply’s.
With China influence in Our politics I agree with Bryce Edwards there is know evedince to back this hype from ———– theres a old saying don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
What about Big business lobbing groups they have a major influence on Our political landscape thats whom we can thank for shonky.
Ka kite ano P.S Who can we trust on the GE debate these big company’s flogging this horse can not be trusted one thing I see with Democracy is this system pits two groups against each other and this is not a good thing one group will do anything to get in power and the humane lefty’s find it immoral to stoop to those low levels . ???????????????
Newshub Nation Lisa that is one phenomenon of the western society charging people / countrys higher interest rates who are the ones who can least afford to pay it and wealthy people countrys very low interest whats with that ??????????????????????????????.
Chris Labour is right to step in and stop these loan predators not Sharks they don’t deserve the name of one of Tangaroas beautiful creatures this problem affects some of Our Pacific Island cousin the most because some are innocent and vulnerable to deceit with loans as they don’t know how the systems work yet.
Loyd Why is Nigel Far here flogging the british exit bandwagon the Queen does not have his views on this subject I say Britain pulls out of Europe than that vacuum of influence will be fulled by America so look across the Atlantic and see if you the common people want a society like trump is ruining . Ana to kai ka kite ano
This is why Eco Maori fights of all of Papatuanukus creatures they are the foundations that support Humans life another link that supports my view that capitalism is the destruction of Papatuanukus environment and wildlife and eventually humans
links below .
Newshub on tv 3 Many thanks to all the American tangata for protesting trumps immigration policy’s he is just using this to bolster his support who care who he hurts in the process .
There are many ways one could save on fuel price rising like get a car that has a motor less than 2 ltr a manual car uses less fuel to service your car regularly check tyre presses fortnightly catch a ride to work with work m8s bus trains its not the end of Papatuanuku .
Those extreme sports shots of wahine gives Eco Maori A sore face ka pai Mana wahine the more publicity wahine get the better its is for te mokopuna’s future is.
We don’t need people like this who think just because he new the people/ sandflys who raped and terrified Louise Nicholas when she was a teenager to get into the police commissioners and have them spread the dumb———-views on the rest of the sandflys just because he is waving his tangata whenua card you know my view its not whom you are its what you do that counts to Eco Maori Ana to kai ka kite ano
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This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Democrats now control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives for the first time in a decade, albeit with razor thin Congressional majorities. The last time, in the 111th Congress (2009-2011), House Democrats passed a carbon cap and trade bill, but it died ...
Session thirty-three was highly abbreviated, via having to move house in a short space of time. Oh well. The party decided to ignore the tree-monster and continue the attack on the Giant Troll. Tarsin – flying on a giant summoned bat – dumped some high-grade oil over the ...
Last night I stayed up till 3am just to see then-President Donald Trump leave the White House, get on a plane, and fly off to Florida, hopefully never to return. And when I woke up this morning, America was different. Not perfect, because it never was. Probably not even good, ...
Watching today’s inauguration of Joe Biden as the United States’ 46th president, there’s not a lot in common with the inauguration of Donald Trump just four destructive years ago. Where Trump warned of carnage, Biden dared to hope for unity and decency. But the one place they converge is that ...
Dan FalkBritons who switched on their TVs to “Good Morning Britain” on the morning of Sept. 15, 2020, were greeted by news not from our own troubled world, but from neighboring Venus. Piers Morgan, one of the hosts, was talking about a major science story that had surfaced the ...
Sara LutermanGrowing up autistic in a non-autistic world can be very isolating. We are often strange and out of sync with peers, despite our best efforts. Autistic adults have, until very recently, been largely absent from media and the public sphere. Finding role models is difficult. Finding useful advice ...
Doug JohnsonThe alien-like blooms and putrid stench of Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower, draw big crowds and media coverage to botanical gardens each year. In 2015, for instance, around 75,000 people visited the Chicago Botanic Garden to see one of their corpse flowers bloom. More than ...
Getting to Browser Tab Zero so I can reboot the computer is awfully hard when the one open tab is a Table of Contents for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and every issue has more stuff I want to read. A few highlights: Gugler et al demonstrating ...
Michael Cowling, CQUniversity AustraliaWe’ve probably all been there. We buy some new smart gadget and when we plug it in for the first time it requires an update to work. So we end up spending hours downloading and updating before we can even play with our new toy. But ...
Timothy Ford, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Charles M. Schweik, University of Massachusetts AmherstTo mitigate health inequities and promote social justice, coronavirus vaccines need to get to underserved populations and hard-to-reach communities. There are few places in the U.S. that are unreachable by road, but other factors – many ...
Israel chose to pay a bit over the odds for the Pfizer vaccine to get earlier access. Here’s The Times of Israel from 16 November. American government will be charged $39 for each two-shot dose, and the European bloc even less, but Jerusalem said to agree to pay $56. Israel ...
Orla is a gender critical Marxist in Ireland. She gave a presentation on 15 January 2021 on the connection between postmodern/transgender identity politics and the current attacks on democratic and free speech rights. Orla has been active previously in the Irish Socialist Workers Party and the People Before Profit electoral ...
. . America: The Empire Strikes Back (at itself) Further to my comments in the first part of 2020: The History That Was, the following should be considered regarding the current state of the US. They most likely will be by future historians pondering the critical decades of ...
Nathaniel ScharpingIn March, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down major cities in the U.S., researchers were thinking about blood. In particular, they were worried about the U.S. blood supply — the millions of donations every year that help keep hospital patients alive when they need a transfusion. ...
Sarah L Caddy, University of CambridgeVaccines are a marvel of medicine. Few interventions can claim to have saved as many lives. But it may surprise you to know that not all vaccines provide the same level of protection. Some vaccines stop you getting symptomatic disease, but others stop you ...
Back in 2016, the Portuguese government announced plans to stop burning coal by 2030. But progress has come much quicker, and they're now scheduled to close their last coal plant by the end of this year: The Sines coal plant in Portugal went offline at midnight yesterday evening (14 ...
The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: As anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. IT’S SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation to be smug. From the distant perspective of New Zealand, ...
RNZ reports on continued arbitrariness on decisions at the border. British comedian Russell Howard is about to tour New Zealand and other acts allowed in through managed isolation this summer include drag queen RuPaul and musicians at Northern Bass in Mangawhai and the Bay Dreams festival. The vice-president of the ...
As families around the world mourn more than two million people dead from Covid-19, the Plan B academics and their PR industry collaborator continue to argue that the New Zealand government should stop focusing on our managed isolation and quarantine system and instead protect the elderly so that they can ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 10, 2021 through Sat, Jan 16, 2021Editor's ChoiceNASA says 2020 tied for hottest year on record — here’s what you can do to helpPhoto by Michael Held on Unsplash ...
Health authorities in Norway are reporting some concerns about deaths in frail elderly after receiving their COVID-19 vaccine. Is this causally related to the vaccine? Probably not but here are the things to consider. According to the news there have been 23 deaths in Norway shortly after vaccine administration and ...
Happy New Year! No, experts are not concerned that “…one of New Zealand’s COIVD-1( vaccines will fail to protect the country” Here is why. But first I wish to issue an expletive about this journalism (First in Australia and then in NZ). It exhibits utter failure to actually truly consult ...
All nations have shadows; some acknowledge them. For others they shape their image in uncomfortable ways.The staunch Labour supporter was in despair at what her Rogernomics Government was doing. But she finished ‘at least, we got rid of Muldoon’, a response which tells us that then, and today, one’s views ...
Grigori GuitchountsIn November, Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, made an attention-grabbing announcement: More than 30 of its most prestigious journals, including the flagship Nature, will now allow authors to pay a fee of US$11,390 to make their papers freely available for anyone to read ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels, and Benjamin Santer Imagine a major climate change law passing the U.S. Congress unanimously? Don’t bother. It turns out that you don’t need to imagine it. Get this: The Global Change Research Act of 1990 was passed ...
“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”WHO CAN FORGET the penultimate scene of the 1956 movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The wild-eyed doctor, stumbling down the highway, trying desperately to warn his fellow citizens: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”Ostensibly science-fiction, the movie ...
TheOneRing.Net has got its paws on the official synopsis of the upcoming Amazon Tolkien TV series. It’s a development that brings to mind the line about Sauron deliberately releasing Gollum from the dungeons of Barad-dûr. Amazon knew exactly what they were doing here, in terms of drumming up publicity: ...
Since Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, US presidents have joined an informal club intended to provide support - and occasionally rivalry - between those few who have been ‘leaders of the free world’. Donald Trump, elected on a promise to ‘drain the swamp’ and a constant mocker of his predecessors, ...
For over a decade commentators have noted the rise of a new brand of explicitly ideological politics throughout the world. By this they usually refer to the re-emergence of national populism and avowedly illiberal approaches to governance throughout the “advanced” democratic community, but they also extend the thought to the ...
The US House of Representatives has just impeached Donald Trump, giving him the dubious honour of being the only US President to be impeached twice. Ten Republicans voted for impeachement, making it the most bipartisan impeachment ever. The question now is whether the Senate will rise to the occasion, and ...
Zero emission buses, cleaner cars and environmentally-friendly biofuels will soon be hitting New Zealand’s roads, as the Government delivers on its election promise to make our transport network more sustainable. ...
The Green Party is already delivering on its commitment for cleaner, climate-friendly transport through our Cooperation Agreement with the Government. ...
A growing public housing waiting list and continued increase of house prices must be urgently addressed by Government, Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson said today. ...
Prudence Steven QC, barrister of Christchurch has been appointed as an Environment Judge and District Court Judge to serve in Christchurch, Attorney-General David Parker announced today. Ms Steven has been a barrister sole since 2008, practising in resource management and local government / public law. She was appointed a Queen’s ...
The Government is delivering on its first tranche of election promises to take action on climate change with a raft of measures that will help meet New Zealand’s 2050 carbon neutral target, create new jobs and boost innovation. “This will be an ongoing area of action but we are moving ...
The Government is investing up to $10 million to support 30 of the country’s top early-career researchers to develop their research skills. “The pandemic has had widespread impacts across the science system, including the research workforce. After completing their PhD, researchers often travel overseas to gain experience but in the ...
A Waitomo-based Jobs for Nature project will keep up to ten people employed in the village as the tourism sector recovers post Covid-19 Conservation Minister Kiri Allan says. “This $500,000 project will save ten local jobs by deploying workers from Discover Waitomo into nature-based jobs. They will be undertaking local ...
