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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Economy; Category: Markets; Published: 14 December 2010; Hits: 24817

Thomas Carlyle coined this epithet in 1839 while criticising Malthus, who warned of what subsequently happened, exploding population.

According to Carlyle his economic theories: "are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next" and in 1894 he described economics as: 'quite abject and distressing... dismal science... led by the sacred cause of Black Emancipation.' The label has stuck ever since.

This 'dismal' reputation has not been helped by repeated economic recessions and a Great Depression, together with continuously erroneous forecasts and contradictory solutions fuelled by opposing theories.

This article reviews some of those competing paradigms and their effect on the economic progress of Australia.

Travel

Peru

In October 2011 our little group: Sonia, Craig, Wendy and Richard visited Peru. We flew into Lima from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. After a night in Lima we flew to Iquitos.

Fiction, Recollections & News

ChatGPT and The Craft

As another test of ChatGPT I asked it: "in 2 thousand words, to write a fiction about a modern-day witch who uses chemistry and female charms to enslave her familiars". This is one of the motifs in my novella: The Craft (along with: the great famine; world government; cyber security and overarching artificial intelligence).

Rather alarmingly, two of five ChatGPT offerings, each taking around 22 seconds to generate, came quite close to the sub-plot, although I'm not keen on the style or moralistic endings. Here they are:

Opinions and Philosophy

Population and Climate Change – An update

Climate

I originally wrote the paper, Issues Arising from the Greenhouse Hypothesis, in 1990 and do not see a need to revise it substantially. Some of the science is better defined and there have been some minor changes in some of the projections; but otherwise little has changed.

In the Introduction to the 2006 update to that paper I wrote:

Climate change has wide ranging implications... ranging from its impacts on agriculture (through drought, floods, water availability, land degradation and carbon credits) mining (by limiting markets for coal and minerals processing) manufacturing and transport (through energy costs) to property damage resulting from storms.

The issues are complex, ranging from disputes about the impact of human activities on global warming, to arguments about what should be done and the consequences of the various actions proposed.

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