Helen Fry On The Top-Secret Work Of MI9 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Imagine that I'm a prisoner of war... how would MI9 help me escape?’
‘MI9 had a number of methods, one of which was the coded communication. So they would send coded letters into the camps with information or to expect special parcels which would have escape devices in them. And this is probably one of the things which has really been immortalized from MI9’s history. Although we may not have heard of MI9, we know about MI9 subconsciously because of the Q gadgets, and Ian Fleming immortalized them in his James Bond novels. But studying the original archives, it's incredible to find that it's not his imagination, that a lot of the exploding pens and goodness knows what else is actually in the MI9 files. And one of the biggest things that MI9 did was to send in the miniature compasses. And these could be hidden. They were hidden behind the buttons on uniforms, and they were screwed counter-intuitively, so the Germans never found them. But over 1.3 million of these manufactured and sent or used by Allied personnel, and all sorts of things could be smuggled into the camps in games, for example, because prisoners were allowed leisure activities. So these are sort of gifts to keep the prisoners amused. And one of the most famous was the chess set. And inside the night, it was specially lined, and it would have ink. So that was one way of sending ink into the camp. And actually, I've got another example, which is quite fascinating. Blankets to keep the prisoners warm in the winter. So MI9 would send him blankets. And the prisoners would know, often from a coded letter, that if you dipped that in particular liquid, or in a bucket of water, this dye would suddenly emerge and the pattern of a uniform that could be made into a German uniform for escape. So it's all this kind of bonkers stuff’"
Neil Price On How Vikings Viewed The World | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘When you get into the the 500s, we're into what historians have for many, many years, referred to as the migration period. It's when peoples are starting to move around in Europe, whether it's as refugees or as raiders, or as entire populations on the move, there's a lot of turbulence. And this has been characterized for a long time as the migration period crisis. There's something very, very disruptive going on in Europe. And no one has ever satisfactorily explained what it really depends on. It’s changes in the economy and the flows of trade, whether it's the kind of fallout of the disintegration of the Roman army. So you've got lots of previously employed mercenaries looking for trouble, or looking for cash, lots of different things that destabilize, basically. And those things are affecting Scandinavia as well. And we've known for a long time that there is a very big decline in Scandinavia in the early 500s. And you see this in lots of ways, the most dramatic is the abandonment of farms. There are literally thousands of farms that are just abandoned. They’re left, at this time. And if you look at the environmental record, you can also see that a lot of the land that had previously been cultivated, so places where people are growing crops, growing food, is now returning to woodland. So even, even the fields are empty, which kind of implies a decline in the population, that something really drastic is happening. And over the last couple of decades, there's another factor been added into that mix. And that's the sort of climate disaster for want of a better word. Seems to happen between about 536 and 540. At least two, maybe more, huge volcanoes that put so much debris and ash and sulfate aerosols and things into the atmosphere, that it partially blocks out the heat of the sun, which has huge effect on the potential for growing crops and things like that. And so you have this, this whole series of factors coming together to seriously impact Scandinavia. And one of the things that we're working on is the idea that anything up to 50% of the Scandinavian population dies… the kind of key to this for the Vikings, because bear in mind, this is 200 odd years before the Viking Age, is that the society that we know is the Vikings is the thing that slowly emerged from that wreckage of the 500s. You've got something very close to a social collapse. And then the process of rebuilding Scandinavia produce something different’"
The story of the Dambusters - HistoryExtra - "‘The story of 617 Squadron has joined that group of tales like King Arthur or Robin Hood, which defy all efforts at scholarly revision. Much that we think we know is wrong. Among many reasons, the 1955 Dambusters became most popular British war movie of all time, is that it portrayed a successful air attack, that seemed victimless, save for 53 dead among the wonderfully courageous young men who carried it out. It bore none of the moral baggage that's become associated with the offensive against Germany's cities. In reality, however, up to 1400 people perished in the biblical flood. The Möhne catastrophe, as Germans call it, unleashed by the Raiders, more civilian deaths than had been inflicted by any previous RAF attempt. It's fascinating that Guy Gibson afterwards reflected on easily about this, as his senior officers never did. He wrote, ‘the fact that people might drown and the calculus, no one likes mass slaughter, and we did not like being the authors of it’...
‘Nobody can wage a struggle for national for survival and keep completely clean hands. We make war as we can, rather than as we should’’
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The fertiliser that blew up Beirut - ‘It seems like the energy demand of producing fertilizer has a huge cost to the earth. And I wondered, how do you justify its use?’