Minister for Climate Change, James Shaw spoke yesterday with President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. “I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Mr. Kerry this morning about the urgency with which our governments must confront the climate emergency. I am grateful to him and ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Hon Nanaia Mahuta today announced three diplomatic appointments: Alana Hudson as Ambassador to Poland John Riley as Consul-General to Hong Kong Stephen Wong as Consul-General to Shanghai Poland “New Zealand’s relationship with Poland is built on enduring personal, economic and historical connections. Poland is also an important ...
Work begins today at Wainuiomata High School to ensure buildings and teaching spaces are fit for purpose, Education Minister Chris Hipkins says. The Minister joined principal Janette Melrose and board chair Lynda Koia to kick off demolition for the project, which is worth close to $40 million, as the site ...
A skilled and experienced group of people have been named as the newly established Oranga Tamariki Ministerial Advisory Board by Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis today. The Board will provide independent advice and assurance to the Minister for Children across three key areas of Oranga Tamariki: relationships with families, whānau, and ...
The green light for New Zealand’s first COVID-19 vaccine could be granted in just over a week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said today. “We’re making swift progress towards vaccinating New Zealanders against the virus, but we’re also absolutely committed to ensuring the vaccines are safe and effective,” Jacinda Ardern said. ...
The Minister for ACC is pleased to announce the appointment of three new members to join the Board of ACC on 1 February 2021. “All three bring diverse skills and experience to provide strong governance oversight to lead the direction of ACC” said Hon Carmel Sepuloni. Bella Takiari-Brame from Hamilton ...
The Government is investing $9 million to upgrade a significant community facility in Invercargill, creating economic stimulus and jobs, Infrastructure Minister Grant Robertson and Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene have announced. The grant for Waihōpai Rūnaka Inc to make improvements to Murihiku Marae comes from the $3 billion set ...
[Opening comments, welcome and thank you to Auckland University etc] It is a great pleasure to be here this afternoon to celebrate such an historic occasion - the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This is a moment many feared would never come, but ...
The Government is providing $3 million in one-off seed funding to help disabled people around New Zealand stay connected and access support in their communities, Minister for Disability Issues, Carmel Sepuloni announced today. The funding will allow disability service providers to develop digital and community-based solutions over the next two ...
Border workers in quarantine facilities will be offered voluntary daily COVID-19 saliva tests in addition to their regular weekly testing, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. This additional option will be rolled out at the Jet Park Quarantine facility in Auckland starting on Monday 25 January, and then to ...
The next steps in the Government’s ambitious firearms reform programme to include a three-month buy-back have been announced by Police Minister Poto Williams today. “The last buy-back and amnesty was unprecedented for New Zealand and was successful in collecting 60,297 firearms, modifying a further 5,630 firearms, and collecting 299,837 prohibited ...
Upscaling work already underway to restore two iconic ecosystems will deliver jobs and a lasting legacy, Conservation Minister Kiri Allan says. “The Jobs for Nature programme provides $1.25 billion over four years to offer employment opportunities for people whose livelihoods have been impacted by the COVID-19 recession. “Two new projects ...
The Government has released its Public Housing Plan 2021-2024 which outlines the intention of where 8,000 additional public and transitional housing places announced in Budget 2020, will go. “The Government is committed to continuing its public house build programme at pace and scale. The extra 8,000 homes – 6000 public ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has congratulated President Joe Biden on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States of America. “I look forward to building a close relationship with President Biden and working with him on issues that matter to both our countries,” Jacinda Ardern said. “New Zealand ...
A major investment to tackle wilding pines in Mt Richmond will create jobs and help protect the area’s unique ecosystems, Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor says. The Mt Richmond Forest Park has unique ecosystems developed on mineral-rich geology, including taonga plant species found nowhere else in the country. “These special plant ...
To further protect New Zealand from COVID-19, the Government is extending pre-departure testing to all passengers to New Zealand except from Australia, Antarctica and most Pacific Islands, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “The change will come into force for all flights arriving in New Zealand after 11:59pm (NZT) on Monday ...
Bay Conservation Cadets launched with first intake Supported with $3.5 million grant Part of $1.245b Jobs for Nature programme to accelerate recover from Covid Cadets will learn skills to protect and enhance environment Environment Minister David Parker today welcomed the first intake of cadets at the launch of the Bay ...
The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Mark Brown have announced passengers from the Cook Islands can resume quarantine-free travel into New Zealand from 21 January, enabling access to essential services such as health. “Following confirmation of the Cook Islands’ COVID ...
Jobs for Nature funding is being made available to conservation groups and landowners to employ staff and contractors in a move aimed at boosting local biodiversity-focused projects, Conservation Minister Kiritapu Allan has announced. It is estimated some 400-plus jobs will be created with employment opportunities in ecology, restoration, trapping, ...
The Government has approved an exception class for 1000 international tertiary students, degree level and above, who began their study in New Zealand but were caught offshore when border restrictions began. The exception will allow students to return to New Zealand in stages from April 2021. “Our top priority continues ...
Today’s deal between Meridian and Rio Tinto for the Tiwai smelter to remain open another four years provides time for a managed transition for Southland. “The deal provides welcome certainty to the Southland community by protecting jobs and incomes as the region plans for the future. The Government is committed ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has appointed Anna Curzon to the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). The leader of each APEC economy appoints three private sector representatives to ABAC. ABAC provides advice to leaders annually on business priorities. “ABAC helps ensure that APEC’s work programme is informed by business community perspectives ...
The Government’s prudent fiscal management and strong policy programme in the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic have been acknowledged by the credit rating agency Fitch. Fitch has today affirmed New Zealand’s local currency rating at AA+ with a stable outlook and foreign currency rating at AA with a positive ...
The Government is putting in place a suite of additional actions to protect New Zealand from COVID-19, including new emerging variants, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “Given the high rates of infection in many countries and evidence of the global spread of more transmissible variants, it’s clear that ...
$36 million of Government funding alongside councils and others for 19 projects Investment will clean up and protect waterways and create local jobs Boots on the ground expected in Q2 of 2021 Funding part of the Jobs for Nature policy package A package of 19 projects will help clean up ...
The New Zealand public sector and judiciary has again been ranked the least corrupt in the world. The 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released today by global anti-corruption organization Transparency International ranks New Zealand first equal ...
New Zealand is again ranked first equal with Denmark in the Transparency International annual index of perceived levels of public sector corruption. Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier has welcomed New Zealand’s position in the 2020 index. He says New Zealand’s ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Kaufman, Research Fellow, Vaccine Uptake Group, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute The federal government’s A$23.9 million COVID-19 vaccination information campaign, launchedyesterday, aims to reassure the public about vaccine safety and effectiveness. It will also provide information about the vaccine rollout. We’ve ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Hongi Luo, brand director at TikTok.In terms of cultural reach and impact, the ...
After Covid devastated its 2020, Basement Theatre comes roaring into 2021 with its Summer Season. Here’s the rundown of shows in-store, with some comments from programmer Nisha Madhan.Pre-FringeLust IslandWhen’s it on: February 2-6, 8pmWho’s involved: The women of improv troupe Hearthrobs (McKenzie’s Daughters, Salem Bitch Trials), including Brynley Stent, Alice ...
The whānau of Te Ahikaiata Turei supported by Māori and non-Māori staff at Unitec will take back a portrait of the Tūhoe leader who led the establishment of Te Noho Kotahitanga Marae and the values that brought the institute back from the brink of ...
A poll across the Early Childhood Education community found 93% in favour of pausing the ‘lunchbox rules’, or the Ministry of Education’s new Food Safety/choking changes to the Licensing Criteria, which came into effect on 25 January. “The message ...
Cycling advocates are calling for the transformation of urban transport, as New Zealand races to cut carbon. The Climate Change Commission will release its initial advice on Sunday 31 January. “Bikes and e-bikes are perfect for many local trips, ...
Three Ministers, led by the PM, joined in chorus today to warble about a bunch of measures aimed at helping to meet New Zealand’s 2050 carbon neutral target, create new jobs and boost innovation. Mind you, the measures mentioned seem to be more matters of decisions yet to be made ...
Michelle Kidd defines her role at Auckland’s specialist family violence court as te kaiwhakatere – the navigator. It’s a one-of-a-kind job, helping guide defendants through the court system. And there’s no one better suited to it than Whaea Michelle.First published November 24, 2020.Whaea Michelle is part of Frame, a series of short ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sallie Yea, Associate professor & Principal Research Fellow, La Trobe University Each year, thousands of men and boys labour under extremely exploitative conditions on commercial fishing vessels owned by Taiwanese, Chinese and South Korean companies. The Taiwanese fleet, which operates in all ...
Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis believes the Crown should maintain responsibility for the care and protection of at-risk and vulnerable children, regardless of their race. Moreover, he is confident his all-Maori team of advisers will not be taking race into account as they help to improve Oranga Tamariki’s care and protection of ...
It’s easy to sacrifice John Banks. It’s a lot harder for brands, sports organisations and government to truly stop funding racism. Are they willing to try?Yesterday John Banks, the former Auckland mayor and MP, became subject to one of the fastest firings in media history when audio covering his approving ...
A community is outraged after Auckland Council granted consent for a row of trees planted by local kids to be removed along a revitalised waterway in South Auckland, reports Justin Latif. An Auckland Council decision to give contractors the all-clear to chop down 12 mānuka and kānuka trees shading Māngere’s Tararata ...
Te Pūtahitanga o Te Waipounamu hopes that the recent changes to Oranga Tamariki leadership present an opportunity for a long overdue paradigm shift that will place whānau at the heart of the child welfare sector. Pouārahi Helen Leahy says that ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Rice, Professor of Management, University of New England Elon Musk is now the world’s richest person, edging out previous title holder Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. His rocketing fortune is due to the booming share price of Tesla, the maker of electric vehicles ...
There are now three returnees who contracted the virus in the Auckland isolation facility then left into the community while positive. These are some of the questions that need to be resolved. At 10.20pm last night the Ministry of Health confirmed that the two cases they’d been treating as probable ...
Having a hard time remembering to scan in on the NZ Covid Tracer app when you’re out and about? Get this song stuck in your head and you’ll never forget again.Learn the lyrics:Aotearoa, it’s time to get scanning!I mean if you think about it, it never really wasn’t time we ...
We conclude our week-long examination of New Zealand writer Roderick Finlayson with a review of his stories by John Newton Roger Hickin’s Cold Hub Press is one of the small miracles of contemporary New Zealand publishing. Over the last decade, on what can only be a shoe-string budget, the ...
