"The UK had a Russian-backed Brexit campaign"

Evidence for that?

Am pretty unacquainted with current Chinese literature/fiction. Idle musing therefore, just wondering. Both of these works are by authors in sufficiently good odor to be able to remain and write in China. Both are quite explicit about events which seem to be banned from public discussion in general. So what is happening? Why are they permitted at all?

The Fat Years one can see one possibility why - the very long monologue at the end by the representative of the ruling committee comes eventually to the conclusion that the current authoritarian regime is the only possible way to run China in a way which works. The real flow of the book is to dismiss dissidence as both futile and rather childish. It essentially promotes the view that what there is now is the best China can do. Is this why its tolerated? Rather as Yevtushenko was tolerated by the Soviet Union - a lot less of a dissident in practice than the West generally assumed him to be from his words.

Though he did write one decent poem:

    How sharply our children will be ashamed
    taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
    remembering how in so strange a time
    common integrity could look like courage.

Is it also true of the Three Body Problem what may be true of the Fat Years?

I don't think Curry is a 'climate change denier' - though the meaning of the accusation is admittedly not completely clear and definite. It presumably means something like one who persists in not accepting a statement or theory despite having been confronted with overwhelming evidence in its favor, and despite not being able to give any reason for refusing to accept it. She is certainly not that.

She's skeptical of some of the mainstream views about global warming, and more attentive to uncertainty when it comes to forecasts and policies than many of the committed activists would like. But she is entirely reason and evidence based in her approach, and her work with Nic Lewis on climate sensitivity is worth reading. As is her recent book. You may agree or disagree with some or all of it, but its rational argument and worth considering if only to be clear why she is wrong.

As to the reference, yes, its six or nine months old. But it at least gets into specific mechanisms of how exactly some of this warming may have been driven. In that respect I find it much more illuminating than the typical Guardian article which just waves arms in air and recites 'climate change' about everything.

These events are not CAUSED by climate change, they ARE climate change. Or they may be, the jury is out on this one, it has not been going for long enough, nor are the proximate causes clear enough for us to be sure.

Go here:

https://judithcurry.com/2023/0...

A careful explanation of the mechanism. You may feel that the mechanism is caused by global warming. But at least this piece explains what is happening so that you can see what is causing it.

The mainstream reporting on this so far has by contrast been only a mixture of arm waving and wailing.

People keep saying this was obviously going to fail and that nowhere else has ever tried it, so good for them to try.

It has been tried (in Portugal) and a full report is here:

https://transformdrugs.org/blo...

Apparently Portugal was the model for the Orgegon attempt, but either the population or circumstances are different or they didn't do it right.

People are in denial about the implications of intermittency. An intermittent supply is not the same product as a dispatchable supply. You cannot supply your local supermarket with a ton of lettuce on August 1 and claim to have met its annual needs for lettuce. A delivery of a ton on August 1 is not the same product as a ton delivered in weekly installments year round, when people actually want to buy it. Perishable goods, notice?

To use the intermittent supply you have to make it dispatchable at the point of use. The only way of doing this at the moment is by rapid start gas peaker plants. Or diesel plants maybe. So the effort to get to net zero means you have to build more gas plants and use them more often, as wind becomes a larger proportion of your generating capacity. This is not just me saying that, the UK Government recently committed to a new building program of gas generation, for exactly that reason.

There is a study by the Royal Society in the UK on the storage requirements which the UK needs if its to get to Net Zero. It takes account of actual UK weather conditions going back decades. (Why had no-one thought to do that earlier?). Their estimate was that it will require 900 caverns to be excavated and sealed and filled with hydrogen (presumably green hydrogen) - and the required storage duration was decades - to cover for the predictable but occasional calm summers that are found in the record.

The question you have to answer, for the UK as an example, is this. Right now UK demand peaks at around 45GW. There is currently 28GW of wind installed. In the winter you are likely to have at least one period when supply is well below 5GW for at least a week. Suppose demand stays at this level. How much wind do you need installed to meet the extra 40GW+ for at least a full week? You'll need something like 400GW, and a lot of storage to go with it. Its impossible.

