To understand the green movement, really understand it, you could do worse than look at the photographs of today’s vast tailbacks on the M25. Here were thousands of ordinary people – workers, deliverymen, mums and dads, holidaymakers – delayed for hours by the self-righteousness of middle-class greens. Activists from a group called Insulate Britain – which, almost comically, agitates for the insulation of British homes – blocked various junctions on the M25, causing distress to people who had places to be. It was eco-elitism distilled: the sanctimonious zealots of the green religion disrupting the lives of the plebs to make some daft point.
The first notable thing about today’s act of public nuisance masquerading as a protest was the hilarity of the campaign group itself. Remember when radicals fought for higher wages or better working conditions or for a revolution to replace capitalism with something else? Not anymore. Today’s self-styled militants demand the insulation of houses. “What do we want? The creation of a thermal envelope in people’s homes! When do we want it? Now!” What a crock to go to the barricades for. Also notable is the irony of supposed planet-lovers causing so much pollution by forcing hundreds of cars and trucks to sit still for ages, chugging fumes into the air for nought. Well played, greenies.
But the most striking thing about these kinds of protests is their sheer arrogance. Their inherently anti-democratic, anti-masses nature, where the aim is always, but always, to inconvenience the little people and teach us a lesson. You’re on your way to Heathrow for a much-needed jaunt to Malaga to escape the stresses of work? Not anymore, you’re not – the eco-elitists blocked junction 14, which leads to one of Heathrow’s terminals. You’re a knackered trucker who’s been driving all night long and now wants to get back to his family? Tough shit. These plummy alarmists have decided to make you the collateral damage of one of their narcissistic stunts.
Brendan O’Neill, “Environmentalism is a revolt against the people”, Spiked, 2021-09-13.
December 14, 2021
QotD: Insulated from reality
November 20, 2021
Modern navigation aids compared
In common with most people in this age of pandemic, I don’t travel very much these days. Back when I did manage to get out and about on the roads, I had an early Garmin GPS device in my vehicle and when I eventually updated the sound system in my truck to a new device, it included a built-in GPS (that constantly “loses” satellite fixes and loudly informs me, even when I’m not using the mapping function). I’ve had both good and bad experiences with these devices, but Alistair Dabbs is much more entertaining with his story:
“Sat Nav FAIL” by J-o-n-o is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Turn left. Turn right. At the roundabout, take the fourth exit.
Nobody enjoys being told what to do all the time but in the case of Google Maps I will make an exception. What I like about it best is that I can ignore her directions – should dissent take my fancy – and she doesn’t get cross.
This is in sharp contrast with all the classic sat-navs I have ever used, including the one embedded permanently into my current vehicle. Not only does it have a penchant for taking me on pointlessly circuitous routes, the wrong way up one-way streets, and along shortcuts too narrow for a bicycle, it grows angrier by the second when I refuse its orders.
“Turn right, turn right, turn right, turn left,” it would yell at increasing volume, trying to browbeat me into making a U-turn. Well no, I don’t want to drive through that building site or weave between those ambulances and fire engines dealing with that overturned lorry. Can’t you take me on an alternative route?
“Recalculating …” it would bark like a sulking dalek, but never accomplishing such. “Recalculating … Recalculating …”
Clearly I am not the only reluctant motorist to have given up on traditional sat-navs: not a single ad for one of these has turned up in my Black Friday spam deluge this year. And good riddance. Of the £3m per minute spent by Brits on their Black Friday shopping, roughly £0 will be spent on in-car nags.
Google Maps is more chilled. It’s as if she has resigned herself to my penchant for taking the wrong exits and missing turns. This is a habit I acquired by trying too hard not to drive like my father, who would obey every instruction from his sat-nav with military immediacy. As soon as he heard the words “Turn left”, he’d turn hard on the steering wheel straight away and we’d find ourselves heading up someone’s front drive, into an underground office car park or across a pedestrianised shopping walkway.
