A mass of floating volcanic rock could help revive the Great Barrier Reef

Hempcrete: How Sustainable Construction Could Change the World

Californian Blackout Fury: “It’s Not Just the Heat, It’s Also the Anti-Nuclear Power Stupidity”

If you don’t read Dave Zincavage’s blog NEVER YET MELTED, I recommend it.

Read it.

Most keyboards use one-dimensional buttons or a QWERTY design. According to CharaChorder, this can often cause user error—like typos—caused by hitting letters in the wrong order when “muscle memory” is moving faster than a device can keep up with.

With CharaChorder, these “errors” are highly encouraged. A user can type entire words by pressing all letters simultaneously, in a single motion. CharaChorder’s internal processor will then arrange the letters on-screen in real time, faster than the human eye can perceive.

This kind of technology makes it easy for users to learn “chording” (a way to enter characters or commands formed by pressing several keys together) intuitively over time. According to the team, it’s also a much more powerful method of communicating.

Well, we’ll see.

Steve decides to be a collector.

My reasoning goes like this: if I know I will continue shooting a certain caliber until I croak, I might as well buy enough ammunition to get me as far into the future as possible. It won’t rot. It doesn’t have to be refrigerated. You can buy it today and use it 50 years from now, if you’re still here. If you wait, you’ll end up paying much more in the long run. Also, the Democrats are gradually destroying our rights, so who knows if you’ll be able to buy anything a couple of years from now?

I’m convinced.

Democrats Promise to Bring California-Style Blackouts to Everyone

Study: 1970s Dam Construction Paused Global Warming Sea Level Rise

Global Warming Crop Resilience? Aussie Farmer Helps CSIRO Develop Long Coleoptile Wheat

Fossil leaves show high atmospheric carbon spurred ancient ‘global greening’

Read it.

Time to leave.

ZMan looks at conservatism.

At the end of the Cold War, Progressives pointed out that conservatism no longer had a purpose, so it was probably going to follow communism into the past. Of course, the Left had its own problems in this regard, but conservatism in America had largely been about opposing the Soviets. They had conceded all the important points in the cultural war and the Left was ready to embrace corporate control of the economy, so there was no longer any purpose to conservatism.

This was a fair analysis, but one conservatives could not accept, as it would mean getting real jobs and doing honest work. Instead they tried to define conservatism as green eye-shade bean counting in the 1990’s. That was no fun as they like spending borrowed money as much as the Left. Then they tried to define conservatism to mean dropping high explosives onto Muslims. That worked for a while, but then the public soured on the pointless flag waving and hollow patriotism.

Severian had a response: The Spiritual Exercises

Victor Davis Hanson.

Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

Tyler Cowen.

When it comes to Covid-19, I worry about the problem of “phantom risk.” Right now the risks of Covid-19 are very real, but at some point we still will feel those risks when they are no longer present, much as some amputees may feel a “phantom limb.”

How this might play out?

I think we’ve already hit that point. The current government-mandated ‘protections’ are far out of proportion to the actual danger involved.

The Other McCain.

Something that has been turning over in my mind lately is the way some people reject the entire idea of judgment — or, rather, they say they are against judging people. In reality, such people are often extremely judgmental. “Don’t judge me!” they angrily exclaim, but if you pay attention, you’ll notice these people never hesitate to judge you.

Read it.

“You might not know this, but most of the actual convention events take place during daytime hours,” he said. “The networks don’t cover them. You have no idea that happened. There’s a reason for that, obviously. But what a loss for the viewing public. If you saw what they were saying during the day, you would never tune in to prime time again. In fact, you might flee the country.”

 

Read it.

I’d make that trade. But what would the Danes do with a bunch of Latinx? They’re having enough troubles with the Muslim immigrants.

Climate and extinction crises require urgent change | TheHill

Are tipping points suitable concepts for developing environmental policies?  They’re sure useful for rationalizing why there ain’t nothin’ happening yet.

Cold weather kills more people than hot weather because… global warming.

‘Turn Up Your Damn Thermostat’: Former Gov. Jerry Brown Tells Californians How To Avoid Blackouts During A Heatwave

Read it.

Why does Colorado have color coded ballots? I guess it is because color coding is way quicker than that little R or D under the bar code to know what party the ballot represents.

Steve Sailer.

I’ve been mentioning for awhile a growth in articles about people complaining about the color of various objects, such as blue or green medical scrubs or the little white man who tells you to walk on a traffic light as indicative of systemic racism. It’s like 5-year-olds talking about their favorite color Power Ranger.

Green California Has the Nation’s Worst Power Grid

Transparent Solar Panels for Windows Hit New Efficiency Record – Could Help Enable Skyscrapers to Serve As Power Sources

The excess costs of Weather Dependent Renewable power generation in the USA

The Transit-Industrial Complex

The future may be full of fire tornadoes  Women and minorities hardest hit.

Legal Motion Filed to Stop FOIA Stonewalling on Paris Climate Treaty

Paul Graham runs the numbers.

Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income taxes. Let’s try modeling the effects of various levels of wealth tax to see what they would mean in practice for a startup founder.

Suppose you start a successful startup in your twenties, and then live for another 60 years. How much of your stock will a wealth tax consume?

Suppose the wealth tax is 1%. That means each year you get to keep 99% of your stock. Which means after 60 years the proportion of stock you’ll have left will be .99^60, or .547. So a 1% wealth tax means the government will over the course of your life take 45% of your stock.

Wealth confiscation by drip-drip-drip. Socialism in slow motion.

Read it.

Democrats have never been comfortable with, you know, actual democracy. They’d much rather buy and steal votes than work for them.

Read it.

A lot of fear and misinformation has been spreading throughout social media the past few days about the post office. People seem to think the sky is falling. But they’re missing a lot of important context.

I am here to tell you that yes, you should be concerned about the future of the United States Postal Service (USPS), but the whole sky isn’t falling quite ye

What does Islam say about climate change and climate action?  And who cares? Al-Jazeera.

New Zealand’s Southern Alps Glacier Melt Has Doubled – Up to 77% of Little Ice Age Glacier Volume Already Lost

WashPost Parrots DNC Climate Council Chair: Virus ‘Inextricably Linked’ to Climate Change

MIT: Five Grand Thermal Challenges to Decarbonise the Global Economy

Read it.

We’re familiar with the designation of places like Somalia as “failed states,” but can’t we equally recognize failed cities when we see them? New York City in the 1970s, when it needed a federal bailout, was one example from our past, and New York’s fiscal woes were closely connected with its larger social problems of crime, welfare dependency, and all the other factors that diminished the shine of the Big Apple.

Today our obviously failed cities are Seattle and Portland, with Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York (again) trending that direction. (And the entire state of Illinois is on the equivalent of a watch list—I think it is literally on credit watch lists—with California not far behind.)

As mentioned here previously, it appears lots of people are fleeing or preparing to flee these cities, and their economies (and consequent tax bases) may be in free fall even if the COVID-induced economic coma ends in the next few months.

Which raises a frequent worry: what if these dazzling urbanites move to Rock Ridge and vote for the same kind of progressive candidates they foolishly supported where they came from? I think it won’t actually work that way, although I understand the logic behind it.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

YANK! THAT! CHAIN!

Actuaries are not as appreciated as they deserve.

Read it.

With the left in a collective fit over a conspiracy theory that President Trump is about to steal the election by crippling the US Postal Service, Twitter user @AGHamilton29 has provided a cogent analysis unpacking the latest leftist miasma dominating the news cycle.

Bethany Mandel.

School districts across the country are facing an exodus of students to private schools opening for in-person learning and homeschooling. Corey DeAngelis, the Director of School Choice for the Reason Foundation, has been following the data and it doesn’t look good for public schools. Over the weekend he reported that homeschool filings are up 129% from last year in Loudoun County in Virginia and 128% in the state of Wisconsin. This exodus in students is also an exodus in dollars for a lot of school districts that have their funding directly tied to their enrollment numbers (which is why I suggested pulling out of public schools as a protest if you didn’t like their reopening plan for the Washington Examiner). A little too late in the game, public schools are realizing that their captive audience isn’t so captive when they don’t, you know, actually teach.

In CAISO Emergency Break Glass

Plastic recycling faces setback in California after COVID-19 disruptions

Sea Level Rise a Major Threat to San Francisco

PD Editorial: Time to get serious about rising sea levels

Fight for Planet A: Aussie PM Retreats from Charging Eco-Warrior

Few bears on the ice off Western Hudson Bay at 14 August but will be onshore soon  I thought they were supposed to be extinct by now.

Every Day 10k People Die Due to Air Pollution from Fossil Fuels

Read it.

And barbecue. Don’t forget the barbecue.

Oh, and lower taxes.

UPDATE: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

Read it.

The Greek government has secretly expelled more than 1,000 refugees from Europe’s borders in recent months, sailing many of them to the edge of Greek territorial waters and then abandoning them in inflatable and sometimes overburdened life rafts.

…

Illegal under international law, the expulsions are the most direct and sustained attempt by a European country to block maritime migration using its own forces since the height of the migration crisis in 2015, when Greece was the main thoroughfare for migrants and refugees seeking to enter Europe.

Saw that coming.

When one is infested with leeches one focuses on ripping them off as fast as possible and doesn’t worry a lot about where they land.

Read it.

Peggy Noonan joined the crowd turning on George W. Bush in what I thought was (in Noonan’s case) a grossly unfair manner in 2008. It wasn’t just unfair, it was cowardly. I wrote critically about one of Noonan’s weekly Wall Street Journal columns in which she identified with the public disapproval of Bush that April in “Season of the witch.”