When the country is converted to EVs and heat pumps, peak demand will be at least double. So this is over 100GW. Get ready to install 1,000GW of wind. And storage. And maintain this wind, which will be offshore in the North Sea. Its impossible.

People now have the idea that you can use the wind to charge storage, during periods of low demand, for instance. No, you can't, because you cannot install enough storage to cover the shortfall. Sometimes people fantasize about using car batteries for this. They have not done the sums. It will only be a small fraction of what is needed.

There are two choices. One is, you can go to an electric society, with EVs and heat pumps and most industrial processes electrified. In that case, get ready to install lots of gas and coal generation. Perhaps superheated coal. Nasty and messy, in the case of coal, but it will work, it will generate the required power. Or nuclear maybe.

Or, you could take the country to wind and solar, in which case get ready to abandon converting to EVs and heat pumps and electrifying industry, because you are not going to have reliable and available supply. So you'll have to stick with ICE and oil and gas boilers and even then it will be messy, you'll need lots of gas backup and probably power rationing as well.

The one thing that is not going to happen is at the same time a move to wind and solar for power generation and an electrification of transport and home heating. Because any political party which seriously tries it will be out of power for several generations when the resulting social and economic disaster becomes clear.

The question is, which country will be the first to have a nationwide weeks long blackout with cold restart due to efforts to implement these green fantasies?

Until a couple of weeks ago, the UK would have been a safe bet, both large political parties showing the same obstinate ignorance about energy planning. Now that the Conservative Party has started its U-turn with the gas build program its not so clear. They are still the favorites, because of the almost certain Labour government that will come to power in November, and those guys are seriously proposing net zero power generation by 2030, and opposing the gas build out. But it may be that once the gas build out gets started, reason will prevail and they will continue with it. If they reverse, the UK will be the winner.

We shall see.

"...enough to generate electricity for 400,000 homes...."

This is the usual misleading quantification. The farm itself doesn't do this. Not because it does not generate enough electricity, but because what it generates is not the product the homes need. It is not putting out the same product as a coal or gas power station because its supply is unpredictably intermittent, whereas theirs is stable and consistent and dispatchable.

The homes require 24 x 7 power at utility standards of stability. What the wind farm generates is a supply which varies with the weather. The UK in a fit of naive pride as it runs at the Net Zero cliff supplies the most exhaustive sets of statistics on the performance of its wind generating plant. You can get graphical versions here:

www.gridwatch.co.uk

On an instant basis, here:

https://energynumbers.info/gbg...

You can also download detailed csv files with all the data anyone would want. What does it show? Wild fluctuations of supply. 28GW of faceplate sometimes delivers less than 0.5GW, sometimes 21GW. There are prolonged calms of a week or more two or three times a year (caused by blocking highs) and then you have supply consistently below 5GW for a week or ten days. Days with 0.5GW or less occur much more frequently, dozens of times a year.

Jon Butterworth, CEO of National Gas in the UK, has said âoeIf we hadnâ(TM)t had gas in 2022, there were 260 days when we would have had rolling blackouts, and for 26 of those days we would have had a full blackout."

This is not a supply which can power homes, or indeed anything else much. Yes, you could use it to pump water into a pumped reservoir system. Or to heat a thermal store. Or maybe to generate hydrogen by electrolysis. But what you can't use it for is to power homes, offices, industry.

So gas plants with very short startup lead times are used to cover when the wind is not blowing. This is why the UK has just announced a gas power station building program. Its the only way to keep the lights on.

But quick start gas is not the same as CCGT, combined cycle. CCGT recovers heat from the exhaust, and so works at a high level of efficiency, around 60%. Rapid start plants are much less efficient.

The paradoxical effect is that the higher the percentage of wind in your system, the more you will use the peaker plants, and the less efficient your gas use will be.

Its completely misleading to describe this situation by claiming that a given wind installation sill supply the needs of x thousand homes. It simply will not. It may have other beneficial effects and uses, it may contribute to powering lots of things, but one thing it will not do is power x thousand homes or generate enough power for x thousand homes.

You would build power stations of other types because (unlike wind, at least according to the poster) the energy they generate over their lifespan is greater than the energy which you expend to build them.

