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Countdown to Crazy

This is your official thread for discussing the upcoming US presidential and congressional election on November 3rd; along with its possible outcomes.

Do not chat about the US supreme court, congress, presidency, constitution, constitutional crises (possible), coup (possible), Donald Trump and his hellspawn offspring and associates, or anything about US politics in general on the Laundry Files book launch threads. If you do, your comments will be ruthlessly moderated into oblivion.

You are allowed and encouraged to discuss those topics in the comments below this topic.

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2731 Comments

1:

Something of interest: https://gruber.micro.blog/2020/10/27/mcconnell-played-trump.html In short, McConnell may have thought one more Supreme Court appointment was all the utility left in "Drumph!".

2:

And another thing: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/26/republican-party-autocratic-hungary-turkey-study-trump

I believe the Republicans became infected when they invited "Dixiecrats" into the party, I see little hope for their future.

3:

"I believe the Republicans became infected when they invited "Dixiecrats" into the party, I see little hope for their future."

Yup. This goes all the way back to Nixon's "Southern Strategy."

4:

I'm much more concerned about the Republican Party (Never Trumper Neocons) colonizing the Democratic party...

5:

I think that the author of that article is underestimating the level of voter suppression shenanigans that Republicans are engaging in. Especially regarding the not counting of mail-in ballots that are majorly from Democrat voters.

He also forgets that the haste in cofiriming Barret was to have her in place BEFORE the election. Even if Trump lost there were still two months left to confirm her.

The SCOTUS was unable to reject one state decision protecting mail-in ballots because it hung 4 to 4 (I guess one of the right-wing judges still has a little shame). Had Barret been in, it would certainly have been rejected. And now so will every single one of the dozens of similar cases that will be presented by Republican legislatures.

Mark my words, Trump WILL be reelected because the election will be completely rigged in his favor. Putting Barret in the SCOTUS in a hurry was a means to this end, and also to guarantee Republican rule for decades to come

6:

Nemonowan IF that happens, it's civil war time ... Thousands if not millions of uncounted ballots & a really clear popular victory for Biden - & the latter seems very likely. Is a recipe for utter disaster

7:

I remember an incident about the last election when Trump was still considered a clown. In the company elevator we have a screen showing the news where there was a video of Trump. A guy I had never seen before, who was standing next to me, suddenly said loudly: "He is going to win!" Well he sure turned out right. I wonder if some folks have an ability to forecast the future accurately?

I certainly live in an elitist bubble but have some idea that the mood of the common folk is angry. Right now if a leader comes along who is slightly credible and just says "I am on your side", that leader will win.

8:

Understandable, though still preferable to "Pick handle" republicans. Your thoughts on the possibility of such a party spinning off a moderately left party and a more or less sane conservative party? Or the remote possibility of republicans being reduced to the point the surviving leadership can all fit into a Pinto, and plunge to their deaths?

9:

Hillary won a popular victory in 2016 by millions of votes, but Trump still was elected because of the electoral college. You only need to fix a few states to win. And voter suppression has been the norm for decades (even if less blatant) and nothing has come it.

There won't be any international pressure either: do you see any country delegitimizing the uS elections? Will Almagro's OAS decree that Trump manipulated the results and call for a military takeover? Will the UK recognize Nancy Pelosi as interim president? Naah...

Also, Democrats have a tendency of appeasement and of conceding for the sake of stability. And if it really comes to armed insurgency, the Trump fanatics are much better at violence than their opponents.

10:

You can sometimes read the mood when you are close to the ground.

In october 2016 I hurried to travel to the US and make a road trip around National Parks and the such (because the possibility of Trump winning made me leary of postponing it)

I drove a lot around the backcountry of the northwest and southwest. I saw a LOT of signs put up by Trump supporters. But NOT A SINGLE ONE supporting Hillary. The closest thing was a sign thanking Obama (somebody who was saved by the ACA, I guess)

That's when I knew that Trump was going to win.

11:
You only need to fix a few states to win. And voter suppression has been the norm for decades (even if less blatant) and nothing has come it.

True. Which is why when I see breathless headlines saying "Biden leads in state $STATE by 2 points!" I think: any voting machines that can be tampered with are going to be tampered with. The PTB won't produce results 99% in favour of Trump, but if they shave a few points off of the democratic vote, you'd better believe that they will do so. And that may change the election right there.

12:

The way I like to put it is "Nixon thought he could put a saddle on the Confederate Faction so the Republican Party could ride it to power, but at the end of the day it was the Party with the bit in its mouth and the Confederates holding the reins and wearing the spurs."

13:

The hopeful read is that the wheels are finally coming off the GOP Clown Car, the Plutocrats & Followers faction override the Drunk On Their Own Koolaid Gang and start siphoning off Conservadems in search of a coalition that's competent enough to both win elections and write a tax cut without screwing over some of the intended beneficiaries.

14:

ITT (and it's early yet!): Much misapprehension of the importance to Republican ratfucking operations of the outcome actually being within ratfucking distance. This is not 2016. Joe Biden has not been the target of a 20-year nonstop smear campaign. People have gotten a good hard look at what a Trump Administration actually looks like, and it turns out that the number who are really OK with "burning it all down" is pretty small.

Trump's only real hope now is for a naked coup, with the Supremes barfing out some kind of word salad about an invalid election and Roberts administering the oath to him no matter what, and it's far from clear even that would work.

The danger is that the D Party takes the trifecta and doesn't use the resulting power to cripple the R Party until it either reforms itself to be able to win elections by appealing to a majority or disintegrates entirely. I anticipate the John Lewis Memorial VRA II being signed next January, after a "we don't negotiate with terrorists" abolition of the filibuster in the Senate and a "go ahead, make my day" message to the Supremes about trying to defang it.

15:

I tend to think that the 2018 results provide a pretty good guide to what's likely to happen; I don't think the "blue wave" has come close to subsiding yet. When Beto O'Rourke came so close to winning Texas in 2018, it was clear that something was changing - and it doesn't look as though the momentum has died away there.

The anecdotal evidence that Nemonowan cites about 2016 seems to be swinging very much the other way this time - the stories seem to all be about Biden signs in places that had rarely seen Democratic Party signs before (and also about how people had been trying to tear them down, which is also a signifier of mood shifts.) Yes, 2016 was a coinflip election which caught a lot of people by surprise (which is odd, considering what happened in 2000. Perhaps the series of pretty decisive results in 2004,2008 and 2012 had made people forget that this problem existed. And I worry that a decisive result this time will do the same thing.)

As to the Supreme Court issue: I think that one of the problems the 'majority' has right now is that a number of their rulings have been on the grounds that a state supreme court does not have the right to override a state legislature on setting the terms for voting (including things like which ballots are valid etc.) This is probably fair enough actually; the courts should not be doing that (let's leave aside the question of whether the courts actually are or not.)
But by doing so, they are making it difficult for themselves to be able to rule on such issues in future, since their argument is based on saying that the courts should not be able to override the legislature on voting rights. Which rather opens the door to the federal legislature passing bills that mandate minimum voting standards etc. and challenging the Supreme Court to either decline any challenges or to overtly say "well, of course, we are above the law", neither of which option would be pleasant for them. (The obvious escape route would be to say "it's still down to the individual states" but again that would set a nasty precedent that it would be difficult to dodge.)

16:

That's when I knew that Trump was going to win.

I think it pays to be wary of this sort of confirmation bias. As you point out, millions more voted for Hilary, so it wasn't that people didn't turn out for the Democratic contender. And if it's about a rigged game, then why does it matter how many lawn signs were out there? Electoral shenanigans certainly played a role in Trump's victory, as did his energetic voter base, but luck also played a role and his odds right now are slim.

17:
"Biden leads in state $STATE by 2 points!"

if [[ $STATE == "Georgia" ]]; then echo "this is indeed worthy of an exclamation point!" fi

Trump's "win" was so narrow that he can't lose any of the Blue States that went Red in 2016. To steal it this time, the Rs need to win seven States (some of which have D governance) that he is projected to lose by bigger-than-ratfucking margins.

If the ballots get counted, he's toast.

PS why does the &ltcode&gt element not work?

18:

About the confirmation bias thing: my point was that sometimes the utterly unfounded impression given by a totally inadequate sample (such as mine or the elevator guy's) can turn out to be more right than a presumably reliable and accurate massive poll which turns out to be wrong because it was not researching the proper question. After all, a gut feeling about a binary question will be right half the time. Th only person I remember being actually right (as in by a reasoned conclusion) about 2016 was Michael Moore who correctly warned that Trump would carry the midwest states and win the election, because Democrats were ignoring them and not campainging agressively there.

19:

AS for the rest, you are talking about Trump's luck and odds. But that is the same thing as discussing your luck when you are playing poker with a bottom-dealer who is using marked cards. Luck has nothing to do with the result.

20:

How hard is it to add states to the Union?

I'm thinking Puerto Rico and District of Columbia are well overdue for statehood, and the effect on the Senate would the drastic ...

21:

The closest thing was a sign thanking Obama (somebody who was saved by the ACA, I guess)

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not but the sign surely was.

22:

At the moment the Supreme Court seems to declining to get involved with (election) decisions by state courts and is only taking up those referred from a lower federal court.

No one should underestimate what can be excused by a partisan outlook, but the Court is not going to just jump in anywhere and everywhere.

23:

If the ballots get counted, he's toast.

They know. Why do you think they are going to such extreme lengths to ensure Democrat-leaning ballots are NOT counted?

Republicans are in full scorched-earth steal the election mode. If the voter disenfranchisement is not enough, the state legislatures will denounce the election as fraudulent and name republican electors for the College. And if this is fought against, they will tie the issue in courts for so long that the presidential selection will devolve to by-delegation vote in Congress where they have the majority.

24:

I think it first requires successful referendum in the territory in question, then two-thirds majority votes in both the House and the Senate, and then the President has to sign.

A two-thirds majority in the Senate is likely to be out of reach for some time.

25:

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not but the sign surely was.

I didn't take a picture and don't rememeber it verbatim, but at the time I got the impression that it was sincere. It was a hand-painted placard on a very modest rural house, respectfully referring to "President Obama" and no sarcastic language. It reminded me of similar signs back home thanking Saints for miracles granted. It didn't specify what they were thanking him for, my guess was for medical coverage under the ACA because at the time I has read articles about people who had been helped by it and changed their opinion of Obama.

26:

Charlie- It's not that hard. DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa are all available. There was a legal request to merge two Republican states (IIRC North and South Dakota) that Congress has the discretion to take up. I don't think the Democrats in Congress are up for bold moves like that. The rest of this post may explain why.

I'm yoinking this comment from another blog. I'm not Che Pasa. This story is big if it's true. I don't know. It accounts for the facts pretty well. I've personally been despairing about related matters for a while. The fact that police forces and the military are controlled by right wingers is key. They have control of legitimate force here in America.

What follows isn't my post, but it rings true to me:

Ché Pasa permalink
October 28, 2020

Well, yeah.

Re: the 2000 electoral coup. Ian describes part of what was going on and blames Gore for “not fighting” and thus as fully responsible for the disaster(s) we face now. Blaming Democrats, of course, for everything that’s ever gone wrong since 1980 is de rigueur on the interwebs, right, but it’s incomplete and denies any agency on the part of others who might have something to do with current and past situations.

The situation in 2000 was more complex. No, Gore did not fight, and he actively prevented others from fighting (for example, shutting down the Black Caucus objections to accepting the Electoral College results, and many other interventions against those who objected to the coup). But there was another side to it. Teamsters might have stomped on the Brooks Brothers Rioters in Florida, but other members were armed and assembling every week, sometimes daily, at state capitols demanding that the Florida recount be stopped forthwith and the presidency be handed to Bush.

This is what I was told was driving events in Washington. Scalia took the Bush v Gore case (lawlessly) under what he perceived (or at least said) was a threat of insurrection, possibly civil war, and convinced a wavering SDO’C (the 5th vote) that the only solution to this immediate peril was to rule in favor of Bush. This belief became conventional wisdom almost immediately throughout the political shops in DC, and it was adopted by almost all the media as the only solution to the present predicament.

Gore’s capitulation was stunning and seemed really out of character, as up till then, he was not considered a wimp (except by some of the haters in the media.) What happened? Well, it was the same threat of rightist insurrection and civil war, combined with underlying knowledge that if he fought or encouraged others to, the military would side with the coup. Checkmate.

Gore did what he thought was right under the circumstances. Yes, it’s led to where we are now. But is Gore solely responsible? Far from it. He could command no troops, and he could protect no one in the streets protesting the coup. He had no fallback, and from every indication, there had been no preparation for the possible uncertain outcome of the election by the Gore team. It never occurred to them. In the end, their feeble efforts at a recount were slapdash and ineffective. They were convinced (why?) the System would work, and when it didn’t work in their favor, they said OK, that’s it then.

Should they have fought harder/better? In the end, they couldn’t. They didn’t have the insight or the resources.

The denouement is a tragedy, yes.

The rest of us should have learned from that (and the rightists did learn, if they didn’t already know) that there would be no salvation in electoral politics. No, seizing and using Power, raw and naked, would be the ticket to the future, and they’ve been doing it ever since, very effectively and successfully.

We’ve long sensed that in the vast, eternal scheme, it won’t matter if Biden wins the vote. It will matter on the margins if he wins and Team Biden and the Dems are able to rule. But we’ve had enough experience to know that their better natures can be thwarted with just a glance from the rightists. Effectively, they are captive to their fear.

The rest of us get to make the best of it how ever we can.

27:

Scurra I tend to think that the 2018 results provide a pretty good guide to what's likely to happen Yes, but, then ... if those votes are stolen / manipulated / lost / deemed "invalid" by the corrupted Supreme Ct .... THEN what - that is the problem under discussion - I think.

Aardvark C If the ballots get counted, he's toast. That's the point, isn't it: IF.

See also Nemonowan @ 23

28:

No.

A simple majority vote is sufficient.

29:

Update - quote from the "indy":

The US Supreme Court dealt a blow to Donald Trump’s campaign on Wednesday by granting North Carolina an extended deadline to count mail-in ballots, giving the state until 12 November to calculate its total and overriding Republican objections in a win for state Democrats who are thought to be more likely to vote by post.

Interesting

30:

It may be easy, but it's not necessarily the panacea people think it could be. Puerto Rico has a strong religious population; they might be pissed at the current administration, but they could also fall under the sway of the antiabortion movement quite easily.

31:

Re: adding States to the Union.

They should clearly add Puerto Rico, Washington, DC and American Samoa. This would bring the state count up to 53, which would have the benefit of making the "One Nation, Indivisible" true, since 53 is prime.

32:

"And voter suppression has been the norm for decades (even if less blatant) and nothing has come it."

Off of the top of my head, Kemp was elected governor of Georgia after being Secretary of State (who runs the elections).

As SoS, he had overseen a purge of 250,000 voters from the registration rolls (note - in the USA that does not mean that they were notified).

He won by 50,000 votes.

Now, does anybody here think that the GOP in Georgia trembles at the idea of suppressing as many votes as they can?

33:

Also, Barrack Obama has the singular distinction of being the only US president who had the same number of stars on the flag when he was born as when he took office. With more states, the USA could keep the record for another 50-60 years.

