Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
Michelle Guthrie has been sacked by the ABC Board. A hurricane management style where she made enemies as far as the eye can see, and made no apparent effort to build critical relationships, was always high-risk. Whether a man who had done the job in the same way would have met the same fate will no doubt be debated in coming days.
From last week but still worth a mention- Church boy ScoMo will legislate to protect ignorance, stupidity, superstition and bigotry (aka religion) from reason, fairness and equal opportunity:
Prime Minister Scott Morrison will enact “preventative regulation and legislation” to shield freedom of religion from future enemies, giving his strongest hints to date about the government’s intentions regarding “religious freedom” laws.
***www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/scott-morrison-says-he-will-pursue-preventative-regulation-on-religious-freedom-20180917-p504cr.html
Commander ScoMo, readying the system for a fundamentalist takeover. Welcome to Great Southern Gilead.
It’s disgusting to think that schools in this day and age can sack a teacher just because they are gay. I bet ScoMo will also give extra money to the creepy chaplains in schools program.
On Joe Stiglitz. It is important to recognise the possibility of government failure as well as market failure. It is not generally the case that imperfect markets can be replaced with perfect regulators to avoid economic and social disadvantage. I found these arguments interesting.
https://www.city-journal.org/joseph-stiglitz-venezuela-16181.html
Harryrarke: where does Stieglitz claim the contrary? This is a straw man pseudo-refutation of his strong theorem of market imperfection.
Smarmy and IPA member Fifield says he does not want to privatise the ABC unlike the IPA and his own party’s Federal Council. This the same fellow who kept secret the Liberal Senator Parry’s British citizenship issues whilst the President was referring other Senators to the High Court.
Credibility issues of course !
Wentworth voters beware.
Wind energy update: Danish turbine manufacturer Vestas have announced a commercially available 10 MW turbine. GE were there first with a 12 MW one, but it’s not actually yet on sale. These monsters (the Vestas is 187m to rotor tip, the GE one 260m; the Eiffel Tower is 300m) are only for offshore, it’s not practicable to transport components by truck to land sites. GE claim an expected capacity factor of 63% for theirs. This is what coal plants get now if they are lucky.
(******cleantechnica.com/2018/09/26/mhi-vestas-launches-worlds-first-10-megawatt-wind-turbine/)
Meanwhile, French company Floatgen have connected heir first full-size floating wind turbine off Brittany. It survived a storm with 5m waves right after installation. Coming after Statoil’s (sorry, Equinor’s) successful deployment of several 6 MW floating turbines off Scotland, using a quite different platform design, we can now move floating wind from the “promising idea” box into the “this works” one. It opens up large new regions to wind, notably the US West coast and the Japanese Pacific one. (*****floatgen.eu/en/actualites/frances-first-offshore-wind-turbine-produces-electricity)
Thanks, James. Good things keep happening in renewable tech
Nowhere, nothing can I read in all the flimflam outrage about the recent, sorry longterm events at the ABC states that the Hon Fifield, minister for communication is a longterm IPA member and apostle which clearly states on its directive to the LNP that the ABC should be scrapped. In fact it is one of the few points on that sheet that hasn’t been acted upon
Fifield again
Meanwhile he makes limited defence or justification of the situation but stares directly ahead like some goofy wombat, a “I am only doing what I am supposed to be doing” look on his face.
China electric car update: in August, electric car sales (BEV and PHEV) broke through the 5% benchmark in the country. For the year to date, the EV market share is 3.1%, so the full year number will be at least that. Chinese policy limits subsidies to cars with over 150 km electric range, a strong tilt to BEVs. However, the best-selling car in August was still a PHEV.
(****cleantechnica.com/2018/09/28/new-byd-tang-1-in-august-in-china-china-electric-car-sales-report/)