The point is not about CO2. The point is about whether an economy based entirely on wind and solar and excluding coal, gas and oil, is viable. The present concept of the climate activists appears to be the electric society. Transport will be electrified, all vehicles will be EVs, homes will be heated by heat pumps, all industrial processes will be converted to electricity. The power for this will come from wind and solar generation plants, because at the same time as we have the use transition, from gas, gasoline and coal to electricity, we will also move all power generation to wind and solar.

The head comment is asserting that this is impossible, because wind and solar installations do not produce enough power to fund what it will take to replace them. Or, put it another way, you have to burn a lot of coal oil and gas to have the energy you need to put up wind and solar generation plants, and, the argument is, you always will have to.

This is my earlier post, from a thread and story which now seems to have vanished.

The story goes something like this. You are Apple, you have a view of the market that says we own the customer who has bought our hardware. We should allow third parties to sell software to him as long as they give us a cut and and the purchase is exclusively through our retail store.

You miss your chance to implement this with the computer market, you failed to lock buyers of the hardware into your app store. In fact, you neglected to implement an app store, so you just sat there in resentful fury while third parties sold to your customers and took your rightful revenues. But then along came iPods, so you did iTunes, and that worked very well. So now along comes the mobile market and this time you are going to do it right.

At first everything goes fine, people buy the phones, use the store, you collect your percentage, and you also get the other thing you were making for, hugely successful sales and important market share. This is working just great, the share price soars, you get to lock in more and more of the collateral market at the same time as raising overall market share. Part of the reason the share price soars is of course that you have now realized Jobs dream. You are not only getting profits from your increased product sales, but also from the supplementary and service markets, and your costs on this last part are almost nothing. So your margins soar, and Wall Street loves that.

And then something nasty happens which you had never dreamed was possible. All of a sudden regulatory bodies start looking at your market share and wondering if its in some way dominant. They start deciding that it may be. But you can defend against this and are not too worried. But then they start looking at the very source of your industry leading margins, and they see that what you have managed to do is lock your customers into buying other products and services from you, and taking a cut. You are basically able to say to app developers that its your way or the highway. And, say the regulators, this might be fine when you were just another tiny minority player with a handful of fanatical fans, as you are in the computer business, but in the phone business you have dominant share of some segments and this is not on.

You are by now one of the leading two or three companies in the world in share price value, so you hire the finest legal talent there is, and prepare to defend.

Unfortunately for you this just leads one of the main market governing bodies, the EU Commission, to look carefully at their laws, and realize that your top legal talent is right, and you are going to be able to defend. But unfortunately for you, the Commission has the ability to just change its laws. Which it does, and then slaps a large fine on you.

Never mind, it may be large, but its peanuts in comparison to our revenues and profits, you think. Well, yes and no. Because what you have forgotten is that the EU has had its eye on you for some time. They have a similar attitude to their citizens as the one you have to your customers. Their aim is to run a closed market with only niche share to any other than local suppliers. Their intellectual heritage is Bismarck and Colbert. They have been looking at you for years now and trying to find a fight they could pick and win. And now they think they have found it.

So you are all sitting around a table in Infinite Loop Drive or someplace, and it slowly dawns on you in discussion that this might turn into a serious threat. Not just because the EU may fine you a meaningful proportion of your revenues this time around. But because they are now aiming at the whole business model which gives you all those free profits. And you need those free profits for Wall Street. It was never just the market share and the growth that was working for you. It was the whole model linking the lock-in to the growth and the high margins.

The EU, it starts to dawn on you all, actually has in mind to reduce you to Asus or Samsung or whoever. To being just another hardware manufacturer in a seriously competitive market.

So when someone actually starts up with their own app store, something which the new EU regulations fully entitle them to do, you have a problem. Let it go, and the world and his brother will be in there, targeting those nice margins. Block them, and the EU will be after you. What to do?

You have no choice. You have to take on the EU. Its going to take years, you will proceed through the courts, maybe there will be some kind of compromise settlement after which you will run it very close to the wind and have more court actions and more delays.

Your problem is going to be that Brussels is not California. But there is no point anyone telling you that, because after all, you are the team that took Apple to being one of the most valuable companies in the world. So what do they know?

Lay in some popcorn. Place your bets. This is going to get very interesting.