Thursday 28th January, AUCKLAND: Drive Electric, the not-for-profit with one mission – making electric vehicle uptake in New Zealand mainstream, welcomes the announcement by the Government today as a sign of what’s to come through 2021, and we are confident ...
The Government announced today key policy decisions on the proposed clean car policies. The MIA has stated on many occasions that we support well thought out and constructive policies that will lead to an increased rate in the reduction of CO2 emissions from ...
Get wild, get cultured, get fed and then get to bed: the essential guide to a perfect few days in the southern city. There’s one thing that preoccupies the staff of The Spinoff almost as much as arranging popular food items into arbitrary lists, and that’s Dunedin. A quite remarkable ...
John Banks’ racist exchange with a Magic Talk listener on Tuesday was the latest in nearly 50 years of talkback controversies. Donna Chisholm has the receipts.John Banks axed over Māori ‘stone age culture’ comments on Magic Talk1972: On Radio I, sports talkback host Tim Bickerstaff launches a “Punch a Pom ...
*This article first appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission.Two new community Covid-19 cases have been identified as the more infectious South African variant, but Auckland Mayor Phil Goff sayit would be "premature to go into lockdown now". The two new cases of Covid-19 identified in the ...
Today, for the second time in two months Dunedin climate protectors have locked themselves to the railway tracks outside the Dunedin Railway station to stop the KiwiRail coal train from Bathurst Resources’ Takitimu mine in Southland to Fonterra’s ...
KiwiRail STOP Hauling COAL Today, for the second time in two months Dunedin climate protectors have locked themselves to the railway tracks outside the Dunedin Railway station to stop the KiwiRail coal train from Bathurst Resources’ Takitimu mine ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Dunn, Associate professor, University of Sydney The government is rolling out a new public information campaign this week to reassure the public about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, which one expert has said “couldn’t be more crucial” to people actually getting ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Therese O’Sullivan, Associate Professor, Edith Cowan University The COVID vaccine rollout has placed the issue of vaccination firmly in the spotlight. A successful rollout will depend on a variety of factors, one of which is vaccine acceptance. One potential hurdle to vaccine ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bernard Walker, Associate Professor in Organisations and Leadership, University of Canterbury Kiwis know what it’s like when life throws curveballs. We’ve had major quakes, floods, fires, an eruption, a terrorist attack and now a pandemic. In those situations, it’s the ability to ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Irwin, Emeritus professor, Murdoch University While we continue to be occupied with the COVID pandemic, another life-threatening disease has emerged in northern Australia, one that’s cause for considerable alarm for the millions of dog owners around the country. This disease — ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cath Ferguson, Academic, Edith Cowan University Almost half of Australian adults struggle with reading. Similar levels of struggling readers are reported in the United Kingdom and United States. This does not mean all struggling readers are illiterate. It means they often struggle ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Abbas Shieh, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Design, Islamic Azad University The industrial revolution transformed cities, resulting in places of residence and work becoming more distant than ever before. This spatial segregation is still largely embedded in the design of our ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia Review: Occupation: Rainfall, written and directed by Luke Sparke Historically, when a sequel to a film was greenlit, you could rest assured this was because the first film made a ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for January 28, keeping you up to date with the latest local and international news. Reach me on stewart@thespinoff.co.nzOur members make The Spinoff happen! Every dollar contributed directly funds our editorial team – click here to learn more about how you can support us ...
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Tourism suffers in the shadow of Covid-19, two new positive cases in Auckland confirmed, and National will contest the Māori electorates.The front page of the January 4 Greymouth Star carried grim tidings for several of the glacier towns on the ...
*This article first appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. Two people who left managed isolation on January 15 have been confirmed as positive Covid-19 cases, with the Ministry of Health urging anyone who visited the same locations during the same time period as the infected pair in Auckland to ...
The watchlist of 'offensive or unreasonable' babies' names is to be reviewed, to include more names from other languages. Generations of the Īhaka family have played a meaningful role in bringing Te Reo and stories of Māori to our wider community. Archdeacon Sir Kīngi Matutaera Īhaka (Te Aupōuri, 1921-93) was known as the orator of ...
After Morocco’s flagrant violation of the terms of the ceasefire in Western Sahara on Friday 13 November 2020 war broke out between the two sides. In the midst of this war Tauranga based Ballance Agri-Nutrients has decided to carry on importing phosphate ...
Nicholas Agar suggests that our handling of the pandemic could be partly down to our distinctive Treaty of Waitangi relationship, and Māori ideas that enabled us to make it through without tens of thousands of deaths A mission for universities in the coming decade will be a deep understanding of the meaning ...
A young girl who once sent $5 to an embattled America's Cup team is now among the women on the water helping run the contest for the Auld Mug. As an eager and generous nine-year-old, Melanie Roberts posted a letter, with a $5 note, to OneAustralia’s America’s Cup team. It was 1995, ...
At 5am today, cock’s crow, the embargo lifted on the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards longlist. Here are the books in the race, followed by thoughts from poetry editor Chris Tse and books editor Catherine Woulfe. A shortlist of four books in each category will be announced March 3, with ...
Ignoring those QR codes when you drop into the supermarket? Can’t be bothered when you grab a coffee? The people serving you notice, and you’re freaking them out.So far, New Zealanders’ use of the Covid-19 Tracer app has been notably woeful. Food industry workers who’ve watched streams of customers walk ...
Steve Braunias reveals the longlist of the 2021 Ockham New Zealand book awards Apart from one or two unfortunate omissions which cast doubt on the sanity and intellectual acumen of judges, especially the nobodies who judged this year's non-fiction, the longlist for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand book awards is ...
By Lulu Mark in Port Moresby Papua New Guinea’s biggest hospital is straining to provide medical services to the growing population of the capital Port Moresby – with an estimated growth rate of 3 percent annually, a medical executive says. Port Moresby General Hospital chief executive officer Dr Paki Molumi ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Nationals who attend Thursday’s memorial service in Tweed Heads for Doug Anthony, who died last month aged 90, may muse on the contrast between the state of their party when he led it and now. ...
Returning to quarantine-free travel in 2021 doesn't just need a vaccine, but a way to check whether arriving passengers are actually immune to the virus. A smart Kiwi science start-up is working with a global biometrics giant to make that happen. A deal signed between Kiwi research and development company Orbis Diagnostics, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caitlyn Forster, PhD Candidate, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney This summer’s wetter conditions have created great conditions for flowering plants. Flowers provide sweet nectar and protein-rich pollen, attracting many insects, including bees. Commercial honey bees are also thriving: ...
Lotto scratchie tickets featuring the pop band Six60 are being withdrawn after a public backlash. In a statement, Lotto NZ said there had been a mutual decision made with the band to remove the tickets from sale following the negative feedback, and it offered an apology. The band faced criticism, both ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Russell Dean Christopher Bicknell, Post-doctoral researcher in Palaeobiology , University of New England Shell-crushing predation was already in full swing half a billion years ago, as our new research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveals. A hyena devouring ...
Vodafone has suspended advertising on the radio station amid calls for talkback host John Banks to be taken off air after yet another racist outburst. Alex Braae reports. In an alarming segment of talkback radio, former Auckland mayor John Banks endorsed the views of a caller who described Māori as a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Welch, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland When a COVID-19 case was found in Northland last Sunday, Aotearoa’s second-longest period with no detected community case came to an end. ESR scientists worked late into Sunday night to obtain a whole genome sequence ...
He has the perfect moustache, an exceptional mullet, and he uses terms like ‘face hole’ on national TV. Who or what is Dr Joel Rindelaub?I was drawn in by the moustache, but it was the mullet that really kept me there. Watching TVNZ’s Breakfast yesterday morning I was fixated. Often, ...
We’ll never be royals with nearly a quarter of declined baby names featuring “Royal” in some form or another. Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs has released the list of names declined in 2020 by the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and ...
After a raft of inquiries delving into and recommending what should be done about the politically beleaguered Orangi Tamaraki, along with the briefing papers we suppose he has been given, we imagined Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis would have no more need for expert advice. Wrong. He has ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vincent Ho, Senior Lecturer and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University There’s a common assumption men take longer than women to poo. People say so on Twitter, in memes, and elsewhereonline. But is that right? What could explain it? And if ...
Just as sexuality is a spectrum, so too is asexuality. In Ace of Hearts, members of New Zealand’s asexual community talk about the challenges and misconceptions of identifying as ace.First published November 17, 2020.Ace of Hearts is part of Frame, a series of short documentaries produced by Wrestler for The Spinoff.“A ...
Sam Brooks wasn’t allowed to watch kids TV as a kid. Now, as a 30 year old man, he watches it for the first time.My mother’s approach to parenting was unorthodox. I wrote weekly book reports on top of my actual homework, I did maths equations in Roman numerals and ...
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk More leading Indonesian figures have made racial slurs against Natalius Pigai, former chair of the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) – and all West Papuans, says United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda. “Since the illegal Indonesian invasion in 1963, Indonesian ...
“The Government’s failure to even conduct a standard cost-benefit analysis for the most expensive infrastructure project in New Zealand’s history is mind-bogglingly arrogant,” says New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke. “A ...
The Ministry of Health is today drawing backlash from the local New Zealand vaping industry following its release of proposed regulations for the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act. Vaping Trade Association New Zealand (VTANZ) President, ...
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Another mass shooting in the US – symptom of a dysfunctional society?
Add to the above:
“As one of the world’s wealthiest societies, the US is what Alston calls a “land of stark contrasts”. It is home to one in four of the world’s 2,208 billionaires.
At the other end of the spectrum, 40 million Americans live in poverty. More than five million eke out an existence amid the kind of absolute deprivation normally associated with the developing world.
The symptoms of such glaring inequality include:
• Americans now live shorter and sicker lives than citizens of other rich democracies;
• Tropical diseases that flourish in conditions of poverty are on the rise;
• The US incarceration rate remains the highest in the world;
• Voter registration levels are among the lowest in industrialised nations – 64% of the voting-age population, compared with 91% in Canada and the UK and 99% in Japan.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/01/us-inequality-donald-trump-cruel-measures-un
Isn’t it about time this country took a more neutral and independent line on the world scene – keeping our distance from both the US and China (just as dangerous a country to get into bed with, imo). Looking inwards for our own prosperity and not going ‘cap in hand’ to the altar of ‘world trade’?
We must distinguish ourselves from US centeric interests if we are to thrive once the economic power shift to the East is complete.
When trade commenced in the Petro-Yuan it took just two months before 12% of trade was conducted in PY in preference to the previous standard of the Petro-dollar.
