Robert, Sweden is already going back to nuclear. In November 2023 the government announced plans to construct two large-scale reactors by 2035 and the equivalent of 10 new reactors, including small modular reactors, by 2045.

Didn't think much of the latest EconTalk. The guy was excited about "exponential growth" and was invoking Moore's Law on things like solar panels, batteries and AI. Obviously the world is finite — there can't be true exponential growth — Moore knew fine well that there was a physical limit to how small a transistor could conceivably be and the periodic density doubling was going to end.

And that's the interesting part: when will the "exponential" growth phase end, and what will come after? There are clear physicial limits to how much energy solar panels can capture and batteries can store. Unlike microscopic transistors in the '60s, both are built on well-established technologies. I don't think there's scope for *any* doublings. As for AI, the hype certainly skyrocketed for a few months, but seems already to be deflating.

Oh well. The occasional mediocre EconTalk helps me appreciate how good most of them are.

I enjoy a bit of word play and one struck me while reading this quoted at Jo Nova's:

For years, Sweden’s low electricity prices have been a direct consequence of the operation of the country’s nuclear and hydroelectric power plants

(appears at the start of this article)

If Sweden abandon's its forays into wind and gets back to expanding nuclear generation I think it'll be a replay of their COVID policies: the Swedes are demonstrating to the western world that they are idiots. But which party does "they" refer to?

tomo,
They've certainly left public service behind, and are into *setting* policy rather than just implementing it.

I think the favourable coverage of Just Stop Oil flags an interesting "problem" with the free market. Some transactions are a zero-sum affair where I just squeak to the highest price I'm willing to pay when the seller just squeaks to the lowest price he's willing to accept. But in many transactions, there's still considerable room for movement. The people at The Londonist are probably very happy to have received such a large payment for favourable coverage of Just Stop Oil. And JSO are probably very happy to have paid so little. In theory, the market sorts this out eventually by lowering the value of the hack coverage of The Londonist, but that may never happen. Even if it does, a new publication starts up: The Londonite and around we go again.

Sooner or later my grandmother's proverb — paper and ink refuse nothing — will be updated for the internet age, and people will realise you can't take a damned thing you see at face value.

In one of the John Anderson interviews, his guest takes a position (which he appears to view favourably) that the tech giants are now so big that they are taking responsibility for various "public service" functions that would traditionally have been taken on by government. He reckons they will do their best to behave responsibly. A bit optimistic.

I think he's right about what's happening, but it's just more of the public-private partnership crap: an open door for unaccountable bodies to defraud the taxpayer.

And I don't think he looked at the national boundaries question for the tech giants either. That's another can of worms (e.g. should Google have a "public service" policy on Brexit?).

DaveS,
I think the public sector is inherently unstable. Politicians, by nature, are corruptible. You take the curse off that by having highly skilled and impartial civil servents to carry out their instructions while staying within legal boundaries. But it's inevitable that the highly skilled and impartial will be ousted by the incompetents and the partisans. The voters get to punish the politicians, which probably serves little more purpose than to entertain the bureaucrats.

It goes unstable the other way when heads roll. La Terreur and all that.

I only very occasionally comment at Judith Curry's. It is nice that threads last a long time there (at Jo Nova's they're all dead within two days, no matter how interesting), but the regulars at JC's seem to be doing a perpetual argument sketch.

A while back I wrote a lttle perl script to count the comments there. Here's how the top few are going in that thread (401 total comments):

  18: David Appell
  18: Ireneusz Palmowski
  21: joethenonclimatescientist
  22: Jungletrunks
  23: DanB
  27: Christos Vournas
  29: jim2
  86: BA Bushaw (ganon1950)

20% by one zealot, and daylight between him and the next. Strange he didn't respond to my point...

In other news, a Boeing whistleblower turns up dead. Bit suss.

On a lighter note, this image does capture central elements of the recent evolution of medicine.

"The most pernicious rot is in the permanent bureaucracy."