Assuming the USA is still a going concern in 2070-2080, of course.

34:

No supermajority required. Admission of a new State is a standard Act of Congress. Or at least it has always been so.

Certain parties might welcome an attempt by the Supremes to thwart such an Act, since it would pour gasoline on the fire of support for Court reform.

35:

Mind you, in this case like in the Pensylvannia one, the new judge Barret did not participate because she came in mid-deliberation and wouldn't have the time to get up to speed before the election.

36:

"... 2016 was a coinflip election which caught a lot of people by surprise (which is odd, considering what happened in 2000. Perhaps the series of pretty decisive results in 2004,2008 and 2012 had made people forget that this problem existed. And I worry that a decisive result this time will do the same thing.)"

Dubya won in '04 by a very small amount of votes in Ohio, which had a GOP state government. Which means that '04 was stolen.

"As to the Supreme Court issue: I think that one of the problems the 'majority' has right now is that a number of their rulings have been on the grounds that a state supreme court does not have the right to override a state legislature on setting the terms for voting (including things like which ballots are valid etc.) This is probably fair enough actually; the courts should not be doing that (let's leave aside the question of whether the courts actually are or not.) But by doing so, they are making it difficult for themselves to be able to rule on such issues in future, since their argument is based on saying that the courts should not be able to override the legislature on voting rights. Which rather opens the door to the federal legislature passing bills that mandate minimum voting standards etc. and challenging the Supreme Court to either decline any challenges or to overtly say "well, of course, we are above the law", neither of which option would be pleasant for them. (The obvious escape route would be to say "it's still down to the individual states" but again that would set a nasty precedent that it would be difficult to dodge.)"

Kavanaugh has already cited Bush v. Gore, which was explicitly declared not a precedent.

He's also explicitly justified not counting votes on the fraudulent grounds that it would mean that an election could not be called on Election Day. They already are not, and never have been; official certification has always come days to weeks after.

37:
That's the point, isn't it: IF.

See above comments about "ratfucking distance," a term of art in American politics with which you might be unfamiliar. Basically, the range within which results can be massaged by voter suppression and selectively losing ballots.

The margins are shaping up to be outside of ratfucking distance. The alternative is ripping off the mask and asserting that no, elections do not matter. The Army, for all its reluctance, will be forced to take sides.

I have no confidence in anybody's predictions about what happens after that.

38:

Trump's only real hope now is that things are tighter than projected and it comes down to Pennsylvania, with SCOTUS shutting down ballot counting early.

Otherwise it's hard to see a path for him. National polling is far outside the MOE, state polling is mostly good for Biden and even a 2016 polling error wouldnt do it for him. Trump has lost significant support amongst suburban women and seniors, is trailing with white voters and early voting indicates high turnout, which is always good for the dems. The strongest indicator may be district polling, which predicted a Trump win in 2016 and is pointing firmly in the other reaction now.

So all things being equal, we should see a Biden landslide with the dems taking the senate and retaining the house... but there's always a chance things may not go as expected seeing as we are dealing with perhaps the most insane political environment in history.

39:

Which rather opens the door to the federal legislature passing bills that mandate minimum voting standards etc.

Unfortunately not. The states have control of their own election processes. The recent Shelby decision was to strike down a federal law doing exactly what you suggest, on the grounds that the constitution doesn't let the federal government meddle with state voting procedures.

40:

Charlie @ 20:

Looks like new states can be admitted by a simple Act of Congress, although its considered good manners to ask the existing population first via a referendum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_Union#Admission_process

So admitting a bunch of poor islands (plus Washington DC) looks like a good way to "pack" the senate Democratic. However bear in mind that the Philippines are pretty religious, so Republican culture-war tactics are likely to play well there.

41:

That decision was made by a very conservative Supreme Court, with Roberts as the Chief Justice, and he's very much a supporter of anything that will cause less people to vote.

42:

You really cannot trust the polls

Despite some really excellent work by Nate Silver and others this election is extremely unusual especially with regards to voter turnout, and without good benchmarks you cannot come up with a meaningful error bar

My gut is that the polls are probably wrong in favor of Trump (Overcompensating from last time) and Biden will likely sweep. But I don’t know how much of that is emotional, wishful thinking

My gut reasons for believing this - some of the states that are in play like Georgia and even Texas are surprising - voter turnout by all counts looks insanely high and that usually benefits dems - the natural tendency among professionals to overcompensate for the last mistake - the macroeconomic climate is still trash

Fixing the election if things are close I can buy, but fixing it when things are not close, I think is beyond the abilities of the fixers

So there is reason for hope at least

However i am so emotionally invested in this one I doubt my own conclusions

43:

Philippines? Are you sure you didn't mean Puerto Rico?

Enjoy!

Frank.

44:

Interesting potential non-sequitur. I watched the PBS science show Nova last night, as I've been doing since I was a kid.

For the last (few?) years, the two main sponsors for Nova have been Draper Labs, an MIT-based non-profit that specializes in basic defense research, and the David H. Koch Foundation for Science. Now the latter is considered a greenwashing side of the Koch Family, and Nova and other groups that take their money have got flack from it.

Here's the interesting non-sequitur, Nova's been around since the mid 1970s, and there's a list of episodes on Wikipedia. Back on November 2, 2016, the show before the US election, Nova aired an episode entitled "Treasures of the Earth: Gems," which was about what you'd expect. This time around, right before Halloween, but also the show before the election, Nova aired "Can We Cool The Planet?" a show about climate change, geonengineering, and carbon capture.

Even more interestingly, the normal David H. Koch Fund sequence was replaced with a aerial view flying over a generic, eastern US forest. The Draper sequence was unchanged.

Now, I assume the Kochs are greenwashing with money to Nova, and I assume that most of the people who watch Nova aren't going to vote for El Cheeto. Still, it's fascinating that a charitable arm of Koch Industries, a group that made their pile on fossil fuel extraction, decided to push climate change right before this election.

And it wasn't an episode of "oh, there's no problem, we can fix it," it was more along the lines of "we've got a serious problem, and we're going to have to try everything, especially planting biodiverse forests, if we want to have any hope of fixing it and saving civilization."

That's an interesting about-face. It likely has something to do with hurricane Zeta hitting Louisiana (for those counting, that's five hurricanes hitting the Gulf oil industry in one year so far). It also likely has to do with the fracking industry collapsing in 2020 due to high costs and falling demand (three companies declared bankruptcy this year that I know of). And it might have something to do with solar and wind power having good years despite the pandemic.

Now what did El Cheeto say about climate change? Something about it being a hoax, bad for the economy, and pulling out of the Paris Agreement? And now Koch's siding with us commie green snowflakes? Or at least pretending to? Interesting.

45:

Nothing will happen. The election will run its course, it'll be clear on election night that Trump lost, mail in votes will only add to that, he'll have tantrums on Twitter until Jan 20 and the moment Biden is sworn in his account will be deactivated.

That's it. Keep rolling.

46:

Not sure there's a good argument for American Samoa, but definitely DC and Puerto Rico. Those two have more than done their share and gotten shafted regardless. And they've each got more citizens than, say, Wyoming.

The other argument for Puerto Rico is the same one that sent the US to invade Cuba and Haiti a century ago: military bases there protect the Panama Canal, which is still vital to American trade. Similarly, the Hawaiian Islands sit below the midway point in the heavily trafficked North Pacific shipping lanes between North America and Asia, which is why they got invaded over a century ago.

America Samoa? check out this view from MarineTraffic. It's centered on American Samoa, and most of the ships in that area are out fishing. So yes, it may be important to protecting our tuna supply, but not vital to the protection of the US industrial trade.

47:

"The danger is that the D Party takes the trifecta and doesn't use the resulting power to cripple the R Party until it either reforms itself to be able to win elections by appealing to a majority or disintegrates entirely."

This. Sending his Attorney General after the Repukes is really the only important thing that Biden needs to concern himself with. And maybe recruiting people who will replace anyone Trump picked.

48:

Nothing will happen. The election will run its course, it'll be clear on election night that Trump lost, mail in votes will only add to that, he'll have tantrums on Twitter until Jan 20 and the moment Biden is sworn in his account will be deactivated. That's it. Keep rolling.

Nope, nope, nope. I'd rather have my stuff prepped for a really nasty general strike and leave it gathering dust than get blindsided.

Anyway, my political calendar is shaping up on a local level to be really busy in November and probably December too. The problem faced by the local republicans is that, if current polls hold, they're about to lose the positions of the San Diego mayor and control of the San Diego County supervisors. So there's a whole raft of interesting proposals getting lined up to be crammed through during the lame duck session.

The same will happen on the national level, of course. And then some. Even if Trump loses, he'll likely go on a shredding fest, issue blanket pardons, resign two hours before noon on January 20 so that Pence can pardon him. He may also gut all the "deep state" bureaucracies through mass layoffs of appointed personnel, pile on a bunch of bad executive actions, start a war with Iran for Biden to handle. And almost certainly he will do nothing about the pandemic or disaster relief to Louisiana or anyplace else.

But by all means, keep (t)rolling.

49:

Charlie @ 20

As far as additional states go, DC will absolutely be added if there's a Democratic trifecta. It's already passed its own enabling legislation and the House has passed a bill to make it a state. Puerto Rico is slightly more complicated because historical referendums on statehood have been muddled do to people splitting between statehood, the status quo, and a small pro-indpendence contingent, with no option getting a majority. This year there is another straight yes/no vote, which seems likely to go for statehood because of how clear it's become that the status quo isn't viable because of how vulnerable they are without representation. In that case, they'll be added as well fairly quickly - in theory both parties support that, and it's not clear that Puerto Rico would actually return two Democratic senators because their internal parties don't line up perfectly with the national ones.

Guam and the other Pacific territories are very complicated, due to their geography and small populations. Local politics also pose problems, because some of these islands have local legal structures that aren't compatible with American ones, particularly regarding restrictions on who can live there and own land. Their cultures and geographic distances also make turning all the territories into one state impractical, especially since some of them absolutely hate each other. (Along the lines of, "people from your island collaborated with the Japanese when they came to occupy our island.") Congress could in theory still unilaterally make them states, but that wouldn't sit well with anyone for fairly obvious reasons, much like Puerto Rico.

Paul @ 39

While the old VRA was struck down in part, the reasoning Roberts used rested a lot on equal treatment of the states. Congress does have the authority to regulate all federal elections, and to enforce voting rights at lower levels, despite conservatives wanting to pretend the reconstruction amendments don't exist. HR 1, which is the new act passed by the House and sure to pass again, does a lot to work around Roberts' ruling and if the cour tries to eliminate it again even the most milquetoast reps are going to vote to expand the court. As it is, a lot of formerly middle-of-the-road centrists are like Angus King and even Manchin are making noises about accepting expansion because they do actually want to pass laws and run the country, and have realized that won't happen unless the supreme court backs down or is reformed.

50:

Trump will definitely be an asshole if he loses, though how that plays out is another matter. He may also decide to cut his loses and resign while visiting Putin - that wouldn't surprise me at all...

But even with a huge Biden win, things will not go easily.

51:

Aardvark C Agree ... I think the stretch is going to be too far to fuck the rats ... What y'all should be worrying about is after 5-9th November, when the resuts are in, & DJT has comprehensively lost ...... And refuses to accept it & starts issuing orders, backed up by his cronies like McConnell to deny a hand-over & to totally trash the place. It could easily end up considerably worse than if the screwing-around was "successful" between now & 5th November, I think. Comments?

droid perhaps the most insane political environment in history. Not quite, not yet. It's not YET as bad as the spring of 1861, but it's heading in that direction.

JMM @ 45 You keep hoping that - OK? I think DJT will go on a serious wrecking spree from mid-November on ... & like Buchanan before him, he can do an immense amount of damage.

52:

So here's my question. Imagine that Trump loses by 20 million votes and 60 electoral votes. He sues, take it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court tries to legitimize the exact form of the complaint which would give Trump the victory.

What does Biden do then?

53:

I could see Guam potentially becoming a US state. Unlike the other territories in the Pacific, it is organized (as are the US Virgin Islands), rather than a commonwealth of the US (as are Puerto Rico and the Marianas). I agree that Guam and the Marianas would be rather unhappy to join as a single US state, despite both of them being heavily militarized by the US.

The argument against Guam and the Marianas are twofold. One, possibly outdated, is that they've both been kind of convenient for factories, because stuff made on either can be labeled "made in the US" without facing pesky US labor laws. The bigger problem, especially for the Marianas, is that they're going to be underwater in about a century or less, so making them a state is going to be a political nightmare. As it is, the US can conveniently ignore everything we do to the Marianas, which is why we used it for nuclear testing and why we now use it as a convenient site to dismantle and dispose of chemical weapons.

Guam doesn't have it quite so bad (they're a high island, not atolls as are the Marianas), and they've got a big navy base. And there are a number of people from Guam (Chamorros and ex-pat Filipino) in the US already.

We'll see. I'm surprised no one is arguing for the US Virgin Islands to become a state.

54:

So here's my question. Imagine that Trump loses by 20 million votes and 60 electoral votes. He sues, take it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court tries to legitimize the exact form of the complaint which would give Trump the victory. What does Biden do then?

This has been Chief Justice Roberts' problem since he got appointed. The SCOTUS has no enforcement power outside its courtroom (it has its own tiny police force to keep order in the building, AFAIK). So basically, their major power has been legitimacy. Roberts seems to have been fighting teh crazeys on his bench to keep the court from falling into irrelevance since 2016.

So Roberts will be faced with an existential crisis if Trump rams through to the SCOTUS after clearly losing the electoral college. Given his past performance, he'll fight to preserve the legitimacy of the SCOTUS at all costs, even if it makes Biden president. Without rule of law, there's no need for a court.

If he does otherwise, we're into general strike to get Trump out territory. In fact, if Trump refuses to do anything about the pandemic, one batshit strike idea is that the country self-quarantines itself for two weeks, wherein it does precisely nothing to help the Trump regime and everything to help the Biden regime, and does not listen to the Supreme Court. Assuming this has the required effect and Trumps steps down, the next move is to reform the Supreme court, and Roberts either deals with an overwhelming Democratic majority or we find some way for him to resign or else.

55:

then why does it matter how many lawn signs were out there?

I can travel around and see only Trump signs. I can also travel around and see only Biden signs. It all depends on where I go. Rural Texas or NC, Trump. Urban Texas or NC, Biden.

Heck I can do that within 20 miles of where I live. All I have to do is pick my routes.

If you're visiting the National parks you're going to see Trump signs. Very few national parks are in urban Charlotte, Dallas, or Miami.

56:

How hard is it to add states to the Union? ... Puerto Rico and District of Columbia

Not as hard as a constitutional amendment.

But PR is somewhat an interesting case. For decades it was not popular with a huge majority or even a majority at all of the population for much of that time. And the "against has been strong for over 100 years. See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_shooting

As to DC, both parties have been reluctant as they haven't wanted to cede control of their stomping ground to those pesky local folks who don't always agree with how Congress and the Pres wants to run things locally. But that may be ending.

57:

Bare minimum requirements to add a state is a majority vote of both houses of Congress. Constitutionally, we don't actually even need the permission of the people living there. It's not unheard of for the US to think 'Golly, we got all this land we stole from Mexico, maybe we should make some of it a state.'