A smart country would read the writing on the wall and react now while it is easier to reposition, but yes both dangerous.
Yes it is. Being totally dependent upon other countries is bad for a country as it leaves them vulnerable to the actions of those countries.
The NRAs current president in the US who got given the position with the help of the gun lobby is a man who has admitted under oath to being a Traitor to the US and to selling guns to people listed as terrorists by the US. The only reason he is not in Jail is the case against him fell apart because most of the evidence had to be tossed out as it was freely given by him to a congressional hearing under an immunity deal.
That is the sort of man you have running the NRA in the US and able to legally bribe their politicians to ignore the call of the majority of their voters for gun control.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12080025
Hooton making things up….surely not? (I was daft enough to believe this for a few hours which is maybe Hootons agenda…mud sticks)
Looks like the ‘lucky country’ may get lucky twice from it’s mining boom:
One analysis I read suggested there may be literally thousands of such sites all over the outback, with a staggering potential.
Meanwhile…
James Hansen.
Hansen is absolutely one of the good guys, but neither do I buy into the stupid totalitarian idea that any individual is omniscient.
Critically there are three things coming together which will bring renewables into a new focus:
1. PV is now being installed at utility scale (> 50 MW) at prices under 3 cents/kWhr, well under any fossil fuel generation. In Australia 60% of all new generation is PV or wind. The economics have now tilted permanently in renewable’s favour; and the smart money in town is now chasing the opportunities as illustrated above.
2. Storage technologies are coming online as engineered reality; pumped storage is one example. The other which is up and running can be seen here:
https://www.aalborgcsp.com/projects/366mwth-integrated-energy-system-based-on-csp-australia/
3. Smart distribution technologies are gaining more traction, allowing generation and consumption to be better matched both temporally and spatially. A global HVDC super-grid will eventually resolve this issue permanently:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-a-global-power-grid
So the technology is there or getting there. And the price signals are improving. We even have engineers and technicians and what not to design and build and develop whatever might be required.
And we have something over 20 years at our current rates of emissions to get it all developed, built, and up and running to (perhaps) avoid 2 degrees of warming.
I don’t think there’s much in the way of “omniscience” required to figure that no matter the amount of will power, it just ain’t possible to hard boil an egg in an open pan of water in 30 sec flat. (That being the basic situation we’re facing in terms of time with AGW and possible tech roll outs)
The history has many striking examples of what happens when a new technology reaches a tipping point; crucially where it become 3 – 10 times cheaper or better than the one it replaces.
While the first cars where marketed in the early 1890’s, in the decade from about 1902 to 1912 horses literally vanished from large Western cities as cars totally replaced them.
The first commercial mini-computers became available around the late 60’s, but suddenly from 1980 onwards they penetrated everywhere. To the point now where modern business gets nothing done without them.
Mobile phones came into use in the early 90’s, but the advent of smartphones in the mid-2000’s literally exploded their penetration to every corner of the planet.
Electric cars are on the cusp of the same transition.
In hindsight the transition always looks obvious, but what no-one anticipates in advance is how fast and how comprehensive the process can be.
Sure. But none of those instances or examples even begin to approach the sheer scale of whats required in terms of engineering in the face of AGW (if the idea is to swap out carbon while we just carry on). And none of those things were subject to the time constraints we’re looking at.
You talk of electric cars. But it would have to be electric cars and shipping and aviation and most of the world’s electricity generation plus whatever of the world’s 80% of energy needs, not covered above, that aren’t currently “vectored” through electricity.
And all in something like 20 years assuming no increase in emissions from present levels (they’re actually going up every year).
As I commented – it’s like saying you’ll take an egg and hard boil it in 30. Nice idea. Doesn’t stack up.
late edit on a mistaken assumption contained in your comment about efficiency and cost driving change. Steam was never cheaper or more efficient than water as a source of energy for mills. And yet…
RedLogix did not claim it would cure climate change.
The comments were limited to electricity generation, electricity networks, and electricity storage.
The other comments were illustrations of technological change, not as contributions to alleviating climate change.
Electricity storage, networks and generation are going to have to encompass most of the 80% of energy we use that isn’t from a zero or low carbon source.
That aside, I didn’t think for one second that RL was making any claim to having stumbled on “a cure for” climate change. But I’m pretty sure he was alluding to the possibility of techno fixes that would see us making no more contribution to global warming. Which, by the way, is feasible, just not in terms of 2 degrees of warming (avoidance of).
That’s a pretty solid response Bill; the numbers are daunting, and hard to argue with given our current position. In very rough terms the ‘big three’ contributors to fossil CO2 are in order of magnitude (IIRC):
1. Electricity
2. Transport
3. Steel and concrete
The first is 100% solvable relatively quickly within two decades, the second can be dramatically improved. The third contribution from steel and concrete are going to be the difficult one, as at present we don’t have a lot of good alternatives I’m aware of. (Other than engineered timber which I like a lot, but has limits.)
Over the past two centuries fossil fuels have served an extraordinary purpose in moving the vast majority of the human population out of absolute degrading poverty and slavery, to on average, a modest standard of living and welfare. Turning the clock back on that is simply not an option.
In solving one problem, we have uncovered another; we are hard up against the limits of what fossil carbon can do for us.
The deep choice we face is this; do we press on down the technological/industrial path in the expectation we can transition off fossil carbon in time, or do we abandon that direction for an entirely unknown destination with wholly unknown risks? And to what extent is this choice conflated with the idea that such a crisis might offer a chance to ‘smash capitalism’?
Just to be clear for you; the un-reconstructed hippie in me still has a place in my heart for the kind of eco-technic forest garden low energy low consumption vision as patented by the 70’s. The fact that we could imagine it means something. Yet the big wide world out there never seemed to conform to our dreams did it?
I’m not really into hippy stuff.
We are facing a problem that we can’t roll out technical solutions for in the time we’ve left ourselves before hitting 2 degrees of warming. And things are going to get ugly and not a little frightening.
Slashing energy consumption needn’t mean dawdling back to some “sackcloth” past.
I think most of us can agree that a hell of a lot of utter shit is manufactured and distributed and that a lot of energy is used in the process. We could knock all that on the head.
Most people are also aware than many jobs are pretty pointless; that if they do serve a point beyond just keeping people occupied and in thrall to generating profit for some-one or other, then that point has never been elucidated. So, given those pointless jobs also consume a vast amount of energy, we could quite painlessly knock all those jobs on the head too.
So far, I’m not seeing any downside 🙂
But sure (and this seems central to inaction on AGW) the economy we have would be shredded if we took those steps. So we need to imagine and develop new ways to do stuff, or we’ll just stupidly knacker ourselves because one idea of what an economy ought to be was biting the dust.
I’m still not seeing any inevitably looming “sackclothed” downside.
In fact, with all that human potential freed up and a world of possibility…
The flip side is a world of bugger all possibility arriving with an economy biting the dust at the point it can no longer withstand the impacts of climate changes and AGW.
A lot of good points well made Bill, especially when you address the gross waste and inefficiency of much of our current economic activity. But then again this isn’t a unique feature of 21st century life; we’re just doing it on a grand scale our ancestors had no access to.
I’m not the only one here who has often mused that politics is an insufficient level of analysis; it’s only a small part of the story. It goes much deeper than this; it strikes at exactly what makes us human and why we behave in these apparently contradictory, self-destructive ways.
It’s entirely impossible to imagine a world for instance, where Arrhenius’ discoveries in the 1890’s would have immediately led to a rational, logical and eminently sensible cessation of fossil fuel use. People just are not like that. And we cannot, should not, try and imagine we can force them to be.
What we can do is encourage us to understand ourselves and observe all the ways we fuck things up. And then help each other, one painful step at a time to do better. I think that’s all I have to say for the moment … thank you for an interesting conversation Bill.
Cheers
Steam was never cheaper or more efficient than water as a source of energy for mills.
An interesting proposition. The engineering answer is that water mills, while efficient in one sense, had strict scalability limits which horribly constrained their range of application. Nor of course was a water mill ever going to be of much use to drive a locomotive or ship.
The thing is, fossil carbon in all it’s forms came with so many immediate advantages, unprecedented energy density, portability and storage qualities … that once discovered we were never NOT going to exploit them.
And we have … to a remarkable extent. The world is a totally different place to 1818. You really don’t want to go back there, for the average person … most people … life was very hard indeed. And given this enormous progress it’s very understandable that so many people really didn’t want to accept that it came with limits, that there would come a time when this geological genie that literally popped out of the earth, might come with a cost.
There is no perfect solution here; there are risks whatever we do. But my sense is that the world is reaching a point where it is looking to build on what we have already achieved, and mass adoption of renewables will be part of that mix.
I’m not arguing against non-carbon sources of energy in terms of research, development of roll-out.
I’m simply pointing out some obvious time restraints that impact any notions around a switch to non-carbon energy happening alongside maintaining what we have, and continuing to do as we do. There’s a bin marked “false hope” for that garbage.
Industry of the early 1800s ran on water, and had no problem in terms of up scaling. (Add another wheel. Build a bigger wheel. Construct more water channels etc).
Social control and power, rather than engineering efficiency or market signals, drove the switch to coal fired steam engines.
I don’t know how “nasty, brutish and short” life really was for those in 1818 not caught up by industrialisation (as opposed to those who were). But I know that however bad or good it was,it’s probably going to look really fcking desirable from the vantage point of humanity experiencing starvation at the continental level when sea level rise wipes out the 20-25% of global food production that occurs on deltas within the space of current human lives.
“I don’t know how “nasty, brutish and short” life really was for those in 1818 not caught up by industrialisation (as opposed to those who were). But I know that however bad or good it was,it’s probably going to look really fcking desirable from the vantage point of humanity experiencing starvation at the continental level when sea level rise wipes out the 20-25% of global food production that occurs on deltas within the space of current human lives.”
aint that the truth!
Social control and power, rather than engineering efficiency or market signals, drove the switch to coal fired steam engines.
I don’t think so. Social control and power long pre-existed your pre-industrial water powered Eden of 1800; it’s not the child of capitalism or technology, rather a great-great-grand ancestor eons old.
What is true is that as we have developed more technically complex societies, at least from the invention of agriculture onward, our personal relationship with the societies we live in has clearly intensified. And that relationship, even as it brings us benefits, often falls short of any imagined ideal.
There isn’t a simplistic binary response to what your saying here; yes the Industrial Revolution brought a great deal of change, social chaos and misery. But arguably at the end of it, the average individual was a lot better off and politically a great deal freer than at the beginning.
