kent rasmussen

Japan is an advanced case of trends present in nearly every developing country and it seems like: (a) superstar cities will be fine, (b) second tier cities/regional hubs will struggle, and (c) everything else -- smaller cities, towns, rural areas -- will be in free fall.

Renewable electricity does not produce: petrol, diesel, bunker fuel, or jet fuel; it does not produce the feed stock for ammonia used to make fertilisers, or feedstocks for chemicals, pharmaceuticals or plastics; it does not produce bitumen, carbon fibres, armaments or ammunition; it does not produce the industrial heat needed to make cement, glass, aluminium, ceramics or steel. Claiming we shouldn't mine oil and gas in the UK because we won't be self sufficient is like suggesting we shouldn't produce any food because we won't be able to grow enough and would still need to import some. Caroline Lucas is NOT right.

There's no good civic argument for the electoral college. It was arguably necessary to ensure the ratification of the Constitution, but it's an anti-democratic device that gives some American citizens far more voting power than others, based purely on where they live.

I think a huge part of the reason why no government has been able to enact difficult pro-growth reforms is that the average voter still believes we remain a rich country. You hear this in politicians’ rhetoric “the sixth richest country in the world”. We’re the sixth largest economy but now far from the richest. Per capita we’re tanking down the rankings. One of the reasons why Poland or China have been able to have growth miracles in recent years is they think like a developing country. They know they were poor and they have to build to get rich. We think we are rich and that we don’t have to build anything anymore, or that when we do, it has to be the most expensive possible version of what we build. Bat tunnels. Fish Discos. Kittiwake hotels. We think we’re rich so we can afford to chase some wealth creators away, afford to mandate public biodiversity net gain on every development in the country, and afford to ratchet up state pension spending five times faster than the rate of growth in the economy. We’re suffering from acute ‘rich country delusion’. It’s only once we realise we’re far poorer than we should be that we can start to fix this nonsense.

…going….

Going…..

In a few years, politicians have gone from wanting to ban ride-share to protect taxis to wanting to ban self-driving to protect ride-share It is almost like the underlying instinct is to restrict all new technologies and modalities regardless of rapid consumer adoption

Mann, who bristle at the suggestion that he is malthusian, insist that Ehrlich didn't really mean the part about forced sterilization, adding contraceptives to the water, and denying food aid to hungry populations. If it looks like a duck and quakes like a duck...