Category Archives: Economics

The Rolling Blackouts In CA

No, they’re not a climate-change story. It’s about rampant insanity and corruption of rent-seeking “green”-energy firms.

And this seems like cheating: Texas lures California businesses with promises of electricity.

What did socialists use to light their homes before candles? Electricity.

[Late-morning update]

California is approaching Puerto Rico territory.

Speaking of which…

[Thursday-morning update]

California is “winning” its way into the Stone Age.

And is the state becoming pre-modern?

Apparently. Pat Brown has to be rolling in his grave at what his idiot son has wrought.

[Bumped]

Model Land

Judith Curry, on a new paper concerning how to escape from it:

Naïvely, we might hope that by making incremental improvements to the “realism” of a model (more accurate representations, greater details of processes, finer spatial or temporal resolution, etc.) we would also see incremental improvement in the outputs. Regarding the realism of short-term trajectories, this may well be true. It is not expected to be true in terms of probability forecasts. The nonlinear compound effects of any given small tweak to the model structure are so great that calibration becomes a very computationally-intensive task and the marginal performance benefits of additional subroutines or processes may be zero or even negative. In plainer terms, adding detail to the model can make it less accurate, less useful. [Emphasis added]

Computer models can be useful in some circumstances, but they are not science.

An Argument Too Far

I don’t necessarily agree that the 737-MAX fiasco was a result of climate hysteria. Yes, the new design reduced emissions, but it did that by reducing fuel consumption, which is intrinsically a desirable goal for airlines. I’m sure that Boeing wanted to claim that it was lower emissions, for PR purposes, but fuel efficiency has always been a driver of new-aircraft design.

BTW, got home from DC yesterday morning. I had quite a week at IAC, but posting may return to the (subdued) normal this week.