In practice, there's a referendum approving statehood and a petition sent to Congress. Congress passes an enabling act outlining whatever requirements about governance and the like, the proposed state meets the requirements and then Congress votes on statehood.

If there are majorities in both houses of Congress who can set the procedural rules for the vote and they're able to avoid dealing with a filibuster in the senate, adding states is pretty simple. It doesn't happen because usually there aren't the requisite majorities, or because the political advantage from the additional members isn't enough to justify the equivalent of setting off a nuclear bomb in the senate to overcome the filibuster

58:

Don't worry. Trump is a bully and a wimp. He'll be too busy stashing gold bars in his private 757 (Trump Force One) to think of trashing the place.

59:

Excerpt for, say, Georgia or TX, anything under 4 points is margin of error.

60:

Uniting N and S Dakota - if the GOP doesn't like that... then how about we make ever major metropolitan area with a population larger than the smaller of those two into separate states? Baltimore would almost make it, DC, and Philly, and NYC, and Boston, and LA....

61:

Just as a tangent, the official language of the Commonwealth government in Puerto Rico is Spanish. The exception is the federal district court there, where all filings and proceedings must be done in English. Only a small fraction of the population in PR is fluent in English. I'm simply curious about what hurdles might be faced in admitting a Spanish-language state.

62:

Nope. Some completely GOP-states have made a point of people who are registered to vote in federal elections don't meet the qualification to vote in state elections.

63:

on the grounds that the constitution doesn't let the federal government meddle with state voting procedures.

What can happen and what did happen after Bush v Gore was money was offered to the states if they wanted to spend it to do "these specific things" to their voting systems. Of course one of the allowed options was touch screen voting. Which should be first on the list of things not allowed. IMNERHO.

64:

However bear in mind that the Philippines are pretty religious, so Republican culture-war tactics are likely to play well there.

Well, Trump does like how Duarte has been running things… but the Philippines started fighting for independence from America in 1899. I doubt they would be happy with becoming part of America again, even if they did get full statehood this time.

65:

Um, nope.

If they actually did more than terrorism (which is, in fact, treason), then it would be like the Celts in Britain up against the Legions of Claudius. They have zip in organizations (who you tellin' to charge? You ain't the boss of me!).

And it doesn't need to all be firearms. IEDs work fine... and then, oh, just so I can point them out to the authorities if they start aiming weapons in my general direction, I just got a high power "military grade" laser (careful, you wouldn't want to point it at someone's face, though I understand it's really hard to aim firearms if you can't look at your target).

66:

Entirely anecdotally:

I live in the deep red section of Pennsylvania. My county, and the surrounding counties, went 70 plus percent for Trump.

So from the ground level:

There's a LOT more Biden Harris signs than there were last time. One of my neighbors who had a Trump sign in 2016 doesn't have one this year, and one, amazingly, has apparently switched to Biden from Trump, at least based on signage.

Likewise, a fair few of the GOP types I talk to have actually either switched to Biden or just opted not to vote for a presidential candidate (early voting began a while ago in Pa). For all of them his handling of the COVID stuff was damned him.

Which seems insane that all the other stuff was okay, but sure, I'll take it.

What appears to be the case (again, anecdotally) is that people who just assholes were and are Trump, whereas the 'hold my nose and vote for R' crowd have moved away from him.

This time four years ago I was a lot more worried than I am now. But there's a lot of evidence that Trump's razor thin 'victory' was rooted in him being Not Hillary (just as Bernie massively benefited from it in the 2016 primaries)

Ratfucking is a distinct possibility (and is why my ass is voting in person for just that reason) but I think people are way overestimating Trump.

67:

My gut is that the polls are probably wrong in favor of Trump (Overcompensating from last time)

In general the polls were very accurate in 2016. But Trump won a few when he was behind like 49-48 which left 3% to refuse to answer or whatever. Plus those few places with pesky 3rd party candidates gave it to him in a few places.

This year is making polls hard as the turnout is expected to be way above anything for over 100 years. North Carolina as of Wednesday night already had over 50% of the registered voters having voted. 3.9 mil out of 7.3. And I think Texas already has more people who have voted that the total in 2016. (Fact check me but turnout there is off the charts.)

And at least in NC all of those votes received by Monday night will have been counted and sealed until Tuesday night. PA is the big problem child here as their state laws prevent any forms of early counting. And there IS a reason for this but it goes way back in time. It was to keep the corrupt party bosses from knowing the totals they needed to bring in from bumpkin-middle-of-nowhere back in the day or slow horse travel over mountain roads on election day.

68:

I suspect it will be more Reconstruction: The Sequel, with (wannabe) oligarchs working face-in-sheet with (wannabe) terrorists to put them colored people back in their place at the bottom of the heap. Just as in the latter half of the 19th Century, especially in the southern US. We'll see if it works this time, but I suspect it won't.

Thing that annoys me is that those effin' boogerloos have ruined Hawaiian shirts for me. I liked Hawaiian shirts. I mean, heck, I used to like Norse runes too, back when I was reading Tolkien. Now. Can't those fuckers leave anything interesting alone? Hell, next, they'll be going after drug-addled conspiracy theories like pathetic knockoffs of Robert Anton Wilson. They really are like Tolkienian orcs, making mean, pathetic attempts of anything good, and ruining it thereby.

69:

RE: Koch sponsorships.

One of them died about a year ago. So maybe some of the hard core has changed in the foundation or the other brother.

Also with them it is purely about money. Which is why they are big in criminal justice reform. Prison are a drag on the economy.

What got me is when I visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History last year it seem the the Koch brothers paid for most of the re-modeling of the last decade or so. And in the back of my head I kept wondering about how the YEC crowd reconciled their support of other Koch things.

70:

Nobody has mentioned Airstrip One. While this is unthinkable, things that many people would have thought of as unthinkable have already happened, others are in progress, and we haven't hit peak fiasco yet. I can't even make an plausible guess what will happen when our economy collapses.

71:

but the Philippines started fighting for independence from America in 1899. I doubt they would be happy with becoming part of America again, even if they did get full statehood this time.

But they do looooooove those WWII pensions. Which will be paid out for another 50 years or so. Non trivial number of death bed marriages to youngest available extended family member there. Surviving spouse benefits and all that.

Not saying everyone there does it but the payments will continue for another few decades to a non trivial number of women.

72:

The GOP doesn't like anything but enthusiastic submission. If you are adding Democratic Senators by any means at all you had better be ready to overcome every form of resistance they can muster.

73:

As alluded to above not all or maybe any of the island clumps want to be states. With statehood comes unrestricted movement of US citizens (residents?). So in their current status they can keep people out. But as a state anyone with enough money can move in and further impoverish the existing locals. Or destroy the local ecosystem for their resorts. Or whatever.

75:

The polls were not very good in 2016, especially the state polls

Yes there is a meme about how they were “no worse then average” abs depending on how you look at it mathematically that is even true. However they were not very useful as a predictor of who was going to win the election

This is a pretty good write up

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right/

As a result of the issue pollsters have made significant changes

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-pollsters-have-changed-since-2016-and-what-still-worries-them-about-2020/

76:

EC You are, obviously still assuming "crash out with no deal" - which would, if it happens completely crash our economy. But if DJT loses & BoZo cuts a ( Really crappy, but better than nothing ) "deal" & the economy doesn't tank. Or no more than the C-19 trainwreck already is doing ... but that is happening to everybody & thus evens out "in the wash" so to speak. LURVE the phrase: "Peak fiasco" though, sums it up perfectly.

77:

It depends. If the Democrats remove the filibuster for new state admissions at the beginning of this Congress, then it will be easy. Otherwise, it will be impossible.

Admitting Puerto Rico may hit some additional roadblocks. While the preponderance of the evidence indicates that the island prefers statehood, there hasn't been a clear referendum. That could gum things up more than a little.

Finally, even if both states are admitted, it wouldn't be a game changer. P.R. is not a slam-dunk Democratic state. In fact, accelerating outmigration seems to leaving behind a more conservative electorate. In addition, even if Democrats did capture both new Senate seats, that is only four out of 104. That is better than nothing, of course, but the GOP would retain its advantage.

I see that others have raised these points.

78:

No. That post was not primarily about Brexit, and certainly not about the current negotiations. Even if there is a deal, it is unlikely to include enough to do more than keep things staggering on for a while, and that is not the last or greatest fiasco that we have scheduled. If we get the sort of 'solutions' you expect and/or favour, all that will happen is that the crash will occur in slow motion, though it may simply be delayed.

79:

It may be easy, but it's not necessarily the panacea people think it could be. Puerto Rico has

Religion is less important to today's GOP than skin-colour. Most of the residents of PR are of the caste that is anathema to the GOP white supremacist base: like the Arab-Americans (especially notable around Dearborn) they're lost to the Republicans for at least a generation due to the GOP's essential racism and xenophobia.

This wouldn't have been the case back in 1960, but any time since Nixon kicked off the Southern Strategy the writing has been on the wall.

Pigeons, homing, roost. (With a vengeance.)

80:

Heteromeles @68:

They The people who enable them and egg them on really are like Tolkienian orcs Sauron, making mean, pathetic attempts of anything good, and ruining it thereby.

I finally am unable to restrain myself from the reply link.

Put the responsibility where it belongs. Money is being made by making sure those effin' boogerloos remain effin' boogerloos. There's no cure for stupidity but you can make it harder for people to sell it.

On an unrelated note, I see you mentioning "general strikes." I strongly doubt that will occur, though if street protests get big enough, basic services and supply chains might get disrupted. But it won't be anything as organized as a "strike" that will disperse if certain demands are met, where there are people supposedly in charge who have some plausible claim to make that happen.

81:

Religion is less important to today's GOP than skin-colour.

Yes and no.

Cuban heritage folks tend to vote R. And people from PR may align more with them than you think.

Both you and m are weak in this area in terms of our tribal knowledge. But my wife worked with a lot of people a generation or two removed form the Caribbean while in Dallas who voted the R ticket every time.

82:

However bear in mind that the Philippines are pretty religious,

The Philippines are an independent nation-state with a seat at the UN and stuff like embassies and an army. And a rich and tapestried history which means they're like to join the United States approximately never, or at least not before Communist China.

Did you mean Puerto Rico?

83:

Sadly, that's not completely clear.

The GOP has lost much of the Latino vote since the days of GWB. The unexpected thing is that most of that loss happened well before 2016. The way Trump has said the quiet part out loud does not seem to have cost him Latino votes. In fact, the evidence is that he is gaining on his earlier margins, and not just among Cuban and Venezuelan-Americans in Florida.

On the island Republicans win quite a bit. That said, it also often happens that members of the conservative party on the island (called the "New Progressives") will register as Democrats on the mainland. So it is possible that the island will elect conservative Democrats. But it is also quite plausible that if Trump loses next week and the island becomes a state that the GOP manages to repair its reputation on the island.

84:

Greg Tingey @51:

I expect Republicans to find whole new ways to commit irreversible vandalism on the way out, as well as stealing all the "B" keycaps from the keyboards in the White House.

Trump apparently means for his order enabling the purge of the Civil Service to take immediate effect: he might start the firings more or less right away. The two most elderly Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices, Samuel Alito (70) and Clarence Thomas (72), might announce their retirements during the lame duck, and appointments to replace them be ramrodded through during the lame-duck session of the Senate. This would be scorching the Earth to prevent Biden from appointing a Justice due to their being finally forced into retirement or dying at the bench.

I think that last would backfire. For years I have been viewed as a swivel-eyed crazy person because I advocate for increasing the size of the Court (the detail of which are an Article III power expressly allocated to Congress). With almost blinding speed, Conventional Wisdom is starting to look on that as nearly inevitable. It's like watching the maneuvers of a school of fish, or a flock of passerine birds. But I digress. Allowing Trump to appoint five Justices would tip that to a certainty I believe. Recall we are assuming that other Republican forces would not be supporting Trump's continuance in office here, some Republican Senators and Congresspersons lose their seats and acknowledge that, &c &c.

With luck, D officeholders and electees would denounce the firings as illegal and call the order without force. They might call upon civil servants to impede the progress of any directives issued by the Administration, and pass a bill right away in the new session to revoke all legislative action after the election. It would not be in character for them but they could do these things.

85:

I tend to agree with you. My understanding (with people like Anthony Fauci) is that, being career public servants, they can appeal their firings and ride out the clock on the appeal process.

Anyway, the simplest way to make a mess is to do nothing about the pandemic, particularly in states that went for Biden. The problem the Republicans have is that they're also committing state crimes, so if they screw up too badly, they may end up in a state supermax as easily as a federal one. The smarter ones will be shredding what evidence can be shredded.

86:

EC Expect, NOT "favour" - unfortunately that ship has long sailed.

Aardvark C IF Alito & Thomas go in the Lame-Duck period ... That would be the perfect excuse to empty the S Court completely & start again, because exceptional circumstances, by Congress voting that the Court has lost it's legitimacy, thank-you DJT.

87:

As folks have said above, DC is primed to become the 51st state. That will almost surely add two Democratic senators to the mix, making that hold more solid.

There's another interesting inflection point coming two years from now. 34 senate seats will be up for re-election, but 22 are held by Republicans and only 12 by Democrats. 2 Republican incumbents have already stated they won't be running again, no Democrats have. So assuming Biden doesn't screw the pooch, there's a reasonable chance the Dems could pick up a couple of more seats.

In 2024, the swing goes the other way - 21 Democrats, 2 independents who caucus with the Dems, and 10 Republicans. At first blush, that might mean the Republicans can claw back control of the Senate. But conversely, that's four years in which some of the other territories might opt for statehood, likely adding a pair of Democratic senators per new state.

Gonna be an interesting four years, I tell you.

88:

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if Trump loses and can't spin things so that he stays in the White House, then he'll either:

a) Retreat into a depressive sulk, either in DC or Mar-a-Lago (I give this one about a 20% probability)

or

b) run riot rampaging through the civil service with a chainsaw, encourage more COVID19 superspreader events, all but demand "milita" groups go after folks named on his enemies list (which he will tweet with daily updates), and generally try to destroy the United States' basic institutions.

Then on his way out the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- either way -- he'll steal the state silverware (and anything he can lift), rip the very wiring out of the walls, and take a shit on the desk in the Oval Office by way of a fragrant welcome for his successor. Hell, he might even take a golf club and smash all the windows. "If I can't have it, neither can you."

89:

Nope: separation of powers. Congress can impeach justices for breaking the law, and arguably Kavanaugh and perhaps Thomas are guilty of that. IIRC, this takes a 2/3 vote of the senate, and the democrats won't have that, even for Kavanaugh.

If the Congress merely decides to clean the court and install a new panel, that causes a huge constitutional crisis about how independent the court is. Do we want to go there?

(Un)fortunately, there's no numeric limit on the number of justices on the Supreme Court, so adding four left-leaning justices to the bench to make a 7-6 democratic majority is the simplest solution, and one the democrats can legally do if they take control of both houses and the presidency.

In the long run, yes, we do very much need judicial reform in the US, but that's not the short-term solution. The short-term solution is a combination of legislating and court-packing. For example, there's already a court-friendly version of the Voting Rights Act in Congress now, and it would be easy enough to do something similar with Roe V. Wade and Citizen's United. Then it would take a constitutional amendment to overturn those laws, or teh crazzies taking back all three and overturning them.