But what I can emphatically say is that the steam engine was not invented as some infernal tool of an evil Illuminati (or whatever), hell-bent on enslaving the human race to it’s nefarious elitist dreams. It works as a metaphor in the Lord of the Rings, but Sauron is not an actual person.
We’re holding a conversation on at least two levels simultaneously here; the obvious one is about the technology options in front of us. The other is deeper and harder to grasp. Tolkien’s directly addressed it in his Hobbit narrative; his revulsion and horror of the mechanised death of WW1, contrasted with an idealised conception of the pre-industrial Hobbiton. Yet in the end, despite it’s charm and nostalgia, even Tolkien knew Hobbiton was a fantasy; it had it’s own internal contradictions and flawed beings.
On the switch to coal, I read an interesting theory years ago that argued the Romans should have developed coal/steam power, but their supply of slaves made it pointless for them to develop alternatives. So possibly not a coincidence that steam power was developed in a nation with one of the weakest monarchies at the time.
I’m not suggesting there was any pre-industrial water powered Eden of 1800. (The switch from water to steam occurred well into the 1800s btw) Neither am I daft enough to believe that power struggles don’t date back to “way back when”.
Andrea Malm has a very good book laying out the various arguments and looking at the historical record. It’s called “Fossil Capital – the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming”.
I recommended it to Carolyn Nth the other day.
Some “snapshots”.
Watt and his business partner failed to make money selling steam engines to mills in Watt’s lifetime because they were expensive and inefficient in relation to water.
Rural populations routinely abandoned the water powered mills they worked in (why wouldn’t they?) Mill owners then enslaved unpaid children from orphanages to make up the short fall (they ran away too.)
Relocating mills to centres like Manchester and running them on steam, not only accessed a larger pool of itinerant labour, but after a couple of generations, city kids knew no different – had no memory or experience of rural life and were therefore more “amenable” to factory life..
There were also bullshit arguments between owners of various workshops and mills over who should pay what in terms of upkeep for the infrastructure required to “tap” a river. Coal fired steam engines sidestepped that conflict.
@ Mc Flock
An interesting argument; it certainly points to the idea that in order to become disruptive a new technology does need to be at least 3 -10 times better than what it’s replacing … something near enough isn’t sufficient to negate the sunk costs of the existing infrastructure.
The engineering response would be two words: Bessemer Process. In order for a steam engine to be efficient it needs to operate at temperatures and pressures that Roman era metals simply could not sustain. The introduction of the Bessemer process in the 1850’s produced for the first time large amounts of high quality, low cost steel with predictable qualities.
@ Bill. Which is why the early steam engines were relatively slow to gain wide acceptance. It was only when decent steel came along for the boiler tubes did the equations tip dramatically in their favour.
Much of what we think of as technological advances are in reality built on the back of advances in materials, a branch of engineering that never gets enough credit for what it contributes.
@McFlock – Steam seems simple. the Greeks made little whirligigs that seemed to be “steam powered” but that understanding is simply ignorant. Using escaping steam as a form of “jet power” is NOT how steam engines work. The early “steam engines” of the industrial age did not actually produce very much power in comparison to their cost and slow speed.
The reason is that “steam” is compressible. And because of that it actually exerts very little force on a cylinder. What made the modern “steam engine” was the accidental realization that spraying a little cold water into a cylinder full of steam caused the steam to immediately collapse… and the VACUUM created in the cylinder has a thousand times more force than the steam can possibly exert. Its Vacuum that drives a steam engines cylinder, not the pressure of steam.
But to discover this, you need to have not only sophisticated metallurgical skills, you also have to understand just what a vacuum is, and how to calculate the force of the vacuum on the materials of the engine so that you can design an engine that can withstand those forces… and, that means you need to be able to measure and quantify such parameters as ductility, tensile strength, elasticity, as well as be able to measure and control very high temperatures with precision to produce materials with reliable properties… and that means you need to have thermometers, and the maths to calculate altitudes, air pressure, and more.
For example, the Romans routinely created vacuums whenever they tried to pump water out of mines in stages longer than 10 metres. But they had no idea they were creating vacuums. They had no idea WHY the water would not go higher in a pipe than 10 metres no matter how hard you tried to pump it. They just understood they had to break pumping systems down to 10 metre lengths. And then pump again from there.
They could not understand the vacuum because they lacked the intellectual tools. Have you ever tried to do advanced calculations using Roman numerals and no concept of zero? The Romans had no concept of the modern idea of science that would have allowed them record and quantify and correlate the physical world around them in such a way as to build a cohesive scientific picture of the laws of nature.
Knowing a steam jet makes something go around is meaningless unless you know also why it makes it go round. A good example of this phenomena is gunpowder. Serendipitously inventing a formula of something that goes BANG! is not remotely as powerful as knowing WHY gunpowder explodes.
The former is a just a recipe you follow without understanding. it offers you nothing but the gunpowder, which is why all you got was gunpowder for another 1000 years.
The latter offers you the capability of creating countless other chemicals, with countless other applications, because you have a theory of chemistry you can employ to make a multitude of compounds.
@ Sanctuary
Great explanation around the importance of steam condensers in the process.
The other intellectual tool the Romans were missing was any inkling of thermodynamics. That really didn’t come along until Carnot formulated the first proper efficiency calculations for steam engine around 1824:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_L%C3%A9onard_Sadi_Carnot
@Bill – mate, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to the early industrial revolution.
“…Industry of the early 1800s ran on water, and had no problem in terms of up scaling. (Add another wheel. Build a bigger wheel. Construct more water channels etc)…”
Wrong to the point of laughable, because you completely fail to account for the cost of distribution. Water wheels require water. If you have a mine in need of pumping nowhere near a river, then even the biggest fucking water wheel in all existence is of absolutely no use to you. Grinding flour at a riverside mill might be cheaper than using a steam powered plant to do so, but by the time you factor in the costs of shipping the grain to the water mill and then back to the markets, it is hopelessly inefficient compared to a steam powered mill. That is because the cost of transporting manufactured goods overland to the markets that wanted them doubled every few miles. Steam engines are far more flexible, you assemble one in the place where the people are and with a hey nonny-nonny your flour mill is in business.
The first most critical requirement for steam power was for pumping water out of coal mines. Beginning in the mid 15th Century Great Britain ran out of ready sources of wood for domestic fuel use. Remember, at this time wood was an especially important strategic resource, essential to naval shipbuilding for example and the main source of construction material before the industrial manufacture of bricks. The price of wood soared, and by the end of the Tudor age much of Great Britain was completely deforested. Unlike the Mediterranean basin Britain had a lot of readily accessible coal seams near the surface, so the British switched to coal for most domestic fuel use. The amount of coal shipped to London from Newcastle grew by 3000% between 1550 and 1700, and the increase in the volume of coal mined between 1556 and 1606 exceeded the growth rate of coal mined at the height of the early industrial revolution.
As surface coal seams were exhausted, mines went deeper and new technologies were needed to pump out water. As I noted in my post to McFlock, early steam engines were very inefficient. 80% of the energy is wasted in a Newcomen engine and they used a lot of coal. But they also allowed mining at much greater depths, and advances in design by Watt and John Smeaton rapidly improved their efficiency, and over the next 150 years steams engines became dramatically more efficient and economical.
I have never heard anyone suggest that the industrial revolution could have been achieved with the steam engine, so i guess your argument has novelty. But only the novelty of the kind reserved for the prefix of a silly hat at the fancy dress shop.
@ Sanctuary.
We probably agree that the Industrial Revolution in Britain was predicated upon cotton, yes? (ie, it was the cotton industry that grew far faster than other manufacturies of the time)
And whatever you’re opinion of me may or may not be in terms of knowing what I’m talking about, the historical record shows that paper mills, cotton mills and other factories requiring power were overwhelmingly powered by water.
You want to argue with the historical record, (presumably on the basis that it’s laughable) then have at it.
In relation to your comments on transportation costs etc.
Do you have any idea about the extensive canal networks that used to criss-cross Britain’s industrial heartlands? (Some are still used). Or the sheer availability and accessibility of places with a high head of water in Britain? (It was no accident that mills were built at the foot of the Highlands and throughout Lancashire). Or of the number of solid flowing rivers passing though major centres of population? (I think most British cities are located on major rivers)
As late as 1826, calculations on the comparative costs of running a mill on coal or water, “including as costs associated with water rent to the landlord, outlays on dams and sluices, expenses for transporting raw materials and a manager between mill and market”…the steam engines coal consumption meant that water was more cost effective.
You want to talk of mines and coal for domestic heating purposes going as far back as Elizabethan times? That has nothing whatsoever to do with what initially powered the industrial revolution.
Now. You want to call me a clown? Fine. Me and history both.
But in that case, what hat is it you reckon you should be grabbing for yourself from the fancy dress shop?
The industrial revolution began as the result of a confluence of numerous technological, economic and political drivers. The need for cheap energy (coal) as a substitute for depleted wood supplies was an important early driver of the chain of events that led to the industrial revolution. Cotton had nothing to do with that – the explosion of inventions that transformed cotton from a rare and expensive textile into a cheap, mass produced one post date the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
the fact that the early transitional stages of the industrial revolution were powered by water more than steam (due to the inefficiencies of early steam power) does not negate the central point that coal extraction with the aid of steam power was a major trigger of the chain of events the culminated in the industrial revolution. Remember, your claim is that the move to steam power was driven by a need for “…Social control and power…” rather than any economic imperative.
Your choice of Manchester is highly illustrative of this process. Your are completely wrong in your statement “…Relocating mills to centres like Manchester and running them on steam…” Manchester became an important early centre of textile production (the reason for the supply of cheap cotton is whole other series of intertwined events) due to the abundance of water to power the early mills and, in the form of the River Irwell, to provide efficient transport to the growing port of Liverpool and the sea (which, BTW, is another example of the inefficiencies of land transportation). But Manchester then EXPLODED as an industrial hub because it is close to the cheap coal fields of Northern England and Wales and local sources of iron ore, essential to making steam engines and other machinery. Oh and your claim that “…Watt and his business partner failed to make money selling steam engines to mills in Watt’s lifetime because they were expensive and inefficient in relation to water…” is simply not true. Watt lived to be 83 and became extremely wealthy and his steam engines were wildly popular. I would be interested to know where you got this particularly egregrious piece of mis-information from!
