A long time ago we had a president who was doing a chubby intern.
And some Americans got uptight about it.
And we were told by Europeans everywhere ‘Relax, it’s just sex. He’s the leader of the country, they have mistresses, it happens get over it you uptight prudes.’
So now with Silvio Berlusconi having sex with underage prostitutes and orgies and I don’t know what-all I guess that makes Europe — and Italy in particular — about eighteen times more sophisticated [1] than us hicks in the United States and so-on and so-forth.
Y’all must be so proud.
[1] Sarcasm.
Brian Dunbar, “Sophisticated Europe”, Space for Commerce, by Brian Dunbar, 2011-04-07
April 8, 2011
QotD: the international double standard
Monty’s daily dose of DOOM!
People suffering from over-cheerful attitudes about the future of the European Union could just read Monty’s chock-full-of-DOOM postings at Ace of Spades HQ for a quick depressant:
Let’s begin abroad by explaining why Spain is boned. Spain suffers from the same disease as the rest of the continent generally — socialism, postmodernism, an ossified job market, an unsustainable welfare state — but in more concentrated form. Spain is so boned that their main export these days is young ‘uns (h/t Andy).
If you look at the countries currently in the midst of insolvency in Europe — Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and (shortly) Spain — it’s obvious that they are different entities altogether from their more prosperous European peers. For one, most of them are recent entrants onto the first-world stage. Spain languished under Franco until the mid 1970’s; Ireland only emerged from decades of civil strife (both amongst themselves and against England) in the early 1990’s; and Portugal was (and still is) a third-world nation glued to the continenet almost as an afterthought. Portugal is more properly thought of as a North African developing country than a first-world European country, whatever the maps say (h/t rdbrewer).
The Euro project hid those problems…for a while. Cheap credit allowed the dysfunctional European countries to borrow enough money to pretend to a first-world standard of living for more than a decade. There was real growth in the various economies — particularly in Ireland — but much of the “growth” was mainly borrowed money with little attendant economic or social reform.
The Great Downturn of 2008 did not cause the problem; it simply exposed what a sham the whole thing had been all along.
England is watching the drama play out on the Continent, and thanking $DEITY that they never signed on to the Euro. England still has serious problems, but they also have options that the other European nations do not have because they control their own currency.
As usual, the original post has lots of links to follow to increase the dosage of DOOM. Adjust intake to adequately suppress your optimism.
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British study finds wind power even less economical than hoped
The assumption was that wind farms would produce 30% of their theoretical maximum over time (the wind doesn’t blow all the time, so no wind farm will ever produce 100% for more than a short period of time). This number now appears to be too optimistic:
A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.
The report [. . .] was commissioned by conservation charity the John Muir Trust and carried out by consulting engineer Stuart Young. It measured electricity actually metered as being delivered to the National Grid.
[. . .]
In general, then, one should assume that a wind farm will generate no more than 25 per cent of maximum capacity over time (and indeed this seems set to get worse as new super-large turbines come into service). Even over a year this will be up or down by a few per cent, making planning more difficult.
It gets worse, too, as wind power frequently drops to almost nothing. It tends to do this quite often just when demand is at its early-evening peak:
At each of the four highest peak demands of 2010 wind output was low being respectively 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.
And unfortunately the average capacity over time is pulled up significantly by brief windy periods. Wind output is actually below 20 per cent of maximum most of the time; it is below 10 per cent fully one-third of the time. Wind power needs a lot of thermal backup running most of the time to keep the lights on, but it also needs that backup to go away rapidly whenever the wind blows hard, or it won’t deliver even 25 per cent of capacity.
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The economics of Falcon Heavy
Charles Stross runs the numbers on the new SpaceX Falcon Heavy:
SpaceX announce Falcon Heavy. It’s been expected for some time — it’s been on their road map for a few years — but it’s worth repeating: man-rated and with a payload of 53 tons to Low Earth Orbit, Falcon Heavy has the largest payload of any space launcher since Energiya and the Saturn V, and it’s dirty-cheap by EELV standards at $80M-120M per launch. Moreover, it can’t easily be dismissed as vapourware because it’s an evolutionary development of a real, flying launch vehicle (Falcon 9) — a Falcon 9 core with two extra first stages strapped to the sides as boosters (and some fancy cross-stage plumbing to run the central core motors off fuel bled from the strap-ons, so that at BECO the central stage still carries a full fuel load). With the giant Iridium NEXT contract SpaceX have landed (the largest commercial launch contract in history), not to mention the ISS resupply contract, SpaceX looks likely to have the cash flow to build and fly this thing.
[. . .]
Note that these days the budget for a big Hollywood blockbuster — Avatar, for instance — can push over the $0.3Bn mark. It’s hard to say what the media rights to the second! ever! manned Moon program! would be, but it’s hard to see them going for much less than a major blockbuster movie. I think it unlikely that the expedition could be run entirely on the media rights, but they should certainly make a double-digit percentage contribution to the budget. Add the opportunity to tout for the science budget of some major agencies (by carrying lunar orbiter packages as payload, perhaps?) and it might be possible to raise $250-500M towards the costs of a $600-1000M expedition.
Is Elon Musk planning on being the 13th man on the moon?
More on Falcon Heavy at The Register.
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Swearing in soccer? Gasp! Shock! Horror!
Duleep Allirajah wonders how the Football Association has managed to avoid hearing what soccer players say on the pitch until now:
Rooney swore? So f***ing what
Those fretting over the footballer’s anglo-saxon turn of phrase have clearly never been to a match before.
Wayne Rooney’s angry outburst was curious. What did it mean? Who was he addressing? In appearing to pick a fight with a TV camera, it immediately struck me as an homage to Robert De Niro’s famous ‘You talking to me?’ scene in Taxi Driver. But maybe I’m reading too much into it.
In a statement issued by his club, the player said: ‘Emotions were running high, and on reflection my heat-of-the-moment reaction was inappropriate. It was not aimed at anyone in particular.’ Maybe he was railing against his inner demons. Maybe there is no deeper meaning. Maybe it was a release of pent-up frustration after months of domestic strife and poor goal-scoring form.
But enough of my speculative interpretation, it’s the Football Association’s response that we should really be bothered about. The FA has banned Rooney for two matches for using ‘offensive, insulting and/or abusive language’. You don’t need to be a lipreader to work out that footballers swear quite a lot; every Saturday you’ll find them effing and blinding like proverbial troopers. But while disciplinary action for abusing match officials is nothing new, a ban for swearing per se is quite unprecedented.
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Graphic illustrating why I don’t expect my MP to change
Here’s the riding of Whitby-Oshawa in the 2008 election. Notice all that deep blue colour? As the legend says, the opacity of colour indicates the strength of the party in that area. Up in the Brooklin area, you can barely see the underlying road pattern for all the blueness.
You can find how blue (or red, or whatever) your riding is by using the cyberpresse.ca Interactive map (this is now available in English: the original was in French). It’s another illustration of how to use Google Maps to display geographical data in interesting ways.
This time around, I’ll at least have a Libertarian candidate to vote for: Josh Insang is running for the Libertarian Party. Check the LPC Candidate page to see if you have a Libertarian running in your riding.