I'm not a fan of court-packing, because once you start, where do you stop? But the Republicans did, in fact, start it, so I guess it's too late to whine about it.

90:

Hmm.

This is amuseballs (and Won't Happen, for other reasons local to the UK), but one can just about imagine that one outcome of a no-deal Brexit and the current trajectory of the UK is that (a) Scotland, NI, Wales, and maybe the North of England leave the UK (and rejoin the EU), and the rump residue of England ... applies to become a member of the United States.

Lizzie Windsor or her successor would still have a throne (she's Queen of Scotland, Wales, NI, and a bunch of other countries, and actually has palaces is some of them). What would probably spike the chances of this happening is that enough of the Owners™ have inherited titles of nobility that they'd vanity-campaign against it. Oh, and also: no guns, but free access to reproductive medicine including abortion. Even England in full EDL/BF hue and cry isn't on the same page as the Republican Party in those areas.

91:

In 2024, the swing goes the other way - 21 Democrats, 2 independents who caucus with the Dems, and 10 Republicans.

The problem with just looking at the superficial numbers -- that is, how many seats must be defended -- there are a decreasing number of Senate seats that are truly in play. Consider that while the large blue wave in 2018 gave the Dems a large House majority, they managed to go down two seats in the Senate. And if they hadn't won the seats in Arizona and Nevada, the Republican majority would have been big enough that no one would be talking about the Dems retaking the Senate this year. And almost all scenarios for the Dems getting that majority this year start with flipping seats in Arizona and Colorado.

One of the badly underreported political stories over the past generation is the huge swing that has happened in the American West from solid Republican to substantially Democratic.

92:

OGH asked in #2

How hard is it to add states to the Union?

If the Democrats win all three power groups - the House, the Senate, and the White House - then it's not horribly difficult. On the US side, you need a majority vote in House and Senate, and a President who won't veto it. On the prospective state side, you need a plebescite of some and a 'state' constitution that doesn't conflict with the federal one. But those Congress makes the rules about that stuff, and Congress can change them.

For a nice writeup on all this, see this Feb 2020 article from Vanity Fair about both the process and some potential candidates for forming new states.

93:

The problem with just looking at the superficial numbers -- that is, how many seats must be defended -- there are a decreasing number of Senate seats that are truly in play...
The power of incumbency is hard to overcome, but there is always some degree of year to year change. In a year where most seats up for re-election are Republican, all other things being equal the Dems have a better chance of gaining seats than the Republicans. Of course, "all other things being equal" is not guaranteed; ask me again in four years and I'll likely have another opinion.

And that said, I think I've drifted pretty far from OGH's stated purpose for this thread, so I'll shut up now.

94:

Troutwaxer @ 3:

"I believe the Republicans became infected when they invited "Dixiecrats" into the party, I see little hope for their future."

Yup. This goes all the way back to Nixon's "Southern Strategy."

It goes back farther than that. Goldwater was first elected to the Senate in 1952. And in fact, it goes back to Truman's 1947 Communist Plot to desegregate the Armed Forces ... if not further than that.

95:

Aardvark Cheeselog @ 17: PS why does the <code> element not work?

I don't know why <code> </code> doesn't work, but the TeleType tag does the same thing (or close enough I can't see the difference.

<tt> </tt> ... TeleType

96:

Right, though there is a scenario that I can imagine that just might get there (probability < 0.1%).

Things go as pear-shaped as I fear in my nightmares, and the gummint goes full-blown fascist, but fails to quell the civil disorder. It then asks for help from the USA, which sends troops in to keep 'order' (within its power, courtesy of That Bliar). Chaos continues, and there is an internal coup within the gummint, with the Bolsheviks taking over from the Mensheviks. And those wild-eyed radicals are NOT made of of people with old money and do ramrod through such a request.

The big problem about revolutions is that the second stage is very often far more extreme than the first, and the victors of the first often lose out. A certain Saul on the road to Damascus, the successors of Thatcher, in addition to the Russian and French examples.

Well, you ARE into dystopias :-)

97:

Charlie Stross @ 20: How hard is it to add states to the Union?

I'm thinking Puerto Rico and District of Columbia are well overdue for statehood, and the effect on the Senate would the drastic ...

Article. IV. Section. 3.
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

It's the same as passing any other law in the U.S.; simple majorities in both houses (House & Senate) pass a law admitting a new state & it goes to the President for his signature. The President could veto the bill which would require 2/3 majorities of both houses to over-ride. Trumpolini would veto & Biden would sign.

The reason Congress hasn't already made Puerto Rico a state is there has not been a majority of voters in Puerto Rico who favor becoming a state. There have been several referendums and I believe the results are (+/- some percentage) 1/3 favors Statehood, 1/3 favors Independence & 1/3 favors the Status Quo and Congress has respected the "will of the voters" and left Puerto Rico a territory until they make up their minds which way they want to go.

DC is a different problem. It might require a Constitutional Amendment.

Article. I. Section. 8. Paragraph 16.
To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, ...

The intention of the "Founding Fathers" expressed by the Constitution, is that the seat of the Federal Government is NOT meant to be part of any state, even itself. There is no territorial legislature or territorial government. DC is directly governed by Congress.

98:

"Hell, he might even take a golf club and smash all the windows."

Oh, I hope he does. That would be excellent... Trump swings golf club; club hits armoured glass, and bounces off; result, either he ends up twatting himself in the head with it, or he tries again and again until he breaks the club and throws it on the floor and jumps up and down and screams and shits his nappy. Either way someone gets a mobile phone video good enough that youtube crashes under the load.

99:

The real thing with FL is all the ranting about "Cubans" is really ranting about Cubans who were part of, or supported the dictator Battista's nasty regime... or those who were, literally, part of the Mafia, which ran Havana since Prohibition.

I have zero sympathy with them.

Also, as we saw when Obama moved to normalize relations with Cuba, thee are a lot of second and third generation Cuban-Americans who said, "screw this, I want to go to Cuba".

100:

Barry @ 32: Now, does anybody here think that the GOP in Georgia trembles at the idea of suppressing as many votes as they can?

I'm sure there a few sleepless nights worrying about what's going to happen when voter suppression in Georgia finally fails.

101:

I thought there was some fundamentally important reason why DC is not to be a state? Something about when they set it up they figured the bit with the president in it couldn't be able to link to state.so or it would crash things, so they made a little enclave that specifically was not a state so it could have its own /usr/lib with non-standard contents.

102:

...Ah, I see JBS has quoted the man page.

103:

Barry @ 36: Kavanaugh has already cited Bush v. Gore, which was explicitly declared not a precedent.

He's also explicitly justified not counting votes on the fraudulent grounds that it would mean that an election could not be called on Election Day. They already are not, and never have been; official certification has always come days to weeks after.

Here's an interesting take on what Kavanaugh might be thinking ...
http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2020/10/scotus-election-law-kremlinology-or-how.html

Professor Dorf notes Kavanaugh's cite of PURCELL v. GONZALEZ for the principle that courts oughtn't to change the rules of an election late in the game.

In just about all of the election cases and especially in the Wisconsin decision on Monday, Justice Kavanaugh has been insistent on the Purcell principle--that courts oughtn't to change the rules of an election late in the game. Maybe that really is his guiding principle. If so, it would make sense for him to refuse to grant Republicans relief in the North Carolina case, because there the Republicans sought judicial relief, arguing that North Carolina localities were acting impermissibly by providing extra voting opportunities beyond what the state legislature provided. For the SCOTUS to grant relief to the North Carolina GOP plaintiffs would have violated the Purcell principle that Justice Kavanaugh seems to value even more highly than the state-legislatures-decide principle.

In his Wisconsin solo concurrence on Monday, Justice Kavanaugh proclaimed that strictly following Purcell promotes "confidence in the fairness of the election." He went further to state that the Purcell "principle also discourages last-minute litigation and instead encourages litigants to bring any substantial challenges to election rules ahead of time, in the ordinary litigation process."

Which brings us to Pennsylvania. If the eve of the election is too late for a federal court to intervene because of what such intervention will do to public confidence in an election's fairness, then litigation after the votes have been cast and the effect on the outcome determinable is a positively terrible time to change the rules. We thus have the intriguing possibility that Justice Kavanaugh didn't join with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch in round 2 of the Pennsylvania case because he doesn't think that further judicial intervention--especially judicial intervention after the state has all the ballots in hand and knows their tallies--would be permissible.
104:

Paul @ 39:

Which rather opens the door to the federal legislature passing bills that mandate minimum voting standards etc.

Unfortunately not. The states have control of their own election processes. The recent Shelby decision was to strike down a federal law doing exactly what you suggest, on the grounds that the constitution doesn't let the federal government meddle with state voting procedures.

Not quite. The Shelby decision hinged on the law only being applicable to SOME states. Congress could pass a law applicable to ALL of the states that should pass Constitutional muster.

105:

When he finds that he can't smash the windows, he would find that there's plenty of smashable stuff inside - windows, vases, etc.

And yes, I think DJT would be just that petty & childish.

106:

Aargh. I meant he could smash mirrors inside (although interior windows are probably not bulletproof).

107:

The House of Representatives (currently controlled by the Democratic Party) passed a bill - called HR.51 - which was then rejected by the Senate (currently controlled by the Republican Party) on DC statehood.

What it did was cede all of DC except for the actual Capitol and White House buildings (and a small, uninhabited area around them) to a new state, called the "Douglass Commonwealth" (still DC, but now named for Frederick Douglass instead of Christopher Columbus). There would still be a federal district (called "the Capital District"), it just would be a couple of blocks, rather than the whole city.

Technically, that federal district would still have a non-voting delegate in the House and three electors in the electoral college (per the 23rd amendment), but there wouldn't be any voters to elect them; passing a constitutional amendment to undo the 23rd should not be overly difficult in the circumstance where the alternative is the First Lady effectively getting three votes in each future Presidential election (the President usually preserves legal residence in their home state; there are some weird constitutional and electoral problems if they run for re-election as a resident of DC; the First Lady could easily transfer residence to the White House)

A bunch of lawyers have had a good look at this, including some that are very hostile to the Democratic Party and none of them seem to have found a constitutional problem. The best argument is that not undoing the 23rd Amendment would be ridiculous, which is true, but ridiculous is not unconstitutional, and the sheer ludicrousness should make the constitutional amendment easy enough to pass.

108:

Troutwaxer @ 50: Trump will definitely be an asshole if he loses, though how that plays out is another matter. He may also decide to cut his loses and resign while visiting Putin - that wouldn't surprise me at all...

I keep hearing that, but no one can tell me what's in it for Putin?

109:

So writing a thoughtful letter to Biden is out?

GDRFC

I've been wondering what he'd do for this tradition if he loses. If anything.

110:

I offer a prediction.

Trump will contest the election results for a few weeks, but not to the extent that some are suggesting. Then, there will be an emergency summit in Moscow in late November or early December. And he will stay there claiming to be the "United States government-in-exile". Perhaps dragging along one or two Republicans besides himself (a Senator who loses their election, maybe, don't have any specific candidates for this in mind). Putin will eat this up, propaganda value alone is worth it... but the rise in domestic insurgency/terrorism will be something Biden has to deal with for his entire tenure.

111:

The reason DC isn't a state is that they originally had the capital in New York and later in Philadelphia and the state governments of New York and Pennsylvania kept trying to interfere with the running of the federal government (denying them permits to build buildings, taxing them, etc) and they figured they wanted their own bit of land that they ruled over.

The proposed DC statehood law (HR.51) resolves this by creating a new "Capital District" consisting of just the White House and the Capitol and the major federal buildings and monuments around them, and then making the rest of DC into a state.

112:

My point is that it is not a given. And the numbers either way are hard to predict.

Not all Cubans against Castro were for Battista.

113:

Michael Cain @ 61: Just as a tangent, the official language of the Commonwealth government in Puerto Rico is Spanish. The exception is the federal district court there, where all filings and proceedings must be done in English. Only a small fraction of the population in PR is fluent in English. I'm simply curious about what hurdles might be faced in admitting a Spanish-language state.

None whatsoever. Puerto Rico is "officially" bilingual; like South Dakota, Hawaii and Alaska (actually Alaska has 19 official languages in addition to English). The Legislature changed the official language to Spanish in 1991, but in 1993 another session changed it back to official bilingualism.

I suspect you grossly underestimate the percentage of Puertorriqueños who are bi- or multi-lingual.

114:

I think that what is in it for Putin is that it's a signal to any future proxy that Putin and Russia will protect them if it all goes to shit.

If Trump ends up in prison in the US, then anyone else on Putin's payroll (not just in the US, but in other countries too) will start looking for a way out, rather than feeling that they can always run to Russia if they get exposed.

Same reason that Kim Philby was allowed into Russia, same reason they've put up Edward Snowden. If you're a Russian agent, then knowing Russia will look after you if it all goes wrong at least means you know you have somewhere to run to.

115:

The Shelby decision hinged on the law only being applicable to SOME states. Congress could pass a law applicable to ALL of the states that should pass Constitutional muster.

Yep. Congress took aim at the south with the VRA and ignored what went on in the rest of the country. It was a bad law in that respect. And it would have been easy to draft it so that it worked equally for all. But it wasn't (who know what went on behind the doors back then before cable TV) and was never fixed.

Basically per the VRA states not mentioned could do things that those mentioned could not.

116:

OGH: "one outcome of a no-deal Brexit and the current trajectory of the UK is that (a) Scotland, NI, Wales, and maybe the North of England leave the UK (and rejoin the EU), and the rump residue of England ... applies to become a member of the United States."

Much more profitable for the US to just move troops in to 'support the democratic government' then proceed to loot everything that isn't nailed down.

After a few years either declare England 'stable' (in the sense that a pile of ash is unlikely to burn) and move on, or expand control in the interest of further looting.

117:

I suspect you grossly underestimate the percentage of Puertorriqueños who are bi- or multi-lingual.

At least when they want to be.

Ran into this with some French speakers in Toronto in the 80s. Their English was non existent or fluent depending on the accent of the English speakers in the conversation.

118:

One other thing I want to comment on is the worry that the Supreme Court will invalidate late votes, especially with Trump going on about (and Kavanaugh's ridiculous comment in his opinion) all votes being counted election day. While there's certainly been attempts to make early or mail voting harder, and it's possible in some states that votes arriving after election day won't be counted due to lawsuits, I don't think it's possible at all that they're going to successfully do anything to stop counting of ballots that definitely arrived on time, or that arrived after election day in states that permit that. Even if they try, there's a couple things working against them:

1) Key swing states where this could happen, particularly Pennsylvania, have Democratic governors. In the event of blatant attempts to steal those states, the governors / secretaries of state can still report the actual vote counts and certify a Democratic slate of electors. This is important because ultimately it is the House of Representatives, not the court, that can choose whether to accept the electors of a state as valid. If there are competing slates, the House and Senate can kick the stolen version out. That assumes we get both but certainly the House is very unlikely to swing.