The canal system also post dates the industrial revolution. When you think about it, it stand to reason that a canal system wouldn’t be built unless there was a need for it – in other words, a need to transport goods and commodities in large quantities – large quantities made possible by the explosion in manufacturing made possible by the industrial revolution. Again, the story of the first “proper” canal in the UK illustrates my points well. The Sankey Canal (opened 1757) was built primarily to transport coal to Liverpool. Secondly, water transport was by far more efficient than carts, reinforcing my earlier point about transport costs.
The bold claim was that “… Steam was never cheaper or more efficient than water as a source of energy for mills…” and that “…Social control and power… …drove the switch to coal fired steam engines…” Bold claims require strong evidence. You’ve not provided any.
I was actually thinking of the 18th century static engines rather when the technology matured (‘brick’ phones rather than iphones). But of course those were to respond to very specific problems without nearby water power. Necessity, motherhood, and all that.
Also a fair point about the legacy of Newton.
@ Sanctuary
The need for cheap energy (coal) as a substitute for depleted wood supplies was an important early driver of the chain of events that led to the industrial revolution
The historical record is clear. Water (a ‘free’ energy source following initial outlay) was cheaper than coal, and preferred by factory owners in the first 1/4 to 1/3rd of the 1800s over coal driven steam engines.
The transition to coal, as I wrote earlier in response to RL is the subject of “Fossil Capital – the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming“, by Andreas Malm (Lund University)
You can find some presentations by him in English on youtube if you care to search.
From the back jacket of the book.
Bold claims require strong evidence. You’ve not provided any.
I’ve provided the source more than once, and that source offers a thorough, fully footnoted exploration of what drove manufacturing from water power to steam power. Do yourself a favour and read it instead of throwing idiotic accusations, assertions and ad homs around a thread, aye?
edit. And the canal system in Britain was going into decline by the second half of the 1800s (because rail). Their development hardly then post dating the industrial revolution as you assert.
The one thing about even burning dirty fuels like coal to create the electricity to power electric cars is that in a lot of cases it is still slightly cleaner than using petrol and diesel-powered engines. When it comes to cars used in big cities due to the amount of time a lot of them sit around at a traffic light or stuck in traffic jams with their engines idling there is a very large amount of fuel they burn wastefully, while the majority of the power generated at a power station is being used and little wasted.
“The trouble with Hansen is he’s never been wrong”.
As with OAB apparently.
The quote has multiple interpretations. Slow clap for picking the least nuanced of them and making an insult out of it. Well done, bravo.
Your quote immediately above with the term “never been wrong” is strongly absolute. Especially absent any clarifying nuance you didn’t feel need to provide.
And the original quote at 3.1 does of course has a few different ways to look at it; feel free to explain why you chose to use it, and the impeccable pristine meaning you intended to convey, and I so stupidly missed.
1. Being wrong once in a while builds character.
2. If your predictions are sufficiently broad, your chances of error diminish.
3. Is the “trouble” a problem for Hansen or us?
A fat lot of good It’s done him.
In that case I must have a whole lot more ‘character’ than I probably know what to do with.
Great post Red….lots of good info. Party Vote Green and all of this will continue apace.
Awesome project.
We’re across a few of the wind farms in South Australia.
Lucky might be the right word for it redlogix, it looks a good scheme and likely not one we’d be able to do on any decent scale.
Longer term I can see Aus running large scale desalination plants from renewables, they might even be able to work the two in together.
Actually we can, or indeed should have, but for the idiot reforms of the National Party which broke the system up. We already have a substantial hydro generation base, and the key to using it intelligently is to minimise using it except to meet demand when other renewables are not available.
But to do that would require a commercially integrated generation/distribution system that for ideological reasons we’re not allowed to have. Which is why NZ is the ‘not so lucky’ country.
Also doesn’t help that a few great wind farm (both large and small) proposals were fought tooth and nail by a few locals, so they were stopped.
The South Australia grid innovations have impressed our firm. Sure hope that the Tesla storage system holds up in a good storm – it’s an important precedent.
I can’t see it RL. The scheme needs two lakes at differing heights, preferably close together. Can’t be much like that in NZ without using up land that’s already being used. Huntly has heaps of lakes but IIRC they’re nearly all on the same level.
Sorry I wasn’t clear; from an energy perspective not using already stored energy in a hydro lake, is the same as actively adding to the storage, if you can substitute with other renewables elsewhere.
All that any pump hydro or storage system does is to time shift the net generation; ie moving the excess of PV generation from the daytime, to the evenings where the demand is.
You get a similar result in say NZ if you stop using the existing run of river hydro during the daytime (effectively topping up the storage) by switching to wind or pv during the day, then running the hydro harder in the evenings drawing down on what you haven’t used during the daytime.
It requires some planning and solid technical integration, and as a concept has engineering limits … but entirely doable.
They do that already don’t they RL? Our hydro is mostly on waterways so they are limited in how much they can control the flow.
Cheap storage of power has been the number one obstacle since electricity was first discovered. When you look at how the world has progressed with everything else it’s quite surprising they haven’t cracked it yet.
Some of the lesser options are quite simple but (presently) defeated by practical economics. When we have a shower in the morning the water cylinder is reheated from the grid before the sun is high enough in the sky to generate much solar energy. For the homeowner with solar panels the cost of getting a sparkie in to install a timer on the water cylinder can eat up the potential savings.
There’s plenty of potential in Otago for pumped storage. Hawea and Wanaka could work but with constraints around the natural level of Wanaka. The Waipori scheme could easily be made to work “backwards” along with the small schemes fed from the high lakes like Onslow. But any hydro dam could be configured to “recycle” water, or in effect energy.
One aspect that’s been glossed over in the video that RL put up in the OP was the efficiency of the undertaking. Wiki says 70 – 80% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity and then you’d have transmission losses on top of that. But probably still worthwhile.
Also had a quiet chuckle at Australia striving to meet “a goal of 20% renewable”. We are very fortunate in that regard.
Good catch on the relatively low in/out efficiencies. Fortunately when the marginal cost of your input energy is almost zero, anything over 60% will do.
Incidentally I instigated and commissioned a modest 300 kW hydro using a couple of existing pumps run backwards on a water supply system some years back. The in/out efficiency was never better than 62% but it just didn’t matter; the payback of the project was well under 10 months.
But otherwise yes, with our mountainous geography there must be more than a few decent pumped storage locations around. Fiordland is essentially one giant opportunity full of hanging glacial valleys with solid rock … albeit with obvious issues around it’s National Park status. The tramper in me would have to fight it boot and ice-axe 🙂
In terms of raw efficiency it’s hard to beat modern batteries, Tesla claim in – out efficiencies above 90% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Powerwall
Economic efficiency and return on investment could be another thing however. Also there’s return on investment for the developer / promotor to factor in, along with entrenched utilities, the consumer just being the mug who’s paying for it.
I can see some of the dedicated hydro schemes being suitable but I’m not convinced you can do it with most dams. Dams are on river systems, start pumping it back up again and you interfere with the habitat and environment downstream of the dam. Realistically you’d want to pump from dam to dam, like what the aussies are doing, or at least catchment to dam and pumping distance would surely be an issue there (?).
70-80% efficiency is very worthwhile if they can achieve that. For large scale solar they can now buy panels for around NZ60c per watt. Allow annual generation of 1000watts per watt, lifetime of 25 years and your generation cost is 2.4c kW/hr. Installation, land and other plant would probably double that for the final cost but 30% on top for dam storage is still peanuts, doesn’t add much at that level. I thought it would be much less efficient.
Actually, to do it requires power being turned back into a government service. Commercialisation won’t do it fast enough and there’d have to be all sorts of regulations around connection to get the smart-grid working. Easier and cheaper just to have the government do it.
Agree Tony with your analogy of the current state of the global health system.
I was chemically poisoned over 25yrs ago in a workplace ‘accident’ in Canada and found out the ‘hard way’ that the global governments and medical fraternity did not know anythuing about the dangers of chemical exposures to the human bieng.
This publically funded group were the one that saved my life; jion thisn group.
https://www.ciin.org/
Here a a library of evidence of the exposures we continually face and fornuse in litigation proceedings.
Chemical Exposure and Human Health
A Reference to 314 Chemicals with a Guide to Symptoms
by Cynthia Wilson
The classic MCS sufferer’s volume on the known health effects of chemical exposures. Written by Cynthia Wilson, the founder and Executive Director of Chemical Injury Information Network, it remains the most valuable source of chemical information written by a lay person about the health hazards from everyday chemical exposures. The sections on Symptoms and Potential Causes, Sources of Exposures and the Chemical Directory are priceless.
The book was originally priced at $55.00 and is no longer in print. 345 pages $25.00 plus $5 s/h Used but unscented copies.
Order online or by mail here – https://www.ciin.org/books.html
https://www.ciin.org/news_ott.html
Since 1993 I have lived mostrly outside of the whole medical system, – living on the age old method of first listening to my body and responding to the signals it sends me to respond to it. No medical Doctor could even contemplate doing this nor could they physically carry this out unless 100% monitoring of my system and brain functions.
Some claiim that a monitor can be placed on our body but still they do not treat the systoms with any thing else than thiose toxic invasive prescription medications who I was found to have “adverse medical reations to”.
No toxic ‘prescription medications’ are used today in my life long slow recovery from almost certain death after the workplace accidental exposures to well documented chemical toxic soup I was exposed to without a workplace adequate ventilation during the six month place accident/incident that affected over 40 workers on that worksite during that time and several have since died who were medically documented very healthy proir to the accident.
We need to look at our own woeful agency called OSH ‘Occupational Safety and Health and re-train the medical community in “toxicology” as we now live in a toxic chemical soup daily nowdays and it is getting worse by the day.
Thanks for that link @CleanGreen.
I unapologetically post yet another Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez video. She is a rising star, and unlike the morbidly aged senior house democrats (Americans really need to talk about the age of their representatives. Maxine Waters is 79. Nancy Pelosi is 78. Senator Dianne Feinstein is 85. The average age of the top four house democrats is I think 76 years old) she is young and in touch with her district.
Sam Seder basically dissects the default position of hostility the establishment MSM has towards left wing change agents (TL,DR – anyone outside the establishment is treated as a freak and interviewed with an air of condescending cynicism with an aim to write them off using gotcha tactics. You hear this style ALL.THE.FUCKING.TIME. from establishment toadies like Guyon Espiner and Susie Ferguson).
The lesson for the NZ Labour party is how easy it is to deal with the ambient passive aggressiveness of the establishment media IF YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING BELIEVE IN DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.