Having turned on George W. Bush, Noonan moved on to support the election of Barack Obama later that year. Noonan all but endorsed Obama in her 2008 column “Obama and the runaway train.” The anti-Bush and pro-Obama columns fit neatly together

I’ve been very disappointed in Peggy Noonan ever since. I used to read her stuff religiously but I can’t stomach it any more.

James Altucher.

Now it’s completely dead. “But NYC always always bounces back.” No. Not this time. “But NYC is the center of the financial universe. Opportunities will flourish here again.” Not this time.

“NYC has experienced worse”. No it hasn’t.

A Facebook group formed a few weeks ago that was for people who were planning a move and wanted others to talk to and ask advice from. Within two or three days it had about 10,000 members.

Read it.

Rich and famous used to flock to beautiful beaches, Malibu, Hollywood, and Los Angeles. Now, they are getting out, citing homelessness, overcrowding, violence, drug abuse, safety, and untenable politics.

Among the next might be Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk, who has already announced a $1 billion Tesla factory in Texas and sold his four-home compound in Bel Air for $62 million.

Read it.

Tech industry millionaires are moving the Democratic Party to the left on almost every issue except government regulation. Unions beware.

Read it.

The Chicago police arrested 43 people who participated in the looting spree along the city’s Mag Mile earlier this week. Who were these looters?

According to the Chicago Tribune, they were “an odd mix of peer-pressured college students, out-of-work parents, and convicted felons.” It would be interesting to know how much time the convicted felons had served, and for what crimes. Their looting could be another product of America’s under-incarceration problem.

Ostensibly, the looting was a response to a police shooting in the Englewood neighborhood. Yet, according to the Tribune, none of arrested looters was from Englewood.

In fact, no one who made a statement in court upon being arraigned even mentioned the incident. Not only was the police shooting a pretext for the looting, it was so far from the looters’ consciousness that they forgot to mention it.

The prevailing motive of this “odd mix” wasn’t “police brutality,” it was the desire to snatch free stuff and, at least some cases, to smash things. In other words, envy and resentment, not “social justice.”

Reliance on Wind and Solar Will Lead to Blackouts

Trump EPA Rescinds Burdensome Obama Climate Change Methane Leak Regulations

Greenland Ice Sheet has melted to the point of no return  Women and minorities no doubt hardest hit.

Read it.

Everyone knows that rural America has gone deep red. That trend came last to the Upper Midwest, but it has arrived in Minnesota with a vengeance. Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, home to the state’s mining industry, is heavily unionized and was long a Democratic Party bastion. No longer: the 8th, along with the rest of Greater Minnesota, is now Trump country. It is represented by Republican Pete Stauber, a former police officer and union member, who has been endorsed for re-election by every private sector union. Today it would take a miracle for a Democrat to win that seat.

Read it.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

This is why you ought not to believe anything you read in print unless you can somehow verify it.

For examples, listen to Scott Adams.

I’m with Jeremy on this one.

Read it.

The non-scientific mind has the most ridiculous ideas of the precision of laboratory work, and would be much surprised to learn that, excepting electrical measurements, the bulk of it does not exceed the precision of an upholsterer who comes to measure a window for a pair of curtains.

—Charles S. Peirce (1908)

Read it.

Actually, I’m prepared to believe it. Certainly they resemble Romney Republicans.

Aussie Government Asks the UN to Dismiss an Indigenous Climate Case

Trump lifts Obama-era regulations on methane, a potent climate-warming gas

Climate change spelled doom for woolly rhinos 14,000 years ago, study says

Claim: Warming Greenland ice sheet passes point of no return

Angela Eaton, Environmental Urbanist

Read it.

It’s always bizarre when Hollywood decides to produce media versions of well-known Republicans or conservatives. These are people they can’t possibly relate to. But that doesn’t prevent liberals from continuing to make movies or television programs that showcase evil Republicans.

The latest example of this concept is an upcoming film tentatively entitled College Republicans, a “fact-inspired” movie about young versions of such “political titans” as Lee Atwater and Karl Rove as they were decades ago, when America witnessed the “dirtiest election in its history.”

Read it.

The village of Sileby, in Leicestershire, began the small market in the parking lot of The Free Trade Inn earlier this summer. Every Tuesday stalls would be set up so that local businesses could sell foods and flowers. However, they have now been ordered to stop by Charnwood Borough Council, which represents the nearby town of Loughborough.

The council states that the pop-up market breaches a Royal Charter signed by King Henry III in 1227, which gave Loughborough the right to hold a market two days a week. Furthermore, the charter prohibits any other market ‘within six and two-thirds miles’ of this town. Sileby lies just within that boundary.

Only in Britain….

Audacious Epigone runs the numbers.

The inverse correlation between favoring stricter gun laws and Donald Trump’s share of the 2016 presidential vote is a remarkable .95. That is a staggeringly strong relationship for the social sciences. Indeed, it is effectively a perfect correlation after sampling noise is accounted for. More than abortion, immigration, taxation, race relations, war, or any other cultural or political issue, a person’s approach to gun rights is a better predictor of how he’ll vote than anything else is.