2) Several other key states will have already counted all mail ballots and other early votes by the time polls close. Florida in particular will have results almost immediately, save for in-person tallies. This can also go to an extent for states like Texas and Georgia. If Florida goes for Biden, it's almost certainly a win for him; if Texas or Georgia even look close then all other keys states are guaranteed. No amount of shenanigans can change such a clear-cut result because of the number of states they'd have to screw with.

119:

David L So an English speaker with no accent was spoken to, but one with an USA accent suddenly found themselves confronted with les Francais, oui?

DJT Yeah, the "Moscow" option is all too feasible, except that Putin is then "Public Enemy No 1" in the USA & elsewhere, for harbouring known gross criminals - & I don't mean his own paid muderers, either.

120:

s/Philippines/Puerto Rico.

I checked to make sure I got it right, and I still got it wrong. Arrghh.

121:

There's a lot of misogyny in the US, particularly in the more rural areas.

122:

I assume you know what you said was sarcasm.

I saw English speaking Canadians adopt a US western cowboy accent in restaurants a few times. Or at least what they could get by with. It was a terrible accent but it worked.

123:

Puerto Rico has voted no in statehood referenda in the past - more than once! (It's more conservative than people expect.) They're trying to figure out how to draw a boundary for DC so that the non-government areas can have statehood.

124:

On the Spanish/English thing for Puerto Rican statehood, I'd be very surprised if it made any difference at all from the way things are now. Mostly-Spanish for purely internal stuff, dual-language/equal-status for official documents and mostly-English for dealing with the other states. As for spoken language, those who need to learn a sufficient amount of one or the other language will do so.

(Same is true for Panama post-Torrijos-Carter.)

125:

Perjury in the confirmation hearings is a start. Kavanaugh also is showing signs of being incompetent at writing his own legal opinions.

126:

Let's amuse ourselves with what happens when El Cheeto tries to visit Russia for Thanksgiving, which we will rename Turkey Day in Agent Orange's honor.

--Because El Cheeto's organization has been publicly and notably lax about Covid19 control, Russia throws a justifiable hissy fit about letting the advance team in. El Cheeto is now immune-adjacent. Speaking of hissy fits, Russia bans most Americans from entering the country, due to out-of-control Covid19 in both the US and Russia (https://ru.usembassy.gov/covid-19-information/).

But Agent Orange is always welcome...? Yeah right.

--So IQ.45 goes to Moscow with the intent to defect, taking with him the fabled nuclear football. He must take it, or people will get suspicious. He then proposes to resign in Russia and defect.

What's the worst that could happen? World War 3, because the defector has all the nuclear codes and the means to use them. Agent Orange puts the US in a use-it-or-lose it position with its nuclear arsenal. You know what happens then.

What's the best that could happen? Czar Pu immediately refuses, ends the meeting, and turns Trump, his entourage, and the football over to the American Embassy, and hopefully we avoid WW3.

Or, perhaps, some deal is reached wherein Agent Orange walks down a bridge, alone, to his Russian future, and then Now-President Renfield pardons him?

Well yeah, President Renfield is supposed to use his shiny Presidential pardon power to pardon treason, but he can't pardon himself for doing so. This leads to two fascinating questions: does President Renfield get impeached and them tried for treason for aiding an enemy? And what happens to Agent Orange? Well, he's kind of useless, so he gets returned to the US as a political bargaining chip, most likely. Or perhaps he gets a dose of polonium not made in Russia, just to make the point. Or if someone really doesn't like him, a nice 1:1:1 dose of amanitotoxin:Conium extract:Cicuta cocktail. Or maybe a little pellet of ricin, shot from an iphone instead of an umbrella?

Anyway, I expect that El Cheeto will go precisely nowhere outside the US if he loses the election, because every potential country is so worried about the risk of Covid19 from his entourage. At least that will be the official excuse. I mean, can you imagine him visiting Australia or New Zealand right now?

But it is fun to figure out how he might escape, isn't it?

127:

In line with your analysis in 107, I've always assumed the reason for carving a state out of DC is to get around the 23rd Amendment as an impediment. My suspicion is that if the DC statehood bill does pass, the GOP caucus will sue with a claim that the 23rd makes such a law unconstitutional because of the very absurdity you point out.

As with court expansion, the issue here is that the next time the GOP controls the two houses of Congress and the White House, they will be motivated to carve up the reddest states into gerrymandered small states (think Northwest and Southeast Mississippi, say) to change the balance in the Senate and the electoral college, and perhaps to reduce the size of the House, too.

128:

I'd also point out that Hawai'i is officially a bilingual state, so there's really no hindrance there (you speak Hawaiian?). New Mexico is a majority spanish-speaking state, but it has no official language and Spanish is not permitted in the legislature, so that's another solution.

129:

There's nothing in it for Putin to treat Trump exceptionally well. Besides, Russia only has 32 golf courses while Switzerland has 95.

130:

I think the simple argument for having DC and Puerto Rico admitted as states is that DC has over 705,000 people, more than Wyoming or Vermont, while Puerto Rico has more than 3,190,000 people, or more than the bottom 20 states. Incidentally, American Samoa has less than 50,000 people, half the number in the US Virgin Islands and the smallest territory on the list. It really should be last in line.

Anyway, that whole no taxation without representation thing? Yeah. That's a good argument. That also, by the way, is a major reason why the largely Republican representatives of about 20 states may get their shorts in knots about the idea of a Puerto Rican contingent joining the Congress. Fewer delegates for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States_by_population

131:

Things go as pear-shaped as I fear in my nightmares, and the gummint goes full-blown fascist, but fails to quell the civil disorder. It then asks for help from the USA, which sends troops in to keep 'order'

The whole “troops required to quell disorder” thing is called “Military Aid to the Civil Power” or “Military Aid to the Civil Authority” (MACP/MACA) as opposed to “Military Aid to the Civil Community” (MACC - rescuing old folks and cuddly puppies from floods).

Hopefully I can reassure you - just, no. Not going to happen. Firstly, because unlike the dystopian fantasies of the preppers, society doesn’t break down at the drop of a hat. When it all goes to hell, people by and large cooperate.

Secondly, the British Army isn’t exactly happy to get involved in that kind of thing. It’s far from being the eager boot heel of the Fascist Oppression, no matter what the Socialist Workers Party types / Press TV / Russia Today true believers want to think. Same applies to the US Army; if anything, they’re far more restrained than most US police forces. There’s also the obvious

Thirdly, look at the scale of the U.K.: sixty million people, spread across hundreds of miles, and several massive conurbations. That’s almost, but not quite, twice the population of Afghanistan or Iraq; twelve times the population of Bosnia and Hercegovina; thirty times the population of Northern Ireland. Now, consider the sheer number of troops that were involved with NATO’s Stabilisation Force (several divisions), or Operation BANNER (over 20,000 troops at the peak of NI operations).

Basically, you could drop the whole British and the deployable US Armies into London and Birmingham, and not touch the sides. And they know it. So it’s not even a starting option. And that’s quite apart from whether the USA would choose to “help”.

[[ smart-quoted broken link fixed - mod ]]

132:

Charlie Stross @

(If you're wondering why I'm harshing on the usual free-floating discussion right now, The Atlantic explains how The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War and it's really irritating to us.)

I hope y'all will spare a little sympathy for those of who got drafted into that fight.

133:

Martin @ 131:

Your hyperlink is FUBAR. Try this one:
“Military Aid to the Civil Power”

134:

This shit (and we do mean shit) has essentially taken six (6) years of our lives to fucking sort out.

We'll remind you: $12.5 trillion dollar moves in the market. That we told Dirk to short. And that was just Wednesday.

I don't think you quite understand how fucking pissed off we are at humans right now.

You ruined the global ecology. You killed all the frogs. You killed most non-Caucasian peoples and/or stamped some shitty Capitalism Ideology upon the survivors You...

And, at the end of it all. You're shit.

Literally: We gave the Keys to Power to those who soooo wanted it. And they're fucking inept. And Worse still: the ones who think they're better - can't stop the damage the really shit ones are doing!

YAY!

Get fucked. Anyhow, CMBS / Bonds / VIX is kinda puking over $4 trillion dollar injection, and the "Great Reset" is coming.

~

And none, and we mean none of these delusional fucks knows the cost to halting their planetary suicide for 5 years.

LOOKS AT HURRICANE ZETA

DON'T KNOW KIDS, PERHAPS YOU SHOULD HAVE FUCKING PLAYED NICE WHEN A CAT 5 GOT FUCKING STALLED AND NONE OF YOUR SCIENTISTS COULD UNDERSTAND WHY

But no.

Get fuuuuuuuuuuuucked.

135:

Even more interestingly, the normal David H. Koch Fund sequence was replaced with a aerial view flying over a generic, eastern US forest. The Draper sequence was unchanged.

You made me curious. I have 7 NOVA shows on my Tivo, including the one you just watched. So I played the intro for each one.

The video for the David H Koch foundation was related to the topic of the show each time. 7 shows. 7 different videos.

136:

Martin Quote from Lt-Gen Sir Brian Horrocks: "It's called Military Aid to the Civil Power & the Army HATES it."

Also, the not-so-crypto fascists in this country are incapable of organising anything ... look at Nugent Farrago on fisheries, or Failing G on ferries, or ....

@ 134 DELIBERATE LIAR - I told you before. ( frogs ) What is this "Caucasian" white man? Last time I looked there was a supermajority of non-pink people on the planet, so you are lying AGAIN. Now then: Go & get medical help ...

138:

The accusations of antisemitism inside British Labour is based on the EHRC report and used to hurt Corbin in the fight of rival factions. But is the report reliable? The tory press have been jumping on the “evil Corbyn” bandwagon until nearly all the media accept Corbyn is guilty as charged. But is he? I have dug up a lot of dissenting voices on internet, many by jews who suport Corbyn and I am beginning to see parallels to American smear campaigns to take down various politicians. It is difficult for a foreigner to get an insight into what is going on -especially as most media have already made up their minds about the narrative.

139:

Puerto Rico has voted no in statehood referenda in the past - more than once!

AFAIK, those votes were for one of three choices: statehood, status quo (commonwealth) and independence. Status quo won handily, followed by statehood and single-digit percentages for independence.

Things might shift post-[Maria Trump Covid].

140:

I often despair about the previous respondent's ability to comprehend plain English. No, this is not likely to happen because, even if things go pear shaped, they are unlikely to get as bad as what I was describing as a prequisite. It's not impossible, but extremely unlikely. Look, if I foresaw Brexit and monetarist/fascist governments over 30 years ago, do you think that my nightmares are "small riot - not many dead"?

I am talking about widespread starvation, riots, looting, arson, thousands dead, pogroms against minorities, and groups forming with the intent of overthrowing the government. Despite the bullshit, the army WOULD obey orders to assist the police, just as it did in Northern Ireland - no, it would NOT mutiny and refuse to do so. It's not as untrained in such things as it was in 1969, so it wouldn't be suckered into another Bloody Sunday so easily, but it would be on the streets. Yes, I agree that there wouldn't be enough.

However, if TPTB were facing the prospect of being actually overthrown, and the army could not or would not stop that, they would invoke the Blair powers to call in external forces - and allow them to carry and use military firearms. Initially companies like Blackwater and other outsourced military but, if even that was not enough, they would call on the USA. The army would scream blue murder, but so what? They would be told to shut up and obey orders. What would they do then? Mutiny?

I am not going to pursue this, because it is a detrailment, but would like to remind people that things can get a LOT worse than what they think is the worst case - and, unfortunately, quite often do.

141:

No. It can be accomplished through ordinary legislation.

142:

I think that can't happen because it misses a fairly large elephant: London. I no longer recall where the brexit vote was strongest, but I do recall that the short answer was 'not London', which was pretty heavily remain.

I also question the idea that the north of England might leave to join the EU: again my recollection isn't clear but I suspect that the north of England was fairly heavily pro-brexit.

The fragmentation that I used to suggest was that London should become part of Scotland, either connected by a thin strip of land running down the A1, or just becoming a topologically disconnected state, and the new Scotland would then rejoin the EU. There are lots of reasons why this would not work, of course, not least the awkward issue of where the capital would be (could they agree on Glasgow as a second-best option for both parties?)

More realistically I suspect the problem is that the 'wants to remain in the EU' and the 'wants to leave at any cost' regions of the UK are in many areas dense in each other, or close to it, so there's no disentanglement which doesn't involve some kind of forced-relocation of people to form some new country of Englandshire where the brexiters could live (and where should that be? are there sparsely-populated areas of the US where we could dump them?).

None of the above is entirely serious, except for the 'don't forget London' bit.

143:

Yes and no. I have downloaded the report and looked at it. It contains very disturbing evidence of bias, but its conclusions seem reliable; however, they serve as much to exonerate Corbyn than condemn him. And, even just from what it says, this was clearly initiated by a smear campaign. From other information, I suspect that that campaign was aimed less at destroying socialism than opposition to Greater Israel's policies.

144:

When the Soviet troops withdrew from East Germany, they trashed everything that could be trashed in the barracks they left behind; mirrors, bathrooms, cabinets, everything. The only reason Trump might not do the same is he is too lazy. But he might certainly grab expensive-looking items on his way out.

145:

BJ @ 138 The real problem with Corbyn is that he's STUPID. To repeat, he's learnt absolutely nothing at all since 1973 ... Whereas the rest of us have changed many of our opinions, because the facts have changed ....

EC @ 140 Sometimes, it's difficult to see what you mean, in spite of your plain language. However, your clarification ( "unlikely to get as bad" & "as a prerequiste" ) help a lot. Agreed it's possible - & would be a disaster, but it is unlikely. WHat frightens me ( & you ) is the slippery slope from "mere" monetarism towards fascism. Again, I partly blame the left, because they have been screaming "fascist!" for so long, that when a real fascist, like Patel, or a smiling one like Farage shows up, no one takes any notice .... I sincerely hope that a crushing defeat for DJT on Tues/Wed will put the brakes on, hard.

tfb Almost no area of the UK wants "To leave the EU at any cost" - that's the manipulators & crooks behind the scenes. Huge numbers of "moderate" brexiteers are now either in a large Egyptian River or running round in circles, going "But this isn't what we voted for!"

On the main subject, there is a BBC report saying over 80 million votes already cast ... looking, as predicted to be a record turn-out, which is bad for the thugs.

146:

PR statehood referenda

This had escaped my attention, but on checking it appears that there's going to be a statehood "political status consultation" on Tuesday. I'm not totally sure what that is, but it seems to be referendum-like.

See

https://www.sanjuandailystar.com/post/island-supreme-court-rules-statehood-referendum-is-constitutional

147:

looking, as predicted to be a record turn-out, which is bad for the thugs.

Nope. Yep. Very hard to tell. Both sides claim it is good for them.

All kinds of get out the vote going on for both sides.

Overall aggregations of polls show Biden with a win. But a narrow one in key states which translates into a very hard to predict electoral college win or for Senate seats. But in detail the various polls are up and down for both sides. Which indicates the polling groups are having trouble (a lot apparently) getting a handle or who will show up to vote. Registrations of new voters the last few weeks have been running something like 3-2 R-D. And the numbers are way above historical trends which implies registrations of people who have never voted before even if eligible.

The chances of Trump in a landslide are slim. The chances of Biden in a landslide are there. But a muddled middle is the most likely result.