Interesting Ocasio-Cortez when asked what she would replace ICE with argues that the purpose of a border agency is to ensure “safe passage”. I’m curious what she means by this. By itself this seems an inadequate definition of what a border is about, surely there is more to a border than handing out coffee, donuts and a ‘welcome to the USA pack’ to anyone who cares to turn up.
The good news is that Mexico is likely to elect a strongly left-wing govt:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-30/mexico-election-amlo-leads-the-polls/9925238
Hopefully this will turn the country around and lead millions of migrants to head back to their homeland. Maybe Mexico will finish up build a wall to keep out hordes of fleeing Americans. 🙂
(I’m thinking of an American couple I met at Tocumen Airport last week, who were doing exactly that. They’d just purchased a new home in Ecuador specifically to get away from the “fear which saturates America”.)
Interesting times.
“… I’m curious what she means by this…”
The point of the interview wasn’t to interrogate Ocasio-Cortez in order to allow voters to better understand her beliefs and satisfy your curiosity. Poppy Harlow missed a couple of opportunities to pin Ocasio-Cortez down on potentially interesting answers because she wasn’t listening to Ocasio-Cortez’s answers – she was looking for an opening to attack Ocasio-Cortez based on a tired establishment narrative.
Poppy Harlow approached the interview from a well worn position of establishment superiority with a well worn interviewing template designed to serve a well worn agenda.
It is reflexive, non-thinking, lazy and complacent journalism informed by ambient hostility to anti-establishment thinking.
Sam Seder’s commentary is entirely about how the only new information that came out of this interview was for those viewers intuitive enough to perceive the meta data of the interview.
The points on the cynical narrowness of the the media are well made; and I agree the interview cast little light on any actual policy.
Still the phrase “safe passage” is interesting one and we’ll need to look elsewhere to find out what the details are.
It does really matter what she thinks of ICE. It is not as if becoming a congresswoman confers the power of the government on that person. The US, irrespective of who is the next president, or the president after that, is not suddenly going to have an open border policy. That would be true even if Ocasio-Cortez became president.
What she will be a fresh face for her district with the sort of appeal of the PM.
Look at Obama. The process of becoming president, and making the inevitable compromises that involves, mean you can’t do a sharp U turn in the overall direction of government. He did end the Iraq war, but wasn’t able to decisively win the Afghan war. He did do Obama care, but with huge compromises.
Perhaps a better example of a revolutionary president is Trump. He did pull out of TPP (which had not come into force anyway). He has done a tax package but that is standard fare for a Republican. There is a lot of things he can’t do. He can’t unwind Obama care.
What he has done is change the overall tone of the Presidency (for the worse). It will be changed back at some point. Obama had the rhetoric, but what else?
None of this is to say Ocasio-Cortez can’t make a difference. She can. But she can’t start a socialist revolution, not in the US. Even the most radical president (in the sense of ushering in big government), Franklin Roosevelt did not turn the US into a socialist paradise.
My first line should have read “it does not matter…”
“Even … Franklin Roosevelt did not turn the US into a socialist paradise.”
No, but he moved it in the right direction, just as you moved ours in the wrong direction.
FDR was against a “socialist paradise ” in a 1913 essay.
“The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.”
http://www.azquotes.com/quote/1160845
He was POTUS thirty years later when New Deal legislation saved american capitalism from the effects of the Great Depression.
It is said that Roosevelt was something of a patrician, and that much of his social activism came from his wife. But he legislated strongly against monopolists, while our local Gnats (and some others who should be ashamed) bow before them as abjectly as any Persian peasant prostrated themselves before their satraps.
Thanks Sanctuary – will watch this evening. If it is as good as it sounds it will be going further up the chain of command. 🙂
Thanks for this, Sanctuary – and definitely no need for any apologies. I had a quick look and decided it is a Must View in full later when there are fewer distractions as at the moment.
Coincidentally I had just read a Guardian article that had popped up in my ‘you may be interested in this’ list. This is an article by one of their Australian columnists, Van Badham entitled “The future of the left is bright if it looks like Jacinda Ardern and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes”
IMHO the article provides a refreshing view of the rise of Ardern and Ocasio-Cortes and is well worth reading. As a taste, it concludes with this:
“Strong men” of the right are now lining up governments from Italy to Turkey to the USA. The times of the now are ones in which we can construct majorities of a diversity they cannot – and do not wish to – represent. We can hope the influence of Jacinda Ardern and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes spread, or we can ensure that it does. The stakes for the marginalised remain life and death.
The article contains much more, however, particularly on Ardern and NZ; and this is just one of a number of comments that I found interesting from someone looking from the outside in:
Observe, also Ardern – who is Pakeha, not Maori – meeting the British queen wearing a Kahu huruhuru: a Māori feathered cloak “bestowed on chiefs and dignitaries to convey prestige, respect and power”. It was a demonstration of a status conferred, and not stolen, and a representation of a New Zealand unafraid to show pride in its indigenous past even as it engaged in diplomatic pleasantry with its colonial one.
This really is shocking. Practically giving away public land for a song and taking away the amenity of neighbouring houses and apartments with sweetheart deals for a developer, while creating a monopoly for boat owners and high prices.
Similar lack of thinking and deregulation happened in the CBD in the 1990’s, they let these developers do what ever they like with little planning, which has resulted in both owners, developers and banks losing confidence in the integrity of the process and two decades of CBD growth being stopped due to leaky building and values being wiped out by neighbouring builds that are poorly planned in relation to existing buildings, and lack of public walkways and public areas for existing residents to enjoy the city.
Nobody wants to buy an apartment and have the amenity halved by the council doing a dirty deal with someone and allowing though their ‘relaxed’ RMA interpretations which has been taken to mean anything goes and be as greedy as you can, by environmental lawyers and the courts to wreck surrounding amenity at any time.
If you get your views wiped out and the apartment buyers continually get screwed either through leasehold (Princess wharf) or Body corporate charges (everywhere) that are designed as a rout or through lack of regulation in surrounding developments (wiping out views/light at the stroke of a council pen).
Even the banks know apartments are not good investments, they are very reluctant to lend on apartments unless a person has at least 30% deposit. Banks know that the value can be wiped out at any time by the lack of regulation that has developed around apartments and central city and anywhere apartments spring up, from outrageous charges, to bad building design and techniques to lack of planning in preserving existing apartment amenities.
Even the banks will not approve of wiping out exisiting housing values in the area to help some sort of Phil Goff rout. Where is the public transport and who pays for it? So far not much interest in making the developers pay the public transport costs for more people and instead it goes to the ratepayers who in many cases are being screwed over by bad developers and having to share ever more with the pathetic services offered.
How can you sell marina land for $5million for 200 apartments & a Marina? Is obscene and against the so called public living around the waterways that should be driving more people to live in those areas.
When one or two apartment blocks are allowed to steal amenity and devalue everyone else then nobody wants to live there and banks don’t want to lend there, the opposite of what the council should be wanting!
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12079411
They fit nearly 9 million into London and they do that through very strong planning laws to protect neighbouring amenity which includes things like privacy (an unknown concept in NZ RMA) and making it difficult for greedy people to get planning through so people feel they can trust their housing is protected. London prior to the worst of the neoliberal dogma believed in social housing being part of new builds of apartments.
NZ has gone to the opposite degree and now we leaky building, chaos and a lack of trust in the NZ planning and building process due to the profit and deregulation model being the favoured way to develop here. Cheap and deregulated building with high profits and a rip off after service with lease hold and Body corps and future surrounding developments.
Good apartments are selling well still. Crappy ones will lower in value, just as they did in 2005-2010.
Most of them are right next to ferry terminals. Taxpayers and ratepayers pay for them.
The need for more housing across Auckland completely overrides the need to protect sight lines, unless they are very well bedded down into the Unitary Plan, such as the Mt Eden sight line.
The biggest sale of public land for apartments that I am aware of is the Wyndham Quarter, and through Wyndham tank farm. Half of those storage tanks will be gone within 2 years to make way for the Americas Cup. Then they go straight into apartments. They are designed to be 5 metres minimum above expected sea level rise in the coming century. Those apartments start at over $1.5m
All of this looks like Panuku doing its job: getting the market to build good quality houses in Auckland at low risk to public funding.
@AD – Clearly does not work that way. Look at London, and Europe, good density planning to protect existing rights means there is integrity in the system. That is not the NZ way, and we are getting boom and bust. Soon there will be a bust, because we develop Ponzi style, the only reason there is no bust is due to immigration. But if they keep that up, we have Asian poverty.
Also ordinary people can’t afford good apartments. You think like a Natz supporter aka you don’t think teachers and nurses and police should be able to afford a good apartment, let alone one on the waterfront.
Thinking like that would be ok if you were a Nat, but you are supposedly Labour supporting the ordinary person and not much from the Greens either on this.
Hence Labour policy, not good for ordinary people. Who now have that petrol tax on top of the fact the apartments springing up for the wealthy earners only or for Ponzi speculation.
Whatever an ordinary person is, they will not be buying seaside apartments. The whole of Auckland needs more apartments of all kinds, but you won’t find seaside Kiwibuild apartments and nor would any logical person expect to. There are a few exceptions – such as the Metlifecare apartment blocks in Titirangi over looking the Manukau Harbour, and the Orakei retirement village (now condemned). But in reality it has and will always be the case that a really good beachfront view is beyond the means of anyone except the very rich. And no government is going to change that.
You just need a good cold drink of reality.
There may well be a property bust. We’ve had one in 2007, 1997, 1987, and 1977. So who knows. So far pretty good.
It’s noteworthy the Hobsonville marina land is leased by the council, presumably at market rates with a regular rent appraisal. It makes no commercial sense to sell land that’s bringing in a rental income which would surely be exceeding the cost of borrowing. It’s also an inflation proofed income.
Hard to escape the conclusion that someone is building up a favour bank with public land.
There was similar issue over the sale of the freehold land at Bayswater, which sold for less than $5 million. The reason why the price for the freehold title was so low is because the marina already had a 105 year registered lease on the property with very low rent. The existence of the lease meant the freehold title basically had no value except to the marina owner.
The Bayswater community is divided on the issue of apartments. Most people recognise that some apartments would be ok, but that 120 or so is too many.
In terms of the sale and retained values of the proposed apartments at Baywater, with a freehold title they will be more attractive to would be purchasers.
In the absence of a dedicated Post for Weekend Reading & Watching I’d like to highly recommend this movie (78 min): Alive Inside.
It is largely (but not solely) about care for elderly in rest homes (in the US) who are suffering from dementia.