Me, I prefer to wait a bit – maybe a bit too long. Google Maps doesn’t mind and gives me no grief. Perhaps she also recognises her own faults in occasionally trying to direct me to drive through bricked-up entrances and children’s playgrounds. “Pff, whatever,” she probably thinks. “He’s too thick to follow the normal route. Let’s try a longer one.”
The odd thing is that she talks to Mme D in a very different way. On her smartphone, Google Maps is, well, chatty.
While all I get is a functional “Turn left/right” or “In 300 metres take the slip-road,” Mme D is treated to a tirade of verbosity. “Move into the filter lane and turn left at the next traffic lights heading north-northwest into B3496 Lower High Street but keep to the right to avoid the turnoff, mind the pedestrian crossing and wave hello to the butcher on the corner …” it spews, one directive tumbling into the next in a single continuous description of the journey and all its finest details.
November 17, 2021
Tank Chats #132 | Morris Light Reconnaissance Car | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 23 Jul 2021David Fletcher is back with another Tank Chat discussing the Morris Light Reconnaissance Car.
(more…)
November 14, 2021
QotD: Traffic in India
Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.
October 3, 2021
The Triumph Spitfire Story
Big Car old account
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June 7, 2021
Dude, where’s my (flying) car?
The latest of the reader-contributed book reviews at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten looks at Where is my Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall:
What went wrong in the 1970s? Since then, growth and productivity have slowed, average wages are stagnant, visible progress in the world of “atoms” has practically stopped — the Great Stagnation. About the only thing that has gone well are computers. How is it that we went from the typewriter to the smartphone, but we’re still using practically the same cars and airplanes?
Where is my Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall, is an attempt to answer that question. His answer is: the Great Stagnation was caused by energy usage flatlining, which was caused by our failure to switch to nuclear energy, which was caused by excessive regulation, which was caused by “green fundamentalism”.
Three hundred years ago, we burned wood for energy. Then there was coal and the steam engine, which gave us the Industrial Revolution. Then there was oil and gas, giving us cars and airplanes. Then there should have been nuclear fission and nanotech, letting you fit a lifetime’s worth of energy in your pocket. Instead, we still drive much the same cars and airplanes, and climate change threatens to boil the Earth.
I initially thought the title was a metaphor — the “flying car” as a standin for all the missing technological progress in the world of “atoms” — but in fact much of the book is devoted to the particular question of flying cars. So look at the issue from the lens of transportation:
Hans Rosling was a world health economist and an indefatigable campaigner for a deeper understanding of the world’s state of development. He is famous for his TED talks and the Gapminder web site. He classifies the wealthiness of the world’s population into four levels:
1. Barefoot. Unable even to afford shoes, they must walk everywhere they go. Income $1 per day. One billion people are at Level 1.
2. Bicycle (and shoes). The $4 per day they make doesn’t sound like much to you and me but it is a huge step up from Level 1. There are three billion people at level 2.
3. The two billion people at Level 3 make $16 a day; a motorbike is within their reach.
4. At $64 per day, the one billion people at Level 4 own a car.
The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated: In 1800, 85% of the world’s population was at Level 1. Today, only 9% is. Over the past half century, the bulk of humanity moved up out of Level 1 to erase the rich-poor gap and make the world wealth distribution roughly bell-shaped. The average American moved from Level 2 in 1800, to level 3 in 1900, to Level 4 in 2000. We can state the Great Stagnation story nearly as simply: There is no level 5.
Level 5, in transportation, is a flying car. Flying cars are to airplanes as cars are to trains. Airplanes are fast, but getting to the airport, waiting for your flight, and getting to your final destination is a big hassle. Imagine if you had to bike to a train station to get anywhere (not such a leap of imagination for me in New York City! But it wouldn’t work in the suburbs). What if you had one vehicle that could drive on the road and fly in the sky at hundreds of miles an hour?