Folks, you do not get it. This is about dismantling the walled garden. The EU has armed itself with a huge weapon, it can fine significant proportions of annual revenue under its new legislation, and it considers it has motivation to use it. I tried to explain this in a long post on an earlier article on this subject. I can't seem to find that story now, it was the earlier story about Epic, 24/03/06/1737255/apple-terminated-epics-developer-account, which is giving me 404 when I try to access it now.

You seem, none of you, to have lived and worked in Europe. That means living there as a local, speaking the languages, spending time talking to Commission staff, understanding the outlook and the historical precedents which its formed on. Understanding how the Commission works, and why.

Brussels is not California. None of the things you are used to taking for granted about the economy and society are factors in this. The EU has given itself the powers it needs, and its going to use them.

Its very understandable why Apple would decide to take them on. Its the whole business model that is under attack. But in the end the smart money in wars between even a very large company and a government the size of the EU Commission must be on the government.

This is why the market is reacting as strongly as it did to the recent decision outlined here: https://apple.slashdot.org/sto....

The amount of money was trivial to Apple. But its the principle. And now we are going to see that applied over and over again. Neither side can afford to back down. But only one can win, and the smart money is on the Commission.

The story goes something like this. You are Apple, you have a view of the market that says we own the customer who has bought our hardware. We should allow third parties to sell software to him as long as they give us a cut and and the purchase is exclusively through our retail store.

You miss your chance to implement this with the computer market, you failed to lock buyers of the hardware into your app store. In fact, you neglected to implement an app store, so you just sat there in resentful fury while third parties sold to your customers and took your rightful revenues. But then along came iPods, so you did iTunes, and that worked very well. So now along comes the mobile market and this time you are going to do it right.

At first everything goes fine, people buy the phones, use the store, you collect your percentage, and you also get the other thing you were making for, hugely successful sales and important market share. This is working just great, the share price soars, you get to lock in more and more of the collateral market at the same time as raising overall market share. Part of the reason the share price soars is of course that you have now realized Job's dream. You are not only getting profits from your increased product sales, but also from the supplementary and service markets, and your costs on this last part are almost nothing. So your margins soar, and Wall Street loves that.

And then something nasty happens which you had never dreamed was possible. All of a sudden regulatory bodies start looking at your market share and wondering if its in some way dominant. They start deciding that it may be. But you can defend against this and are not too worried. But then they start looking at the very source of your industry leading margins, and they see that what you have managed to do is lock your customers into buying other products and services from you, and taking a cut. You are basically able to say to app developers that its your way or the highway. And, say the regulators, this might be fine when you were just another tiny minority player with a handful of fanatical fans, as you are in the computer business, but in the phone business you have dominant share of some segments and this is not on.

You are by now one of the leading two or three companies in the world in share price value, so you hire the finest legal talent there is, and prepare to defend.

Unfortunately for you this just leads one of the main market governing bodies, the EU Commission, to look carefully at their laws, and realize that your top legal talent is right, and you are going to be able to defend. But unfortunately for you, the Commission has the ability to just change its laws. Which it does, and then slaps a large fine on you.

Never mind, it may be large, but its peanuts in comparison to our revenues and profits, you think. Well, yes and no. Because what you have forgotten is that the EU has had its eye on you for some time. They have a similar attitude to their citizens as the one you have to your customers. Their aim is to run a closed market with only niche share to any other than local suppliers. Their intellectual heritage is Bismarck and Colbert. They have been looking at you for years now and trying to find a fight they could pick and win. And now they think they have found it.

So you are all sitting around a table in Infinite Loop Drive or someplace, and it slowly dawns on you in discussion that this might turn into a serious threat. Not just because the EU may fine you a meaningful proportion of your revenues this time around. But because they are now aiming at the whole business model which gives you all those free profits. And you need those free profits for Wall Street. It was never just the market share and the growth that was working for you. It was the whole model linking the lock-in to the growth and the high margins.

The EU, it starts to dawn on you all, actually has in mind to reduce you to Asus or Samsung or whoever. To being just another hardware manufacturer in a seriously competitive market.

So when someone actually starts up with their own app store, something which the new EU regulations fully entitle them to do, you have a problem. Let it go, and the world and his brother will be in there, targeting those nice margins. Block them, and the EU will be after you. What to do?

