tomo,
Yes, you've certainly poked fun at rooftop hydro before. Still, when she said Singapore I was thinking Tall buildings, regular substantial rain, you *might* get something for that, then she said how the electricity was being extracted and it just got sillier from there. Do like the idea of a km of rain per hour: you'd need to keep swimming upwards at 16m per minute just to stay on top.

Brendan O'Neill interviewed Nick Cater on Australia's federal election. I think he has it about right, though I do wonder how he stays a true believer in the Liberal Party when they seem about as unprincipled as the others.

Good article rejecting an Australian Financial Review puff-piece on playing the residential electricity market from your besolar-panelled and bebatteried home.

Can be amusing to be a bit behind on the podcasts. Listening to FooC from last week, we got BBC veteran David Willey's tip for the next Pope: He won't be an American.

Seems the alarmists have escalated their claims of human contribution to CO2. Now we're to blame for 1/3 of atmospheric CO2. Apparently the logic is that CO2 has gone up by about 1/3, so it must be us. Never underestimate the power of The Science.

Thought this doco by Internet Historian gave a coherent and amusing account of the Costa Concordia debacle.

tomo,
Those lasers are interesting, but a bit too esoteric to draw me into the rabbit hole. Mind boggling though. In photography terms, the femtosecond is the exposure, but what is the frame rate? Turns out they call it the pulse repetition rate and, according to this, it can be up to "several gigahertz". So you have a 10^-15 exposure every 10^-9 seconds. The flash is just one millionth of the elapsed time, but apparently very useful. It's Arthur C Clarke's law about sufficently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.

From Sunday's comments at Jo Nova it turns out that the powers that be in Germany are completely bonkers. Why worry about zealots from the Muslim religion when zealots from the Green religion are demolishing six-year-old power stations?

It's like watching a train crash (stolen comment)

After PMQs the BBC’s finest told us in no uncertain terms that gas prices were the cause of the huge UK energy costs as compared to other countries, pushing the government lie…and that this was merely a ‘culture war’ rather than an important and honest critique of the Mad Monk’s nut zero diktats….and you might note the less than open reporting about job losses due to massive green costs in this report…you’d never know from the title what it was really about….

‘The choppy waters between North Sea oil and green energy revolution’

And note the first line…

‘The Great Energy Transition is under way’

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg414w9xx91o

What of that claim that gas is driving costs up? Andrew Neil notes some interesting facts that don’t seem to get in the way of a good lie at the BBC…

https://x.com/7Kiwi/status/1916156557823189446

https://x.com/ajcdeane/status/1916045482230419719

You have to wonder how many emails there are flying between the BBC and the Mad Monk’s office discussing the best way to spin these lies to the public….we know it happens as they try to nudge us into believing their guff.

As Andrew Neil says….

‘Those interviewing E Miliband need to better briefed so they can call him out when he spouts nonsense.
He says fossil fuels are up 60% on the year. In fact oil and gas prices have been trending down and shown marked falls these past 12 months.
He says we are in the grip of petro-state dictators. We get most of our gas from Norway and the USA.
On the other hand he’s been in China pleading with them to take stakes in our solar and wind power + other green infrastructure. Not a petro-sate dictatorship. Just a dictatorship.’

Recent EconTalk on AI had some overlap with Machiavelli's effort when the guest started speculating about Mr Xi being augmented with an AI "mind" thousands of times more intelligent than his own, and how well that would bode for his rule in China. Odd how Xi got to be China's leader despite not having the highest intelligence in the land.

Guest was pretty heavy on the Dopeler effect, with nonsense coming at us rapidly. His constant use of compute as a noun (e.g. "you have more compute to experiment on") grated with me too.

None of that stops him being right (largely ad-hom), but the current AI fad feels akin to wind power. The pundits tell us that the only way to prove that it works is to do it at full scale. When the first full-scale one doesn't pan out, do another, and keep doing them till it *does* work. Wasting a phenomenal amount of money on magical thinking.

Also on AI hype: quite enjoyed this article.

tomo,
There's something in what Machiavelli says, though I strongly doubt Dutton's disadvantage was due to any superiority in intelligence. He was well outgunned on the ability to lie, yet his own lack of spine made him seem the untrustworthy one.

I think Abbott and Hawke are the only properly intelligent PMs we've had here (in the last five decades). Abbott performed as per Machiavelli; Hawke's ego helped him to overcome the difficulties.