Spot on. As an example, I don't think it's a coincidence that a succession of UK Home Secretaries have talked the talk but achieved next to nothing on securing borders and deporting illegal and/or undesirable immigrants. And if a politician does try to shake things up, some senior civil servant or other puts in a bullying accusation. I guess they've become accustomed to not being told what to do.

Your "we don't consider natural causes because..." link had a certain entertainment value, true believers were certainly out in force on that thread.

tomo,
Agree with your qotd. Not a great distance from things I've said here in the past.

The pharmaceutical companies certainly don't have their customers' best interests as top prioity. A common element in most medical fads (e..g. blood pressure, cholesterol, osteoporosis) is that the treatment involves taking a medication regularly from diagnosis till the end of your life. Small margins × zillions of people = big profits. They will never support a one-time cure for any of these problems (that's allowing that they're problems at all). It's much like that MS charity fighting hard against people who might be on a track to curing MS.

(Reminds me of one of the despair.com captions: If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.)

Ross Lea,
Thanks for the tips. A couple of politically incorrect second-tier comedies come to mind too: Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language. I don't suppose we'll see them screened again. Maybe the first casualty of political correctness was Me Mammy from the late '60s. It was very popular in Ireland, but I believe the BBC cancelled it because of English people being offended on behalf of the Irish.

I was musing over why television is so dismal these days (I mean the entertainment part; the "journalism" is a lost cause). In the '70s and '80s, the commercial channels would run day and night, and fill the hours with old movies and repeats of older shows, all interspersed with ads of course. It wasn't spectacular, but you had a chance of seeing a few different things. I have a feeling that the old material has largely been bought up by the likes of Netflix, but they don't offer it for viewing; they've just buried it. I suppose it wouldn't look good to have people switching off The Americans in favour of Mind Your Language.

Was listening to an ABC radio show yesterday where they were talking with a few officials about our new NACC (National Anti-Corruption Commission). Hopeless. It appears their mission is all about countering politicians having undue influence over the bureaucrats, as if *all* corruption was down to politicians. Yes, the political process naturally attracts the ruthless and corruptable, but that's always been the case. The most pernicious rot is in the permanent bureaucracy. It seems our NACC will just add to it.

Robert Swan, I note your allusion to "Dad's Army" can I also recommend "Last of the Summer Wine" and "it an't alf hot mum" thought the latter is deemed not PC by the BBC; I have a box set. The Goon shows are still broadcast by the BBC but are preceeded with " The Goons Show reflects some of the attitudes and language of the time" (1950's) I maged to get a couple disc of poor quality as well as "Beyond our Ken" and "Round the Horne" also iffy quality but cheap !.

tomo,
That does look to be rubbing it in. We'll have to fill in the blanks for ourselves I suppose.

Pretty sure the guy's right about it being a fault with that particular Tesla. There are plenty of very low temperatures in the USA (not so much in California).

The true figures from that satellite will probably do more to exonerate than to damn. It's called natural gas for a reason after all, and natural sources are surely plentiful.

Overlaps with a comment I made at Judith Curry's recently in response to this:

we don’t consider natural causes because the increase in co2 is not due to natural causes.

which is a silly rationale. If the problem truly were greenhouse gases, you'd look at all sources. If you want to cut them, it would make sense to cut them where they are most concentrated, to devise a gadget of some sort to sit near a fumarole spewing out tons per day instead of some ludicrous outfit to stick on a dairy cow to capture a kg or two of its belches.

That's if you truly want to cut greenhouse gases. That they only consider greenhouse gases generated by western industry suggests that western industry is their real target.

Recent EconTalk on weak training in statistics was pretty good (preaching to the converted of course). Quite liked the analogy of chainsaw training. You get trained in fuelling, starting the engine, sharpening the chain, etc., but are expected to work out for yourself what to do with it when faced with a tree. I think that strikes about the right balance on what's missing from statistical training.

Struck me the unfortunate part of that analogy is that using a chainsaw, the art is to get the tree to fall the way *you* intend. You'd hope that the art with statistics is to get at the truth... I'll continue with Rutherford's scepticism.