Before reading this book, I thought flying cars were just technologically infeasible, because flying takes too much energy. But Hall says we can and have built them ever since the 1930s. They got interrupted by the Great Depression (people were too poor to buy private airplanes), then WWII (airplanes were directed towards the war effort, not the market), then regulation mostly killed the private aviation industry. But technical feasibility was never the problem.
Hall spends a huge fraction of the book on pretty detailed technical discussion of flying cars. For example: the key technical issue is takeoff and landing, and there is a tough tradeoff between convenient takeoff/landing and airspeed (and cost, and ease of operation). It’s interesting reading. But let’s return to the larger issue of nuclear power.
April 14, 2021
Tank Chat #103 | Laird Centaur | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 15 May 2020David Fletcher looks at this curiosity from the 1970’s, a Land Rover with tracks. Currently housed in The Tank Museum’s Vehicle Conservation Centre.
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March 30, 2021
Tank Chats # 101 | Irish Leyland Armoured Car | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 9 Apr 2020Here David Fletcher discusses the Leyland Armoured Car which was produced in the 1930s for the Irish Army, but with some alterations, saw service right through to the 1980s.
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March 26, 2021
Tank Chats #100 | Rolls-Royce Armoured Car | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 6 Nov 2020The 100th Tank Chat milestone has been reached as the Rolls-Royce Armoured Car turns 100 years old! In this special edition, everybody’s favourite moustachioed tank historian David Fletcher examines his favourite vehicle in The Tank Museum’s collection: the Rolls-Royce Armoured Car, on its 100th birthday.
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March 25, 2021
QotD: Lucas, the Prince of Darkness
- The Lucas motto: “Get home before dark.”
- Lucas is the patent holder for the short circuit.
- Lucas — Inventor of the first intermittent wiper.
- Lucas — Inventor of the self-dimming headlamp.
- The three position Lucas switch — Dim, Flicker and Off.
- The Original Anti-Theft Device — Lucas Electrics.
- Lucas is an acronym for Loose Unsoldered Connections and Splices
Andrew Stoy, “Joe Lucas, Prince Of Darkness: British Electrical System Jokes”, Jalopnik, 2008-08-04.
March 4, 2021
QotD: Accounting for the long-term fall in the crime rate
One clue to the long-term fall in crime rates may be that most of the juke traits I’ve just described are heritable. Note that this is not exactly the same thing as genetically transmitted; children may to a significant extent acquire them from their families by imitation and learning.
The long-term fall in crime rates suggest that something may have been disrupting the generational transmission of traits associated with criminal deviance. Are there plausible candidates for that something? Are there selective pressures operating against jukeness that have become more pressing since the 1960s?
I think I can name three: ready availability of intoxicants, contraception, and automobiles.
Once I got this far in my thinking I realized that the authors of Freakonomics got there before me on one of these; they argued for a strong forward influence from availability of abortion to decreased crime rates two decades later. And yes, I know that a couple of conservative economists (Steve Sailer and John Lott) think they’ve found fatal flaws in the Levitt/Dubner argument; I’ve read the debate and I think Levitt/Dubner have done an effective job of defending their insight.
But I’m arguing a more general case that subsumes Levitt/Dubner. That is, that modern life makes juke traits more dangerous to reproductive success than they used to be. Automobiles are a good example. Before they became ubiquitous, most people didn’t own anything that they used every single day and that so often rewarded a moment’s inattention with injury or death.
Ready availability of cheap booze and powerful drugs means people with addictive personalities can kill themselves faster. Easy access to contraception and abortion means impulse fucks are less likely to actually produce offspring. More generally, as people gain more control over their lives and faster ways to screw up, the selective consequences from bad judgment and the selective premium on good judgment both increase.
Eric S. Raymond, “Beyond root causes”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-01-12.
February 27, 2021
QotD: What the instructions in Haynes manuals really mean
Translation: Will be corroded into place … Clamp with adjustable spanner then beat repeatedly with a hammer.Haynes: This is a snug fit.