The web site 207towin.com had the Senate results for the last few weeks as most likely at 49 to 47 with 4 hard to call. In the last 24 hours they've moved it to 48-46. Which means the result, if the latest polls are to believed can wind up somewhere between D48-R52 and D54-R46.

148:

I also question the idea that the north of England might leave to join the EU: again my recollection isn't clear but I suspect that the north of England was fairly heavily pro-brexit.

Reminder that "EU membership: good or bad?" ranked tenth in issues of concern to the British public per opinion polling in 2010; it took a five year propaganda campaign to make it the #1 issue, and six years of sadistic austerity by government with the Tory press blaming it on the EU to convince the public to blame the foreigners. And then you need to add the large segment of the "Leave" voters who were basically emitting an incoherent scream of rage at The Man, rather than expressing a considered political opinion.

Once the brexit process completes and there's nobody left to blame but Westminster tories ... well, we'll see how well the propaganda stays bedded in: but the English government is doing a terrible job on COVID19 and their mitigation efforts for social/economic damage in the "Red wall" constituencies is piss-poor: they just don't care about the north.

So I can see most of England north of Nottingham going the same way in the 2020s that Scotland went in the 1980s -- comprehensively shat on the the Tories and swerving away from them permanently. (Yes, northern England got the shaft under Thatcher, too: but less so than Scotland.)

The real question now is who would pick up the votes, given Labour's current ongoing ideological implosion/Finlandization by the Klept. I fear it'll be Britain First or the EDL rather than anything remotely left-wing that rises from the ashes up there.

149:

Small unrelated question: in the I assume upcoming DLD post-release thread, will it be okay to talk/ask about spoiler stuff from the book?

150:

I think Donald Trump doesn't actually care that much about being president, it is too much hard work and, it takes time aways from things he enjoy more, like TV, golf and scamming.

What he does like about being president, is gettting all the attention and the adoration of his followers.

He will keep that by simply frame whatever actually happens as: "Trump Winning, Bigly, See?"

1) Trump victory - Ohhh, He beat all those MSM and Swamp-people

2) Trump loss - Haha, see that sucker Biden go, how he fell for it. I sold him the clown car before the brakes failed and all of the wheels popped off!

  • Then he will go on his way selling self-improvement training and motivational speeches, maybe buy up the dregs of Scientology and rebrand it. Whatever draws a big crowd, that's what he will do!

What results that Donald Trump's regime has actually achieved in terms of policy, those I think was crafted by deeper eldritch horrors dressed up in human skin while The Donald was distracting everyone.

151:

Yes. Equally badly, their claims of reskilling and adapting our economy to the new situation are political bullshit, pure and simple. We are very likely to lose London as the dominant financial hub and the UK as a preferred base for foreign companies to export to the EU, so the Brexit hit isn't likely to be followed by a recovery, despite the polemic.

I am horribly afraid you are right in your last paragraph.

152:

The White House is filled with historical treasures. They are the property of the people of the US and not the president. The secret service would intervene if he tried to destroy anything, on the pretext of stopping him from hurting himself.

153:
(a) Scotland, NI, Wales, and maybe the North of England leave the UK (and rejoin the EU),

Anyone asked the EU about that?

Because, many people here would think that we already have our plates loaded quite full up from the Buffet of Rickety Statehood served with Ethno-Centric Cray-Cray Sauce, like: Hungary, Poland, Austria and "sometime" Macdonia and Albania!

I.O.W, Now without the UK there pushing for geographic expansion, I don't think the EU will let more "disrupters" into the club until Brussels have found a way to make the EUR a full currency and the EU itself into a proper federation. Expansion in Depth, will be the new game.

154:

Well, so far the EU seems fairly happy to consider Scottish re-accession. (Scotland could well turn out to be Ireland 2.0 as far as EU membership goes -- English-speaking peripheral EU state with local industries contributing to the bottom line, subject to a few years playing catch-up after years of malignant underinvestment due to London.)

Northern Ireland will probably end up in some sort of pantomime horse federation/confederation with Ireland. So that's okay-ish.

Wales gets a bit more iffy -- Wales has been integrated with England at the legislative level for a very long time, and won't break away from England very soon, either. And Northern England is definitely getting into Macedonia/Albania territory.

I agree about expansion in depth as a goal for the EU: I think it was spiked last time around by backstage pressure from the USA (which wanted to (a) bite off and digest chunks of the former Warsaw Pact before Russia got its shit back together, and (b) wanted to dilute German influence on the continent by chaining Berlin to a bunch of, well, Poland and Hungary and Bulgaria, etc.)

155:

"You ruined the global ecology. You killed all the frogs. You killed most non-Caucasian peoples and/or stamped some shitty Capitalism Ideology upon the survivors You...

And, at the end of it all. You're shit."

Isn't that a little bit of an exaggeration? I brought my children up to respect the environment. My son and daughter in law both have postgraduate degrees in marine environmental protection. I did once kill a frog (in Norfolk any heavy rain outside the depths of winter results in frogs crossing the road. I haven't killed any people, Caucasian or non Caucasian. Actually I've never met anyone from the Caucasus. I'm a socialist and have never stamped a capitalistic ideology on anybody. I don't think I'm a shit. Now tell me what positive steps you have personally taken to improve the environment.

156:

Pushing to make it a federation seem highly unlikely - um, can you really see France, Germany, and Italy agreeing?

On the other hand, a full confederation, maybe. And definitely the EU a full currency (I hadn't realized it wasn't one).

Besides, I'd think any part of the UK that wanted to rejoin the EU on its own would be happily accepted - with a thumb to the nose at the Tories.

157:

fajansen NO Remember, that when ( We seriously hope it's when ) he loses the election, come 21st January, he's going to be knee-deep ( at least ) in process-servers & other lawyer-types, demading both money & criminal penalties. One main reason he wanted to be "president" was that it kept those people away ....

Later: Austria is ethnically "German" Hungary "Magyar" your view of Europe is, um, not correct.

EC We are very likely to lose London as the dominant financial hub and the UK as a preferred base for foreign companies to export to the EU Already happening As for the openly nazi parties ... no, though they are going to make a LOT of noise & attract some followers, but I don't think they will get a serious grip.

Niala Which raises an interesting point. The US Secret Service peole are not DJT's personal assistants ... What do they do if he openly starts either breaking stuff, or really egregiously breaking the law, or goes for The Football? Because their duty is to the "Union" not the man - could be, very interesting.

Charlie @ 154 Wales .... even the railways cross the border multiple times, never mind the road layouts NOT a practicable proposition unless you are going to go Berlinermauer on it.

Mike Collins Don't worry, she'll be along to hurl insane abuse at all of us, fairly soon. She's almost certainly in the USA, which accounts for her mental state. In a civilised country, the mental health services would have been along to give her medication & counselling, long since.

WHitroth "The seven kingdoms of the English" the Heptarchy Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, Northumbria, Essex, Kent, Sussex.

159:

Trump doesn't have a history of being a violent person. It's not like LBJ. If he became violent due to a steroid overdose the Secret Service would gently get him down on the floor, awaiting sedation.

160:

Just for a laugh, of sorts, I picked this up from Twatter, of all places ... "The most embarrassing thing about the U.S. having another civil war is it’s not even for a new reason"

161:

@ 199 Richard Gadson:

Washington, D.C. was created to appease the Southern slaveholder power structure, particularly those of Virginia. There were a lot of reasons to do so:

https://washington.org/dc-information/washington-dc-history

Another very large reason was they were terrified of the still small abolitionist movements in New York and Philadelphia. Plus it was much closer to where they lived and easier to get to than NY, while Philly was in-between north and south. Going along again, with their pressure on the writing of the Constitution to make it slavery friendly, and even for the War of Independence, due to fear that Britain, following the Somerset Decision and the growing abolitionist movement there (though very small yet), would "take away our ---" well, I won't even think that word much less write it.

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-philadelphia-lost-the-nations-capital-to-washington#:~:text=The%20Residence%20Act%20of%20July,being%20too%20sympathetic%20to%20abolitionists.

Most of all, first, second and always, Virginia regards this nation as Virginia. The South was always petulant and whiney, and believed the federal government belonged to it, but no South was more entitled than Virginia -- just ask Virginia, which held the presidency for the first 5 administrations with the exception of John Adams, others thereafter, and those with VA origins after that even if no longer living there. Woodrow Wilson is another Virginian, he who gave the Dems -- the southerners, of course, federal workforce apartheid. The Southerners have always believed the White House and the federal government is by all rights theirs.

[ "The Residence Act of July 16, 1790, put the nation's capital in current-day Washington as part of a plan to appease pro-slavery states who feared a northern capital as being too sympathetic to abolitionists.