It won the Audience Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and also featured at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2014: https://www.nziff.co.nz/2014/wellington/alive-inside/
I watched it (for free!) on Snagfilms (another recommendation; it also has a category Climate Change & the Environment and much other interesting stuff): https://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/alive_inside
It reminds of another inspiring documentary Young@Heart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young@Heart_(film)
Happy watching! You won’t regret it …
Is it a rush to forget, or are so imbued with a 24hr news cycle we can’t see the tree for the woods?
Just a reminder that the Palestinian “Great Return Marches” have not stopped. Israel is still shooting people, who at their most stupid do throw stones. Like a stone will be effective against a well dug in and heavily armed military force intent on killing unarmed civilians.
Mind you, in the worlds biggest open air prison – the occasional rock is all the future you have, that, or a bullet.
Great post Red….lots of good info. Party Vote Green and all of this will continue apace.
Good stuff from ABC Comedy, In response to an increasingly trump/may like Aussie government
Property investors having a moan.
Stuff: Renters are being warned to expect landlords to want better rental returns from their investment properties, in the absence of capital gains. “This can’t continue. If property investments aren’t “washing their faces”, something will have to be done”
Gee here’s an idea. Stop buying existing homes for capital gain. Invest in businesses that actually manufacture or produce something. Help grow the economy instead of just shuffling more money from renters to landlords.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/105079172/pressure-goes-on-investors-to-ensure-properties-pay
Help grow the economy instead of just shuffling more money from renters to landlords.
Well if you own the house you’ll be cutting out your bastard landlord (who provides the equity you don’t have, pay the rates and insurance you don’t want to pay and get the maintenance done you either don’t know how to do, or can’t be arsed doing) ….. and shuffle the money direct to the bank.
The vast majority of us bastard landlords are ordinary working kiwis who lived through a succession of rip-offs and betrayals by our local stock market and finance industry from the 70’s onwards. That burned off so much trust, we just cannot believe anymore.
For the past ten years we’ve been looking for an alternative commercial investment that would provide a better cash flow; but without finding something that we had much confidence in. In the end I took the hard way out and went overseas, working high stress 70 – 80 hr weeks in crazy remote places to pay the mortgage down.
There are of course enough bad landlords, and bad tenants, to create plenty of angry stories; but really much of the resentment directed at landlords is misdirected. We’re only one component of a much larger problem with many, many components.
I own my mortgage free house, so I don’t have a landlord (or to use your vulgar description “bastard landlord”).
Well more power to you; but I am puzzled. Unless you were fortunate enough to inherit or be given a free house, I assume you spent some decades paying down a mortgage to a bank.
In which case why are you so concerned about ‘shuffling money from renters to landlords’, but apparently quite pleased you shuffled even more money to a bank?
I’m not trying to attack you personally here, I’m genuinely curious about the apparent contradiction between the two attitudes.
Capitalists never provide anything – they just steal from everyone else.
Fair enough DtB, if you promise never to give me any of you money, I promise never to let you live in one of the homes I built. That way you don’t have to put up with me stealing from you, and I don’t have the risk of you trashing the place.
If you need a tent for the wintertime, I have a few old ones left over from my early tramping days that should still keep the worst of the rain off. You’re welcome to hang onto it 🙂
1. All the capital was actually provided by the community. It can be no other way. The raw resources belong to the community. The processing of the wood and the glue and the nails were done by the community.
2. Rent that you demand for living in the house is what’s paying for it thus you didn’t even provide the financial capital.
Despite these two facts yet you get to call the house yours because of the capitalist system we have that makes such theft legal.
That argument really does have a problem with boundaries. Why stop and wood, glue and nails? What about that nice laptop you’re typing on? Obviously it too belongs to the ‘community’ and your monopolization of it is also theft. My turn with it now thank you. (What historically happens at this point degenerates very rapidly into mass murder … but I’ll get to that below.)
The other obvious point to be made is that all that nice collectivist materials (steel concrete and some wood actually) didn’t magically leap into the form of homes all by themselves. It took a number of hard years of planning, funding, and high pressure work to achieve. At a number of points we could have easily lost the lot.
And finally what you completely miss is the notion of reward for risk. While classic marxism recognises physical labour as the ONLY unit of value, it completely excludes any sense of achievement beyond a pedestrian shoveling of shit for a living. It’s blind to the idea that if you undertake virtually anything worthwhile in life, it innately engages with risk of failure. Unless that risk is compensated for, everyone avoids that possibility and little of new value is ever created. Exactly as observed in ALL the historic marxist experiments.
Here’s the thing; your argument clearly identifies me as the soviet equivalent class of kulaks; modestly successful farmers who through their skill, entrepreneurial risks and hard work, had accumulated just a little more than the other miserable peasants in the villages. Remind yourself of the consequences of that policy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
While clearly I’m a kulak, absolutely I’m not one of the 50 or so hyper-wealthy who have more combined wealth than half the world population. Again you’ve failed to draw a boundary between pretty ordinary working people like me, and the clear-cut outliers whose excess wealth really is a problem.
The devil is in the detail here; clearly the kind of extreme inequality as embodied by the hyper-wealthy has a corrosive impact on society. But as with Stalin, you’ve targeted us kulaks first because we’re the soft, visible target for populist resentment. Very quickly it degenerates to the condition where if you have achieved anything of value and someone else looks on with envy … it’s off to the gulag with you buster. Yes inequality is a very real and deep problem; but this is the worst possible solution.
I realise quite well you don’t intend for this to be to consequence of your marxism. We probably share a lot of the same motivations, we’ve both inhabited this socialist space for many years now. But if you think that somehow your version of marxism would turn out any better than all the catastrophically failed versions that have gone before … well I politely suggest you”re wrong. There is absolutely no apriori reason to think that you or any other neo-marxist would not behave exactly as everyone else did when thrust into that long collectivist nightmare … with deceit, betrayal and cruelty.
About 18 years ago I had the chance to work and travel in Russia for a period. Burned into my memory are shards of the soviet horror; my pathetic words can do no justice to some of the things I saw … and that in their removed, diluted form. As I said above, we share much in common, you’re intelligent and interesting, and have always behaved impeccably here which is why I’m attempting to respond in kind. But you need to think about the boundaries.
Good morning Corin from the Q&A show on tv1 on today .
I don’t think it is fair that the transgender people should be treated any diffidently from Ladys if people are not affecting anyone negatively than they deserve to be treated with respect full stop some people should get a life and stop being so judgemental Eco Maori knows how this type of behavior can affect ones life.
Peter Gluckman putting fluoride in OUR water is a no brainer lets get on with it and save our mokopunas teeth there is a wealthy organisation that will lose money when we put fluoride in all water supply’s.
With China influence in Our politics I agree with Bryce Edwards there is know evedince to back this hype from ———– theres a old saying don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
What about Big business lobbing groups they have a major influence on Our political landscape thats whom we can thank for shonky.
Ka kite ano P.S Who can we trust on the GE debate these big company’s flogging this horse can not be trusted one thing I see with Democracy is this system pits two groups against each other and this is not a good thing one group will do anything to get in power and the humane lefty’s find it immoral to stoop to those low levels . ???????????????
Newshub Nation Lisa that is one phenomenon of the western society charging people / countrys higher interest rates who are the ones who can least afford to pay it and wealthy people countrys very low interest whats with that ??????????????????????????????.
Chris Labour is right to step in and stop these loan predators not Sharks they don’t deserve the name of one of Tangaroas beautiful creatures this problem affects some of Our Pacific Island cousin the most because some are innocent and vulnerable to deceit with loans as they don’t know how the systems work yet.
Loyd Why is Nigel Far here flogging the british exit bandwagon the Queen does not have his views on this subject I say Britain pulls out of Europe than that vacuum of influence will be fulled by America so look across the Atlantic and see if you the common people want a society like trump is ruining . Ana to kai ka kite ano
This is why Eco Maori fights of all of Papatuanukus creatures they are the foundations that support Humans life another link that supports my view that capitalism is the destruction of Papatuanukus environment and wildlife and eventually humans
links below .
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2017/jan/24/what-if-we-gave-universal-income-to-people-in-biodiversity-hotpots
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2018/jun/28/biodiversity-is-the-infrastructure-that-supports-all-life
Ka kite ano P.S its good to see that the interest of Aotearoa’s tangata whenua culture is on a high note after 9 years of —————
Newshub on tv 3 Many thanks to all the American tangata for protesting trumps immigration policy’s he is just using this to bolster his support who care who he hurts in the process .
There are many ways one could save on fuel price rising like get a car that has a motor less than 2 ltr a manual car uses less fuel to service your car regularly check tyre presses fortnightly catch a ride to work with work m8s bus trains its not the end of Papatuanuku .
Those extreme sports shots of wahine gives Eco Maori A sore face ka pai Mana wahine the more publicity wahine get the better its is for te mokopuna’s future is.
It was a good weekend of sports . Ka kite ano
We don’t need people like this who think just because he new the people/ sandflys who raped and terrified Louise Nicholas when she was a teenager to get into the police commissioners and have them spread the dumb———-views on the rest of the sandflys just because he is waving his tangata whenua card you know my view its not whom you are its what you do that counts to Eco Maori Ana to kai ka kite ano
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/105108129/louise-nicholas-slams-appointment-of-top-cop-wally-haumaha-for-comments-about-rape-investigation&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjy9Mqevv3bAhUIa94KHX-8CAcQFggIMAE&client=internal-uds-cse&cx=006730714154542492986:oh6vl0ybuqy&usg=AOvVaw1SHb9r-ZX3kgyEc9kVCtmo
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/105108129/winston-peters-says-inquiry-to-be-held-into-appointment-of-top-cop-wally-haumaha&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjy9Mqevv3bAhUIa94KHX-8CAcQFggFMAA&client=internal-uds-cse&cx=006730714154542492986:oh6vl0ybuqy&usg=AOvVaw3Jro6ovXo9k6t37bEj8Q-I
Here is what the state navy army police do to a wahine when she reports the offence.
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/98443248/officer-hayley-young-speaks-out-about-sexual-harassment-and-rape-in-nz-and-uk-navy&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwiGmsbwwP3bAhWMad4KHVQxDF4QFggFMAA&client=internal-uds-cse&cx=006730714154542492986:oh6vl0ybuqy&usg=AOvVaw3E7Oq7xzeXpDyhpxCcrDu3
P.S I know one thing at least I don’t bring other peoples whano into my causes
Eco Maori. I enjoy reading your comments, you make a lot of good points.