‘So if you look at global consumption of food, if you're not using a mineral fertilizer, you will actually produce half of the food that is produced currently, which means that you will need to increase the land area significantly. If you look at global greenhouse gas emissions, approximately a quarter comes from food production and land use change. And it's only one to two percentage that comes from fertilizer production. So actually, it's more important to ensure that we optimize fuel production on the existing land. And in order to do that mineral fertilizer is part of a solution.’…
‘I have memories of my great grandfather who died at 120, who had made my parents swear not to use this, to have this interference of chemicals be sprayed on our land for a very, very good reason. And that was to keep the land sacred because we don't own the land. The land does not belong to us. We belong to the land. And this is the belief that I grew up with and it's something very, very deeply emotional and, and important to me.’
‘Flores tells me this spiritual connection to the land is called tapu.’...
‘These fertilizers have made it possible for us to overpopulate the earth. Very simply put, without Haber-Bosch, we would have never had the food that we have to feed the population that we have now. The human population is still rising. And we're going to add another two or 3 billion people between now and the end of this century. And we're going to have to depend on Haber-Bosch to do it. That looks inevitable.’
‘So there is a lot of scientific studies that show that you will not be able to feed the population today on organic farming, because there is such a big yield gap. So you would then need to compensate by increasing the land area significantly.’...
‘I believe that every person is willing to do the best for the environment. But once he looks at the price in the supermarket, he chooses the cheapest. If you internalize the external costs, so make products that pollute more expensive, and subsidize the more sustainable farmers, that helps the consumer to make the choice for the more sustainable products.’"
"Sustainability" is only sustainable with subsidies. Environmentalism is a conceit - rich people virtue signalling and making poor people's lives worse
Are You a Maximizer or a Satisficer? (NSQ Ep. 14) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘I believe Barry Schwartz wrote about the fact that people tend to become more satisficers as they get older.’
‘Yeah, he did. He thinks that's why we get happier. Our standards go south.’
‘I think there's a different way of looking at that. It's not that you settle. I think it's about choosing to care less about things that matter less.’
‘Yeah, it's a little more Buddhist’...
‘Let's say one day you're riding to work on the subway or the bus. And you see someone sitting near you. Say, a middle aged woman. And she's reading, got her nose buried in this book, and she’s got her hair drawn back, and these thick glasses and right next to her, she's got a big tote bag filled with more books. What's more likely? That she is a librarian or a salesperson?’‘This is like a Danny Kahneman question... So I'm supposed to answer with base rates. So I have to think that there are I think more salespeople than there are librarians… And therefore, that person is more likely a salesperson, even though there's the salient cue, like books, librarian. Must be a librarian. So I'm gonna go with salesperson’...
‘There's a consensus in social science that what's typically done is the unstructured interview, which is like person walks in, you strike up a conversation. You're like, oh, I noticed you've got a Phillies hat on. Are you from Philadelphia? And then the conversation’s a random walk through topics and then all of a sudden an hour has gone by and the interview’s over. That's what most interviews probably are like in America and the consensus in social science is not only do they not add much predictive value to hiring the right person, but like, in many cases could detract value. In other words, if you hadn't interviewed the person at all, you would have been better off as an employer.’
‘Because you're basically building up an image, a projection based on kind of garbage.’
‘Well, I think the idea is this: you can come out of an hour long interaction with another human being with a really strong visceral and emotional liking or disliking for that person. And then you could overweight it, you could ignore things like, well, the resume is not so strong. And I don't know, the recommendations were iffy, but God we had this great conversation about the Phillies... A work sample. And I think there's like a mountain of research showing that unlike unstructured interviews, work samples where you're just like, hey, you're gonna have to do X, could you do a little X now? Let me see how it goes. Those are really good.’"
Ignoring "stereotypes" (base rates) reduces accuracy. The price of hewing to ideology
How Can We Get More Virtue and Less ‘Virtue Signaling’? (NSQ Ep. 17) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘There's another thing that determines human behavior, and that's friction. So I think for a lot of people going on social media, and tweeting or retweeting and like you don't even have to write anything anymore. All you have to do is retweet, it's just one button that you have to press. And that is frictionless. And I think that is why you get a lot of virtue signaling and maybe a little less virtue. Because imagine the comparison between tweeting and tutoring, right. It's like well, tutoring you have to do repeatedly. And when you're with them, it's a lot of energy. And that is actually what I would like to see more. More tutoring and less tweeting. But I think this friction thing is key. And therefore if we want to see more virtue, we have to make it more frictionless for people to actually do something about one of the many things that there are to care about... It's always going to be hard to make virtue as frictionless as virtue signaling. I mean, even Ben Franklin had this anecdote in his autobiography, like, fill a wheelbarrow with piles of paper and walk around the neighborhoods, that people think you're an industrious person. Like, that's easier than actually being industrious’...