Translation: You will skin your knuckles! … Clamp with adjustable spanner then beat repeatedly with hammer.Haynes: This is a tight fit.
Translation: Not a hope in hell matey! … Clamp with adjustable spanner then beat repeatedly with hammer.Haynes: As described in Chapter 7 …
Translation: That’ll teach you not to read through before you start, now you are looking at scary photos of the inside of a gearbox.Haynes: Pry …
Translation: Hammer a screwdriver into …Haynes: Undo …
Translation: Go buy a tin of WD40 (industrial size).Haynes: Ease …
Translation: Apply superhuman strength to …Haynes: Retain tiny spring …
Translation: “Crikey what was that, it nearly had my eye out”!Haynes: Press and rotate to remove bulb …
Translation: OK — that’s the glass bit off, now fetch some good pliers to dig out the bayonet part and remaining glass shards.Do it by the book — the real meaning of Haynes instructions.
February 23, 2021
The Corgi Toys Story
Little Car
Published 4 Feb 2020Corgi Toys is the name of a range of die-cast toy vehicles produced by Mettoy Playcraft Ltd. in the United Kingdom.
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January 30, 2021
Toyota’s Invincible Truck
Big Car
Published 1 Nov 2020Toyota’s best-selling vehicle is the long-running Toyota Corolla, but second is Toyota’s resilient pickup the Hilux that’s been sold for over 50 years. No matter where you are in the world, you’ll likely find one moving up to a ton of cargo down a dusty lane. In the process it’s turned into a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde vehicle. On the one hand it’s the basic indestructible commercial vehicle that thousands of businesses rely on every day. On the other it’s become a well-specced weekend leisure vehicle. And in some cases it’s a bit of both! So why did this unassuming vehicle get a place of honour at the Top Gear studio, and what other successful vehicles have been born out of this long-running pickup?
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January 19, 2021
Milton Friedman’s “Shareholder Doctrine” is alive and well
Satish Bapanapalli on why Friedman’s doctrine helps to explain why auto manufacturers spend so much money to crash-test their vehicles:
Ford Focus versus Ford Explorer crash test IIHS by Brady Holt is licensed under CC BY 3.0
Of all of Friedman’s great ideas, the Shareholder Doctrine is perhaps the most misunderstood by academics, in large part because many left-leaning intellectuals use the good old straw man argument to misleadingly caricature the doctrine as a “profit-at-all-cost system regardless of human toll.”
Case in point, the latest sermon by some reputed academics published in Fortune magazine: “50 years later, Milton Friedman’s shareholder doctrine is dead.”
This one has all the usual tropes, including the claim that “Friedman … urged business to use its muscle to reduce the effectiveness of unions, blunt environmental and consumer protection measures, and defang antitrust law. He sought to reduce consideration of human concerns [such as] treat[ing] workers, consumers, and society fairly.”
Friedman said no such things. Read it for yourselves. Friedman’s primary argument was that it is not the job of the officers of a corporation (corporate executives) to fight for social causes. The officers must only act in accordance with the shareholder’s wishes, “which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”
Of course, in some cases, the shareholders may themselves encourage charitable spending and other corporate policies and activities deemed “socially responsible.” In which case, executives are tasked with finding the best ways to fulfill those objectives. In his article, Friedman clearly demonstrates why this is a logically precise position.
The scolds, who authored the Fortune article, put forth an alternative. Their “three pillars” proposal advocates for laws to be imposed on corporations with vague and fuzzy objectives (note the italicized words) such as “responsible corporate citizen[ship]”, “treating workers … fairly“, “avoiding externalities, such as carbon emissions, that cause unreasonable or disproportionate harm to others”, and corporations should make profits by “benefiting others.” To rub foolishness on the vagueness, the proposal calls for putting the onus on the corporations to measure and demonstrate progress on these fuzzy objectives! To put it in Friedman’s own words, such proposals “are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor.”