You have no choice. You have to take on the EU. Its going to take years, you will proceed through the courts, maybe there will be some kind of compromise settlement after which you will run it very close to the wind and have more court actions and more delays.

Your problem is going to be that Brussels is not California. But there is no point anyone telling you that, because after all, you are the team that took Apple to being one of the most valuable companies in the world. So what do they know?

Lay in some popcorn. Place your bets. This is going to get very interesting.

"At first glance, the â1.8bn fine for stifling competition in music streaming is not a lethal problem for the company. It is pocket change when compared with Apples global sales, equal to about 2 per cent of last yearâ(TM)s annual free cash flow. Appeals mean the case will be in court for years. Apple can argue that its own music service does not dominate the market. "The problem is that the EU fine does not mean the end of Appleâ(TM)s regulatory battle. Around the world, more attempts are being made to put limits on tech company power. Slowly, Apples closed ecosystem is being chipped away.

This is really fundamental. If you agree with Lex, what we are now looking at is the demolition of the walled garden business model. If Lex is right, this is a sign of a wave of intrusive regulation of big tech. The way the regulators are approaching it is to break up obligatory bundling. The approach would, for instance, if totally generalized, which it will not be, ban Apple from insisting or taking technical measures to make MacOS only run on Apple hardware. The story suggests that this is the reason why a financial penalty which is trivial in relation to Apple's revenue and profits should have caused such a sharp selloff in the share price.

What is different this time is the volume of action on multiple fronts and the fact that they coincide with a period of slowing growth. High-margin services revenues have bolstered net income even as slowing smartphone sales drag on growth. This is the model that regulators have put in peril.

https://www.ft.com/content/6f2...

This is from the SHO:

"Every year the lives of approximately 1.19 million people are cut short as a result of a road traffic crash. Between 20 and 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability.

"Road traffic injuries cause considerable economic losses to individuals, their families, and to nations as a whole. These losses arise from the cost of treatment as well as lost productivity for those killed or disabled by their injuries, and for family members who need to take time off work or school to care for the injured. Road traffic crashes cost most countries 3% of their gross domestic product....

"...More than 90% of road traffic deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Road traffic death rates are highest in the WHO African Region and lowest in the European Region. Even within high-income countries, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be involved in road traffic crashes."

So you have to imagine a world without cars, and some group puts this proposal to the various legislatures and health and safety organizations: lets introduce this new product and system. It will let people travel at will wherever they want whenever they want. Yes, it will be noisy, polluting, expensive. And it will kill about a million people a year, and injure over 20 million. But it will be all worth it!

There is no way this would get off the ground today. Its something we have grown up with and accept, but the piece is right to say it is an intrinsically totally unacceptable situation.

The real difficulty is making self driving cars work safely in the present chaotic and unpredictable street and highway environment, and I suspect this is something that cannot be done. And even did we do it, the occupants would still be at risk from accidents caused by human drivers. So we will be faced with a choice between keeping our present environment without self driving cars, or clean up the environment, which means making it much more controlled and uniform, and excluding human driven cars from it. If you cannot make the cars drive safely in our present streets, then if you really want to tackle the death and injury problem you are going to have to make the streets safe for the cars.

There are massive problems doing this. Because for a long time, even if you adopt such a program, there are going to be lots of human driven cars on most streets and roads. You clean up certain roads and streets and make them exclusive for self-driving ones, and they are safe for the self-driving. But what happens when they leave these safe environments and are back into human driven chaos for the last mile of a trip?

I don't know what the solution is. The problem of traffic deaths and injuries is much lower in the developed world than in the developing. But its still at totally unacceptable levels. On usual calculations of cost benefit and health and safety we would move as fast as we can to self-driving cars and get people out of the business of driving. But the project would be a huge one, and the costs enormous, and the way to do the transition very unclear.

So I suppose we will stumble on, trying to make self-driving cars work in our chaotic road and street environment, failing. trying to make our present human driven cars safer and lower the death and injury rate, and failing. All one can say at a personal level is, get a car robustly built for survival of accidents, avoid peak danger hours and routes, and hope the air bags work if they are needed. And yes, get the unsafe off the roads at a better rate than we do today. Not at all satisfactory, but I think that's the way it probably is.