‘Steven Spielberg… said, yeah, you know, my rabbi told me that when I give, you know, 10 million or 20 million here and there that you're supposed to not put your name on it, but I thought, look, my name has some leverage. And if I can give money, and then have the name attached, and make other people like me think, oh, I should also give money, then I'm going to do it. And I thought, what's better? That I look humble, or that I get more money raised for a cause that I care about? And I thought that was a fantastic argument, I really think he did out Maimonides Maimonides'...
'When you see in that big font, next to the major corporations and the well established philanthropic foundations anonymous, I honestly have to say like, that inspires me more than anything'...
‘I became an editor, because there are a lot more editing jobs than there are writing jobs.’
‘That is not intuitive, because you think that there's so much writing to edit, but then you only need one editor for 10 writers or something?’
‘Well, it's the jobs part that makes it real. In other words, like in the magazine world, editors are usually actual salaried jobs, which I was interested in. I wanted to be on the inside of something. Whereas in magazines, at least, a whole lot of the writing was freelance’"
How Do You Raise a “Likable” Kid? (NSQ Ep. 18) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘One of the predictors of both romantic and platonic relationships is homophily. In other words, that like likes like, so birds of a feather.’"
Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal? (Ep. 429) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Even before Covid-19 crushed G.D.P.’s around the world, some people were calling for high-income countries to intentionally reduce their G.D.P.’s — to pursue what has been labeled “prosperity without growth.”
HICKEL: “Degrowth” is specifically about actively scaling down resource use and energy use... Clearly the objective is to transition our economies to 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as possible. But research in ecological economics and in climate economics is quite clear that that can’t be done fast enough while we grow the economy at the same time. And the reason is because the more you grow the economy, the more energy it requires. And the more energy it requires, the more difficult it is to supply the energy with renewables."...
The downside of a constant growth strategy, Hickel says, is that it inevitably pushes up against what scientists call “planetary boundaries.”...
VAN DOORNINCK: I do think a lot of people are interested in reusing or recreating or recycling things. But right now, it’s quite difficult because it’s still cheaper to dig the mines and get all the raw materials from other parts of the world to the Netherlands. That’s cheaper for a producer than to actually recycle. So, we need this incentive to make recycling and reusing and recreating much more interesting for a producer than raw mining.One of the things that we need to do is completely change our tax system. Right now, we do have low taxes on primary resources and we have very high taxes on labor. And actually, the circular economy is very labor-intensive because all this reusing, recycling, you’re taking things apart and then making new things, is very labor-intensive. And so, I do think that by showing that using things again is not only saving the earth, but it’s also creating lots of employment...
DUBNER: So, Amsterdam could go to zero carbon emissions in five years. And that doesn’t affect at all what, let’s say, India or China do. So, I realize this is not your job, per se, but I am curious to know how Amsterdam feels, being a citizen of the world, but knowing that even if you achieve your solutions across the board, not just with climate and pollution, but sustainability, housing, reusing, etc., what part that may play in the global march toward those sort of solutions.
VAN DOORNINCK: Well, if you only wait for the others to start, then nobody will ever move. And I know that there’s many countries in the world and many cities in the world who really want to make change, also cities within the United States of America. So, I do think as a city who puts a huge ecological footprint on the world because we are a rich city, and we use enormous amounts of fossil fuels, and we use enormous amounts of consumer goods that pollute the world by its waste, but also by the way it’s being produced, we do have a responsibility."
Even clearer evidence that the fetish for renewables and environmentalism is also about destroying the economy and making people's lives worse by making things more expensive on purpose
Why is Malthusianism so seductive despite being repeatedly debunked? Maybe it dovetails with the Nietzschean death wish
Ironically the episode talks about the HDI, but ignores the fact that HDI correlates well with GDP
A true sign of late capitalism: when life is so good that you can think of how to make it worse because you're bored
Basically an admission that environmentalism is virtue signalling - the principle of the commons doesn't apply and you can only hope that others won't take you for a sucker