Asahi is a great achievement. Its made Apple hardware generally possible and attractive, in spite of Apple. Its a bit like in the previous episode of this opera, running MacOS on non-Apple hardware ,but in reverse.

There are two components, the OS and the hardware. Apple always used to have an OS that people wanted, and so they would put up with hardware that was either inferior or (when they went to Intel) over-priced. If they would only have sold the OS to run on the hardware of your choice they would have sold a heap more of it. But being Apple, they would not.

In fact, you can argue that back in the early days they were largely responsible for the rise in Windows and the IBM compatible OEM industry. They would not license the OS. But they also would not or could not make enough hardware to meet demand. So the market, which wanted PCs of some sort, with some kind of graphical interface, bought the only thing they could get in the required quantity, Windows PCs. Because of the ease of entry into the hardware market pretty soon there were as many of them as anyone wanted. Apple having refused to supply, the market turned to someone who would.

This is now playing out in reverse. At the moment they have hardware that people want. It really does seem like very nice hardware. If they would just sell barebones systems or the same hardware running Windows or Linux they would probably sell heaps of it.

But being Apple, they will not. Being Apple, they insist on selling you the OS, whether you want it or not, if you are going to be allowed to buy their hardware. They are a bit more enlightened than they were in the earlier period, they are not actively doing things to the hardware to stop you running any other OS on it. But they are also not encouraging it, so it will remain a niche market.

Yes, they will sell more Macs with the new hardware and MacOS than they did when they were selling overpriced Intel to people who were determined to run MacOS and so put up with the overpriced Intel hardware Apple insisted on supplying with it. But they are, as in the earlier case, squandering the real opportunity for huge volume sales of their superb hardware, if they would only cut it loose from the OS that none of the market except their fans wants.

Good for Asahi in this situation. They have some of us seriously considering buying Apple hardware for the first time in many decades.

At this point one hears the creaking of joints as the Mac fraternity start jumping up and down, and claiming that sourcing the OS and the hardware from the same source delivers something called better integration. Right. We are supposed to believe that the same OS running on PPC, on Intel, and now on Arm, using standard memory, disks, interface components, screens, keyboards...etc was in all of those iterations somehow mystically more connected to the components than an HP or Asus machine running Windows? Well, you can believe it if it helps you to sleep... but no-one else is buying it.

But we may buy the hardware, now we can get an OS that we want running on it.

Jobs always had the approach that Apple as the hardware supplier owned the customer, and that people making profits off selling Apple's customers their software were essentially ripping Apple off. So the collective dream at Apple has always been that as a developer you should pay for the privilege of being allowed to supply your software to OUR customers.

Apple also has always had the approach that they should own whatever connected to 'their' products, so you see the proliferation of special connectors and protocols. You also see stuff like soldered in memory, so you either buy it at the outset or do without. Again, its you will buy your memory from Apple, and you will pay whatever they ask for it. Or do without.

In the end this turns into an ambition for total control over whatever the customer did with 'our' computer. Or phone. Or music player.

There is a different point of view possible on this issue. Namely, that the customer has bought some hardware and should be free to load whatever they want to on it, connect it to whatever they want, and that they don't owe Apple anything for the privilege, neither do the people who develop the software or provide the other things that we connect.

The EU has taken the traditional anti-trust point of view that as much mixing and matching as the customer wants should be possible, and that if you have sold the hardware, you must not prevent your hardware customer from putting what he wants on it. Just as if you are GM back in the day, when they were really powerful, they could not oblige car owners to buy spare parts only from GM. Or various kinds of add-ons. And they could not charge the suppliers of these third party things a fee for the privilege of installing them in the customer's own car.

The interesting social question is why Apple users are generally so enthusiastic about having their ability to do what they want with their own product restricted.

It seems to be because they have bought into the Apple myth that its a different, more worthy, more politically correct company, and whatever it does must be applauded, and all criticism of anything resisted.

The EU however is a different beast. It has its own bad and illegitimate reasons for doing what its doing. But its doing the right thing for bad reasons, and its stance is amusingly similar to Apple's. It thinks it owns its market, and if you want to sell here, you play by our rules and probably pay for the privilege. Remind you of anything?