The City of Brotherly Love became the ex-capital for several reasons: the machinations of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson; the compromise over slavery; a concern about public health; and a grudge against the Pennsylvania state government were all factors in the move." ]

~~~~~~~~~~~

Like Our Host, my sense of what will happen if w/o a doubt rumptubtupshoggoth has lost, he will certainly steal everything inside the White House they can -- hell, they did it with the US Embassy in Paris, just took Stuff away 'coz he liked it. (At least some of which he liked and thought so valuable, were just copies, and not expensive ones either, of museum-class art works and furnishings.) That he'd try to break windows and other things too, isn't unlikely. He's certainly assiduously working to make as many people sick and dead as possible.

But we are in for a lot of terror and crime and lawlessness -- the cops are totally down with him as to the national police union, and he's been flying their flag, not the stars and stripes at his rallies.

162:

I've not found a definition of a 'full currency'. Could you enlighten me?

I'm guessing you mean a currency that all the EU states use.

163:

In a civilised country, the mental health services would have been along to give her medication & counselling, long since.

England doesn't have working mental health services any more, thanks to a decade of Tory neglect of an already-impaired branch of the NHS. (Scotland isn't notably better, either.)

164:

and he's been flying their flag, not the stars and stripes at his rallies. Saw one of the "Blue Lives Matter" flags on a pickup truck hanging out in my neighborhood a week ago, and there is a smaller one by a house in the neighborhood. https://www.advocate.com/sites/default/files/2017/06/27/blue-line-flagx750.jpg They should be really creepy to nationalist flag-revering Americans; the red strips are replaced with grey (dark blue?) and the background for the stars is the same dark color.

The Truck Guy was associated with the neighbor that called the cops on me for Walking At Night (same house or close). (Was wearing a hood; it was winter.) Two responding patrol cars drove through the neighborhood with those car-mounted cop searchlights swiveling, found me and asked for identification, which clearly showed the same address as was on the letter box(mailbox) 7 meters away in large reflective numbers.

165:

...knows the cost to halting their planetary suicide for 5 years. PERHAPS YOU SHOULD HAVE FUCKING PLAYED NICE People have (extremely) stuck priors. (I've been [not quite keening, silently] for a couple of years+, tempered with willful optimism.)

EC at 158: Ukraine: Protests in Kyiv after top court scraps anti-graft laws Thanks for that. We might need analogues in the US.

Protesters, including students and anti-corruption activists, held placards which read "Corrupted court of Ukraine" and "Out the pigs of the constitutional court."

166:

Heh. LBJ actually picked up and shook Canada's then-PM, Lester B. Pearson.

A good thing that LBJ didn't try that with Pierre Trudeau, our next PM (and father of our current PM). The elder Trudeau was a black belt in karate. Assault and counter-assault would have been embarrassing all around.

LBJ: 192 cm (6' 3") PET: 178 cm (5'10")

167:

On a totally unrelated note, after ycts re the Clamshell, I've been wondering what I'm going to do when I am forced to get something beyond my flip phone.

Then an odd thought came to me, and I looked online. Sure enough, there are cases for mobiles with keyboards in them. Not sure there's a small one that's only for a mobile, and not so big as to fit a tablet, but that looks like my answer.

168:

@Heteromeles on general strikes:

It was recently pointed out that it didn't take a general strike to end the US Federal shutdown in early 2019, but a call for one did play a role. If the air-traffic controllers don't show up for work, an awful lot of things that are important to powerful people shut down pretty quick, and don't start again until the controllers go back or are fired and replaced with military personnel.

The guy at the link says useful things to know about strikes.

169:

They were alone on a terrace at Camp David. Horrified US and Canadian officials heard what was going on through an open window. Some of them peered out a bit. LBJ swore repeatedly. This would never happen again.

Like Pierre Trudeau our current PM Justin Trudeau is a martial arts practitioner. He's a serious boxer at 6 feet 2 inches.

170:

Richard Gadsden @ 107: The House of Representatives (currently controlled by the Democratic Party) passed a bill - called HR.51 - which was then rejected by the Senate (currently controlled by the Republican Party) on DC statehood.

What it did was cede all of DC except for the actual Capitol and White House buildings (and a small, uninhabited area around them) to a new state, called the "Douglass Commonwealth" (still DC, but now named for Frederick Douglass instead of Christopher Columbus). There would still be a federal district (called "the Capital District"), it just would be a couple of blocks, rather than the whole city.

Technically, that federal district would still have a non-voting delegate in the House and three electors in the electoral college (per the 23rd amendment), but there wouldn't be any voters to elect them; passing a constitutional amendment to undo the 23rd should not be overly difficult in the circumstance where the alternative is the First Lady effectively getting three votes in each future Presidential election (the President usually preserves legal residence in their home state; there are some weird constitutional and electoral problems if they run for re-election as a resident of DC; the First Lady could easily transfer residence to the White House)

A bunch of lawyers have had a good look at this, including some that are very hostile to the Democratic Party and none of them seem to have found a constitutional problem. The best argument is that not undoing the 23rd Amendment would be ridiculous, which is true, but ridiculous is not unconstitutional, and the sheer ludicrousness should make the constitutional amendment easy enough to pass.

I just don't think that's going to work. Even if you can undo the 23rd Amendment, there's still the Article I provision to be overcome.

If you look at the Original District of Columbia it was a 10x10 mile diamond on the Potomac River, partly in Maryland & partly in Virginia. The Virginia portion was ceded back to Virginia in 1847.

What I think could work and would be fair would be for Congress to cede the residential portions of the current District of Columbia back to Maryland and let those portions of DC that are not actual Federal properties be represented by a Maryland Congressman (or Congresswoman) and Maryland's Senators. There are however, several obstacles
     1. The 23rd Amendment
     2. The State of Maryland doesn't want it back
     3. The residents of DC don't want it.

171:

We need to repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the number of Representatives at 435, and then institute the Wyoming Rule (the smallest state population - Wyoming - gets one representative and all other states get a number of representatives equal to the number of "Wyomings" that their population contains).

The total number of reps in the US House increases from 435 to 573, which also affects the Electoral College. Wyoming still stays at 1 rep while the California delegation increase from 53 to 68. Blue states in general do much better.

By matching the number of reps to actual population a lot of the unfairness of the Electoral College is mitigated. The number of EC votes needed to win the White House increases from 270 to 339.

Simple legislation from a Blue Congress (assuming the filibuster is eliminated) can completely change American politics.

No constitutional amendment needed.

172:

David L @ 117:

I suspect you grossly underestimate the percentage of Puertorriqueños who are bi- or multi-lingual.

At least when they want to be.

Ran into this with some French speakers in Toronto in the 80s. Their English was non existent or fluent depending on the accent of the English speakers in the conversation.

I've only kind of run into that once. First day of Basic Training in the Army we had a number of Puertorriqueños in the company I was assigned to who were "no comprende" ... lasted all of about 5 minutes before the 1SG straightened them out. He was a Puertorriqueño himself.

I'm pretty sure Francophones anywhere would rather speak to me in English than listen to me butchering guidebook French. Their disdain for English doesn't seem to be as strong as their horror at having French mangled by non French speakers.

173:

Hell, I'm disgusted when I hear too many Americans mangling English.

I mean, how does Cairo become kay-ro? And then there was the guy 20 years ago in a Schlotsky's, who told me that he had someone come in a couple weeks before who couldn't say "Texas".

174:

Beautiful Displays of Paradoxical Extinction Burst @ 134: *LOOKS AT HURRICANE ZETA*

DON'T KNOW KIDS, PERHAPS YOU SHOULD HAVE FUCKING PLAYED NICE WHEN A CAT 5 GOT FUCKING STALLED AND NONE OF YOUR SCIENTISTS COULD UNDERSTAND WHY

But no.

Get fuuuuuuuuuuuucked.

Be nice now. This iteration hasn't landed in the bit bucket YET ... but is probably headed that way.

Hurricane Zeta never got to be more than a Cat 2 storm. The remnants passed through Raleigh yesterday.

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/WTUS82-KRAH.shtml

The interesting thing about Zeta is we've still got a month or more left in the 2020 Atlantic Hurricane season & we've already used up all of the storm names and are into the Greek Alphabet.

175:

On a totally unrelated note, after ycts re the Clamshell, I've been wondering what I'm going to do when I am forced to get something beyond my flip phone.

Let me just point you at next year's Astro Slide 5G transformer, the third iteration of Planet Computers' valiant attempt to resurrect the old Psion PDAs for a new century: this time it works as a proper touchscreen smartphone as well as having a slide out proper keyboard.

176:

fajensen @ 150: I think Donald Trump doesn't actually care that much about being president, it is too much hard work and, it takes time aways from things he enjoy more, like TV, golf and scamming.

[ ... ]

What results that Donald Trump's regime has actually achieved in terms of policy, those I think was crafted by deeper eldritch horrors dressed up in human skin while The Donald was distracting everyone.

Trump has significant legal issues that he has so far managed to hold off by being President. Even if he manages to self-pardon on his way out (and make it stick), that won't shield him from State level prosecutions, nor from Civil liabilities.

177:

The interesting thing about Zeta is we've still got a month or more left in the 2020 Atlantic Hurricane season & we've already used up all of the storm names and are into the Greek Alphabet.

You need to follow the Greek alphabet with an alphabet of Doctor Who monsters/aliens. I mean, show's been running for well over fifty years, right?

Hurricane Autons

Hurricane Blathereen

Hurricane Cybermen

Hurricane Daleks

...

There are so many of them the full alphabetic list takes up four pages on wikipedia!

178:

They should be really creepy to nationalist flag-revering Americans; the red strips are replaced with grey (dark blue?) and the background for the stars is the same dark color.

I think the not-so subtle message is that they want to replace blue with grey.

Unpacking this for the rest of the world: it's an allusion to the American unpleasantness of 1861-1865, during which the treasonous side abandoned the blue uniforms of American troops for grey clothes (rather less uniform than the loyalists). Authoritarians don't like turbulent democratic discussions where everyone gets their opinion heard, doubly so for letting people of the wrong ethnicity speak up at all.

179:

whitroth @ 167: On a totally unrelated note, after ycts re the Clamshell, I've been wondering what I'm going to do when I am forced to get something beyond my flip phone.

Then an odd thought came to me, and I looked online. Sure enough, there are cases for mobiles with keyboards in them. Not sure there's a small one that's only for a mobile, and not so big as to fit a tablet, but that looks like my answer.

FWIW, when I reached the conclusion I was going to have to give up my flip phone & reluctantly join the 21st Century, I decided I was probably going to end up with some form of iPhone. So I joined an Apple User Group and asked them to recommend which flavor of iPhone would be most congenial to someone who hated the idea of having a "smart phone".

They recommended the iPhoneSE as probably the least annoying & so far it has been tolerable.

180:

No nuclear testing was done in the Marianas, they were in the Marshall Islands like Bikini, Johnston and Kwajalein Atolls. The Chemical storage and destruction was at Johnston Atoll.

181:

Sure enough, there are cases for mobiles with keyboards in them. Not sure there's a small one that's only for a mobile, and not so big as to fit a tablet, but that looks like my answer.

I know someone who bases his cell phone purchases as to which can use a case oriented small chick-let keyboard. If you want I can ask him what he likes. He has never liked touch screens.

Personally I think both of you need to just get over it. But I'm also big in that people should use what they like. So to each their own.

182:

whitroth @ 173: Hell, I'm disgusted when I hear too many Americans mangling English.

I mean, how does Cairo become kay-ro? And then there was the guy 20 years ago in a Schlotsky's, who told me that he had someone come in a couple weeks before who couldn't say "Texas".

If you mean the town in Illinois, it's pronounced "KAIR-oh" (or "CARE-o") because that's how the locals chose to pronounce it specifically so it wouldn't be confused with that other city located on "denial".

183:

I'm pretty sure Francophones anywhere would rather speak to me in English than listen to me butchering guidebook French.

You need to understand my experience was in the middle of the Quebec separatist movement.

184:

I mean, how does Cairo become kay-ro?

Or Versailles Ky become ver-sales?

I've lived near both.

I suspect that they were named by the French in the 1600s. Then those pesky folks from the northern end of the British Isles settled eastern KY and nearby lands on the western side of the Appalachians. They gradual moved west mangling the names as their went. And bringing a strong heritage of home brew with them.

Or so I guess.

185:

Doctor Who monsters/aliens. I mean, show's been running for well over fifty years, right?

Best description I ever heard of how the show got started so campy was: Make a science fiction show for TV. Here's $50/show for special effects. We expect the unspent amounts to be turned in after each show.

186:

Charlie Stross @ 177:

The interesting thing about Zeta is we've still got a month or more left in the 2020 Atlantic Hurricane season & we've already used up all of the storm names and are into the Greek Alphabet.

You need to follow the Greek alphabet with an alphabet of Doctor Who monsters/aliens. I mean, show's been running for well over fifty years, right?

Hurricane Autons

Hurricane Blathereen

Hurricane Cybermen

Hurricane Daleks

...

There are so many of them the full alphabetic list takes up four pages on wikipedia!

That would work, but do you think humanity would survive a hurricane season where we went through all of the "names", all of the Greek Alphabet and then got all the way to Hurricane Zygon. It'd be kind of rough if we got to the end of the Doctor Who alphabet and had to start in with Star Trek names?

187:

No-English placenames: "Ockott saint Annie" Eucourt de St-Anne Or, for that amtter .... "Wipers"

188:

If you mean the town in Illinois, it's pronounced "KAIR-oh" (or "CARE-o") because that's how the locals chose to pronounce it

Sorry got to go with whitroth on this one. His way is how everyone I grew up with for 20 year pronounced it. I lived 25 miles by bird flight away. But to get there was longer as we had to navigate the bottom lands of the two rivers and actually cross the Ohio.

189:

Make a science fiction show for TV. Here's $50/show for special effects. We expect the unspent amounts to be turned in after each show.

I worked at the BBC for a while doing CG special effects and graphics for a rather niche but famous science show, "The Sky At Night". There's a common belief that the official BBC tartan is "small checks" which I can thoroughly agree with.

190:

It is less difficult than amending the Constitution.

Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

(from wikipedia)

Just an act of Congress, with Presidential signature. It has not been done since the late '50s.

191:

Bear with us.

While Greg thinks we're insane, we're actually crunching huge amounts of your Brain Wave Data (hint: go look up France, Macron and what's happening as this is typed. You might spot what "Algerian" means now. For the UK it's a protest at the Embassy; for Malaysia it's the ex-Foreign Minister tweeting out a Jihad (call to arms, not the other version). Yes, 1.7 billion angry followers of the Hajj is a mind-fuck to skim through, thank you anyhow, notice how it was suddenly a Right-Wing attack yesterday after it was a "mad Muslim attacker screaming Al. Ak"? This type of stuff takes skills to splice in. That's after the BBC and others reported it and the RW media culture went wild.......).

And yes Greg: if you were even slightly clued in, you'd not think us Mad, more covering your ass.

Look: 100%, the US 2020 election is going to be fixed. It's a money race, never anything else, until now. Record spending this year, as ever. It's not a question of "if", it's a question of whose "ratfucking / hacks / tricks / skills" are better.

Here's a tip of how strong sentiment is getting: https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/11/11/why-twitter-shares-plunged-27-last-month.aspx -- 27% off Twitter, means Big Boys (and they are Boys) are maneuvering and they're not liking the Big Tech plays (censorship / stopping the FFANG train).

Here's another tip: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2020/09/09/senate-stimulus-bill-no-second-stimulus-checks-and-5-other-takeaways/

The Money has made its bets (and woooo look at what's actually under the HOOD). And... look. You need to pray that Biden doesn't win. Honestly: they're not trying to, but...

That Cat 5 was real, was really stopped in its tracks and your scientists really don't know why, since that's never happened before. Go check. As we told you: vote is 90% 3 weeks.

They're going to cheat, and they've enough $$$ in the tank and enough tear gas on the floor (anyone remember '98 anti riots in Seattle?) to not give a shit. At this very moment they've been practicing and perfectly small urban riots.

~

Sure, Biden wins. "OK". When a majority of your "Democratic" elected officials are ex-military or ex-spooks, well.

Russia, 1991. It's the same fucking playbook.

192:

I'd think that they'd change the codes as soon as he touched down. Claiming to be "president-in-exile" would be unlikely to fly even with the current Senate, and DoD would be even less likely to go along with it.

193:

I think the WH staff - who are not employed by the president, but by the government - would be doing a lot of the packing.

194:

Maybe - but it's also to keep it free of the various political desires of states - it's written into the Constitution, under things Congress does (Article I).

195:

Where are you going to put the 140-some new representatives? The size of the house is set because that's as much room as it has. (If you want to start a movement to rebuild the Capitol to allow for a bigger House, that would be a good start.)

196:

Where are you going to put the 140-some new representatives? Perhaps by packing the seats tighter? I'm sure the airline industry would be eager to help.

197:

I think the not-so subtle message is that they want to replace blue with grey. Thanks, I hadn't spotted that. Might seed it around a little to see if it gets traction.

198:

Nice. Well, except I'm a retired computer pro, and just beginning author, mostly living on social security, and a $1500 phone is, shall we say, a bit much.* Meanwhile, I could get a far, far cheaper phone and keyboard/cover for $8-$20.**

JWS, @179: no. I refuse to touch Apple. They're overpriced commodity hardware, and work very hard at being a monopoly, and that's not even getting into their what, $78B, or is it $100B CASH RESERVES that they avoid paying taxes on.

"Get over it", why? I get online in the morning, and I'm on all day. Why do I need to be online more, when all I want is, say, like this evening, sit in the parking lot until my SO comes out of the medical center, where she went for some lab work, and call me to TALK to me, to tell me to come get her?

  • For the same reason, I will never own a brass locomotive - they're drop-dead gorgeous, a friend referred to them as sculptures... but model railroading is a hobby, not a "means of disposing of unwanted income".

** Just this evening, it was suggested a get a large mobile, and use that to replace my Nook, and then I can back up everything on my computer.

199:

Cairo become kay-ro

Heh. In southwestern Ontario, we have a Delhi that's pronounced Del-hi (accent on the second syllable) in the local parlance.

The county just south of where I live is Elgin, pronounced the correct way. I have heard some Elgins in the USA are pronounced Ell-gin (rhyming with Belgian).

Crazy, amirite?

200:

Um, yeah, I mean in IN, and I was told how it was pronounced by folks who grew up in Cinci, and know the area.

201:

That's what's wrong with the revived Dr. Who (well, other than I've forgotten to watch it for a few years now, because I forget when the season starts, and what night it's on....

I want my cheesy special effects! I don't want hot CGI....

202:

Damn, that makes it harder to merge N & S Dakota.

203:

Am I the only one seeing a bit of Machiavelli in Macron practically challenging fundamentalist religious hot-heads to engage in huge crowded protests during a pandemic ?

204:

P H-K Possibly - a useful side-effect, perhaps. The French take their Laicité very seriously - it was introduced, because of a farcical failed military-catholic coup ( The "Boulanger crisis" ) in 1899, (I think) leading to "the Law of 1905". It's a very public message, akin to people attempting to break the "Basic Law" ( Grundesgesetz ) in Germany. THESE ARE THE RULES for LIVING IN FRANCE - if you don't like it, then fuck right off, we are not interested. May I add: "Vive la Republique Francais!"

Scotland needs to pay attention, before idiot Wee Fishwife & tosser Humza Yousaf re-impose a "Blasphemy" law there ... some-one REALLY NEEEDS to re-publish the Hebdo/Jyllens cartoons about a microsecond after said proposed law is enacted, if they are that stupid .....

205:

Modest proposal (that requires a daydream constitutional amendment):

Legislate to move Congress and Executive branch to city in an entirely new state, once every 30 years.

The state will be selected from those which (a) have never hosted the government before, and (b) are poorest.

The city will be selected from those which have (a) not less than 10% of the state's population, and (b) are poorest.

There will be no "federal district" or gated communities permitted: everyone will be required to live among the locals. (Possible exception: POTUS/VPOTUS, if the level of exposure to assassination attempts is deemed too high. But remember you have a VP for a reason: as the last 4 years have demonstrated, an imperial presidency has become a single point of failure for the US government, and the POTUS needs to be brought down a peg and reminded that they are potentially disposable and the nation will still go on.)

Legislators, president and VP, and supreme court, all need facilities building anew. Federally funded, natch. Ditto lobbyists, on their own dime: ditto homes for individual members of congress/senate and their staff, who will be required to live in the current capitol for 6 consecutive months out of every calendar year.

The purpose of this proposal, beside splurging a huge lump of cash on urban renewal in a state capital every generation or so, is to forcibly restore the social structure of Congress to it's pre-1994 model, where legislators don't fly home at the weekends and leave their families back in their home constituencies, but move to the capital properly: so there is social mixing with the other side (to mitigate the intense partisan hostility that Newt Gingrich's cohort brought to congress). We have the tech for long-range video interaction with the home constituency: in-person presence every week is less important than it was in order to maintain a connection.

The move is also intended as tax on lobbyists, who'll have to spend a chunk on property in order to maintain an in-person connection.

It's also intended to break the legislature out of its bubble. Right now there are two Washington DC's: the federal government, and the ordinary people, and they barely mix. This proposal probably won't result in much mixing, but if it forces the reps kids to mingle in local schools -- and then drags their parents into parent/teacher or school sports stuff -- it'll at least have achieved something.

Discuss ...

206:

They're overpriced commodity hardware, and work very hard at being a monopoly, and that's not even getting into their what, $78B, or is it $100B CASH RESERVES that they avoid paying taxes on.

It's not about the commodity chips/gpus (and by the way had you noticed the in-progress migration to their own silicon?), it's about the integrated vertical stack from the low-level silicon right up to the application layer on top: Apple is ironically maturing into IBM circa 1975, only on an infinitely vaster and more pervasive scale (with nicer eye candy).

As for the $100Bn cash reserves, they're not inactive.

What AAPL do is, they work out what magic hardware they're going to need in five years' time that doesn't exist yet -- say, 8Mpixel 40-bit colour OLED display panels in sizes nobody makes, or their own chip fab and CPU design. Then they find a company like Panasonic or Foxconn that specializes in that tech. And they say "hey, we'd like to buy 10 million units of $UNOBTANIUM starting in 3 years' time. Can you supply us?"

The supplier initially says "hah, we would if we could, but the factories don't exist and we can't afford to build them!"

To which AAPL replies, "how would you like an interest-free (or very low interest) loan to build that factory, with a GUARANTEE of 10 million sales in its first couple of years in operation? Only catch is, we want an exclusive line on the first production." (Oh, and they also buy some shares in the supplier, so that when the tech is mature and the other OEMs are lining up to buy the $UNOBTANIUM running off the Apple-bankrolled production line, Apple gets a cut of the profits.)

Anyway, this is how you end up with unibody laptops becoming the norm, or laptops all having 4K screens, or a magic mirror in every pocket. It's not money sitting in a pile in a bank vault, it's the seedcorn for the next stage in their product line.

207:

Scotland needs to pay attention, before idiot Wee Fishwife & tosser Humza Yousaf re-impose a "Blasphemy" law there ...

Um, no.

What happened was: there was a pre-existing blasphemy law, from way back when. As in England, it had become an embarrassment due to private prosecutions (no cop would touch it with a barge-pole). So parliament moved to fix it via abolition.

Abolishing blasphemy, however, coincided with hate speech as a concern. So some well-meaning idiot legislator said "how about we generalize it into a criminal libel law aimed at incitement on racial and religious grounds"?

Which proposal surfaces, then deteriorates rapidly into much shouting about Blasphemy Law 2.0 (especially in the overwhelmingly anti-SNP press). And the whole thing is sent back to committee for a re-think.

I keep saying this, Greg, but it never seems to sink in: you cannot trust a single word the English press writes about the SNP and the Scottish government without checking secondary sources. You can't trust The Scotsman or The Glasgow Herald either, they're both strongly pro-unionist (i.e. Tory) because they're owned by press barons. The BBC is about as reliable on Scotland as it is on anything else, see also the current fracas about banning employees from attending pride marches or anything remotely political where they might express a personal opinion. Our supposedly free press is feeding you lies.

208:

"I'd think that they'd change the codes as soon as he touched down. Claiming to be "president-in-exile" would be unlikely to fly even with the current Senate, and DoD would be even less likely to go along with it."

I've been hoping that the Football is now a dummy. If he loses (God willing!), he'll make late-stage Nixon look sane and sober.

209:

"Heh. In southwestern Ontario, we have a Delhi that's pronounced Del-hi (accent on the second syllable) in the local parlance."

In southeastern Michigan, we have a 'dell-high' road. Along with a city called 'Say-leen'. It's in my county, right near Brighton, Chelsea and Manchester.

That's why I was surprised a few years ago when our local football stadium (107K seats) was being used for a soccer game involving the 'Manchester United' team.

I hadn't even known that our local Manchester had a soccer team, and wondered why it would require a large stadium.

210:

The Versailles Kentucky (ver sales with a country twang) is the home to a Toyota factory.

When it was being built 40-50 years ago there were a lot of folks visiting the area from overseas. Setting up local offices and such to work with Toyota. They kept getting odd looks when asking the locals the best way to get to "ver sigh" from Lexington.

211:

Poorest by median household income or by per capita income? I have the 2 in Wikipedia and it makes a radical difference.

212:

The grain of truth is that the first version was a complete balls-up, and the second isn't brilliant, but the SNP are right that something to discourage hate speech IS need. This has been called for in the UK and England, many times, for good reason. Muslims are quite right to feel victimised in the UK, because they ARE victimised. Greg should consider three aspects:

He should transliterate what is being said (and by whom) about Muslims to be about people who practice Judaism, or even Roman Catholics (in Northern Ireland, or even Glasgow), and ask himself if that is acceptable.

He should match what is being said (and by whom) about Muslims and people from some specific countries to what was said historically in the UK and elsewhere shortly before there was a pogrom.

He should remember that hate begets hate, and the current increase in anti-semitism followed on from hate campaigns against other minorities, most definitely including some of the pro-Israel hate campaigns against others.

213:

As for the $100Bn cash reserves, they're not inactive.

There's a lot wrapped up in that figure. There's a lot of it earned in various places around the world and moving it back to the US just to have it here incurs taxes so they tend to leave it where it will not incur such. (Ignoring the Irish and similar tax fights.)

Toss into that with interest rates so close to 0% (and on the bottom side of it at times) they just borrow funds in places where they cash pile isn't. The interest on the loans is trivial compared to the tax bills of moving the money around.

Based on some quick Google searches they currently have about $95 billion in long term debt and $90 billion in cash and short term assets.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/aapl/financials/balance-sheet

Similar to why I borrowed at 1.19% and 1.49% for my main car and truck. And will likely finance the car I MUST[1] to buy this week at either 0% or 0.9%. My money is more useful in my bank or investments than in my cars.

[1] My wife's car was rear ended a low speed a couple of weeks ago. Visually it looked almost like the bumpers could be buffed out and was driveable. But it turned out the metal on the bottom of the car behind the rear bumper was now an inch or two shorter than before. Oh, well. Take check from insurance and go find another car.

[1a] My wife will not drive my Tundra. Just too big. So she says.

215:

Another angle on Apple, the usable lifetime can be quite long, in effect, more economical than buying inexpensive hardware more frequently.

216:

That's too bad.

On his 90th birthday (25 August 2020) someone recounted a Connery anecdote. Don't know if it's true.

Connery was in Edinburgh for the Fringe around 2005. He was in a cab, and amazed the cabbie by being able to name all of the streets before they got to them. The cabbie asked how he knew downtown Edinburgh so well.

"As a boy, I used to deliver milk in this neighborhood. All of the businesses have changed, but the streets are the same."

"Oh. And what do you do now?" asked the cabbie.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

217:

It would be amusing. Given that the US's biggest divide, probably by orders of magnitude, is classism rather than any of partisan hatred, mysogyny or racism...

My prediction is that there would be a modest dearth of upper class politicians with children willing to serve. They won't mix their kids with the lower classes.

So, meh effects. Given that you just end up with modest increase in sociopathy in the political elite. But, I'd buy popcorn for this.

Personally, trifecta actions that seem achievable without? starting a civil war are most likely either packing the courts or admitting US territories.

Of the two, I'd prefer admitting any and all US territories interested in admission. (Which is likely zero.). Yes, 3-4 are below 60k inhabitants, but, eh, the current failure point of our politics is racism. Most likely, adding 10, eg, senators from non-white states would significantly reduce the viability of basing evil policies on racism.

Packing the courts is more achievable but would be returned in short order. Probably within 2 years.

Albeit, please forgo optimism, reduced racism does not seem.to translate towards reduced classism at all. (Having watched the local democrats torpedo a homeless shelter based in largely groundless nonsense).

Now, if you want a war, I favor California1-California50, each artfully gerrymandered to add 80+ non-Republican senators and maintain a population over that of Wyoming.

218:

it forces the reps kids to mingle in local schools

It won't that. They will still go to elite private schools, even if the private school has to open a new branch or do fancy commuting to make it work…

Moving the entire elected branch plus hangers-on and their families would create a great market for a private charter school, and you can be that someone would fill that market, so the local kids would still be attending their shithole underfunded public schools that congress-critters never see.

219:

Charlie ( @ 206 ) Apple is ironically maturing into IBM circa 1975, only on an infinitely vaster and more pervasive scale SCREAM - run away or something ... shudder.

( @ 207 ) NOTHING AT ALL to do with "The English Press"

The National Secular Society are getting very excited about this & with good reason - & that is where my information is coming from... I suggest you read this, from them OK? It's the exact opposite of what France is, quite correctly, doing to preserve freedom of expression - which you also touched on, yes?

As presently worded, I think a Hebdo/Jyllens re-publication in Scotland ( Or even a repeat publication by "Private Eye" - available in Scotland ) would immediately produce an attempt to stamp down on ridiculing the religion of submission, or any other religion for that matter. Let's avoid this obvious trap, shall we?

EC Sigh Agree about "hate" speech, but ... when school teachers who were TRYING TO EXPLAIN THE PROBLEM are murdered by religious nutters, then ridicule & sarcasm need protection. Look at Poland, for another example, if you want another totalitarian religion. Ah yes Rangers/Celtic "games" - a wonderful example of religious tolerance ... "Hate begets hate" - yes, but when ridicule & a redfusal to "respect" untrue myths begets murder, what then? Manchester Arena / Paris suburb / Polish Streets

I'm with Macron on this one.

220:

Agreed for the most part. I love the idea of the U.S. Government spending thirty years in Fargo, N. Dakota.

The other big legal improvement I'd make is to outlaw private schools. You want to see public schools improve? You want to see an end to ignorance? Make a Senator's kids attend!

221:

Don't you ever watch DIY or HGTV?

Give the job to Chip and Joanna Gaines and they can expend the congress building with an open floor concept.

And shiplap. Lots of shiplap.

222:

Troutwaxer @ 220: Agreed for the most part. I love the idea of the U.S. Government spending thirty years in Fargo, N. Dakota.

But what would you do with all the museums & monuments? They moved the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, but it was only a little less than 3,000 feet. Moving the Washington Monument all the way across country would probably be a bit much.

The other big legal improvement I'd make is to outlaw private schools. You want to see public schools improve? You want to see an end to ignorance? Make a Senator's kids attend!

You'd have to repeal the 1st Amendment, because a lot of those private schools are "religious" schools.

223:

Troutwaxer @ 220: The other big legal improvement I'd make is to outlaw private schools. You want to see public schools improve? You want to see an end to ignorance? Make a Senator's kids attend!

I don't think you need to disband private schools to make sending kids to public school a requirement for federal employement (which I think would catch congress-critters, the President+Vice, and executive appointees?).

I think private schools are insufficiently regulated, but I think removing them would be even less likely to happen than OGH's original idea. Speaking of:

OGH @ 205: Modest proposal (that requires a daydream constitutional amendment): Aren't modest proposals supposed to be the ones that one doesn't want to actually happen?

JBS @ 222: But what would you do with all the museums & monuments? Leave them in DC? Let that bit stay (with the current WH and Capital buildings joining the Smithsonian), while the new builds in other states get built bigger from the start to support growing beyond 435.

224:

I was listening to the radio the other day & they had a Doctor/Sociologist on talking about <"herd immunity". What he had to say was interesting.

We (the world, and especially the U.S.) will have "herd immunity" sometime in 2022. The pandemic will end & SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic.

What route are we going to take to get to "herd immunity"?

The first route is to let a lot of people get sick and die. A lot of people will die because we don't have the resources to treat them if they all get sick at once. It won't result in acquiring "herd immunity" any faster.

The second route is via vaccine with social distancing, and masks, and quarantines in the meanwhile to prevent everyone from getting sick at once and overwhelming the medical system. What they're calling "flattening the curve"

It's buying time for treatments to be developed & for a vaccine to become available. The doctor said that if you get Covid19 now you already have a better chance of survival than if you had caught it in March or April. The more people we can prevent getting sick the fewer unnecessary additional deaths.

So, there it is. We're going to get "herd immunity". The question is how many excess deaths are we going to have along the way? Do nothing and get a lot before the vaccine becomes available or do masks, closings, social distancing and all the other active measures to try to minimize the number of excess deaths.

PS: He said we'll be approaching something resembling normal by 2024. But I don't think that's going to be true if we follow the "let a lot of people get sick & die" route. The downstream effects of having so many holes in our economy are going to be much more difficult to overcome.

225:

Bluntly, as I have said before, from the death aspect, a viable strategy is simply to let it rip and live with the near-uniform factor of two death rate. That will reduce the life expectancy by only a few years, and have a negligible hit on the economy. The bigger problem is the 'long-term COVID', which is FAR less age-dependent. Now, that IS a serious economic problem.

And anyone who says we are going to get 'herd immunity' (even in a very weak sense) is talking bullshit - the simple factor is that we don't know, and whether vaccines exist doesn't change that. We THINK that vaccines will reduce the incidence of serious problems, as will second infections, but we simply don't have the data to be certain. It's unlikely that either of those will increase the incidence of serious problems, but we don't have the data yet to exclude that.

We live in interesting times :-(

226:

He said we'll be approaching something resembling normal by 2024. But I don't think that's going to be true if we follow the "let a lot of people get sick & die" route. The downstream effects of having so many holes in our economy are going to be much more difficult to overcome.

Depends on who the dead are, doesn't it?

If they are predominately the elderly, well, that probably saves money for other purposes. Especially if heroic measures are limited to those willing to pay for them.

Dystopian? Sure, but this is a science fiction blog. Plenty of SF has been written on this theme. I'm not certain that Covid forcibly shifting assets from over-70s to younger folks would have a negative economic impact.

Societal, definitely. A society that chooses to effectively sacrifice its elderly (especially in the name of consumerism rather than survival) is a lot harsher than one I want to live in.

(Speaking from a city where bars & restaurants account for 17% of all infections, contact tracing is overwhelmed, cases are shooting up, and the mayor wants to reopen eating establishments because of the economy — even though they are less than 1% of the city's GDP.)

227:

Not a medical doctor, but I am a PhD ecologist and my wife's a pharmacist (which also requires a doctorate).

So, couple of points:

--Covid19 is already endemic in our species. Unless we get everyone perfectly vaccinated, it's not going away again, ever. If we get lucky, nonlethal forms will take over, if they'll be better at reproducing and spreading than the lethal forms are. Note that's if, not when. Disease evolution depends on being able to infect new hosts faster than existing hosts die. That's the balance between lethality and contagion. While the simplest solution is not to kill your hosts, that gets into the issue of true herd immunity, which is simply that there are no susceptible hosts if no host dies so eventually the infection burns out. Solutions to this include mutations that can't be attacked by existing antibodies and having a system where the antibodies forget you fairly rapidly. This last is what coronaviruses are notorious for.

--To repeat, in case you don't read paragraphs: coronaviruses are known for being easily forgotten by human immune systems. This doesn't mean they mutate rapidly, as do influenza and HIV. Rather it means that, for structural reasons I don't understand (and I'm not sure anyone understands), people can get reinfected by the same exact virus years later, because they lost the antibodies for it.

--This is the really nasty part of Covid19, and why herd immunity through infection without a vaccine may not be possible: by the time most people have had it, those who had mild infections the first time will be losing their resistance and may well get reinfected.

I'll let that sink in, because it shows how evil the proposed herd immunity strategy is: there's a reasonable chance it won't work. If that happens all you do is kill a lot of people, keep hospitals at flood stage for treating the sick, and burn out and kill off health care workers who have to deal with the mess. Indefinitely. And if a major disaster or another pandemic happens? Well, too bad, there's no additional hospital capacity to take care of the victims, unless we spend billions to trillions building and staffing Covid19 wards. Forever.

With vaccines, even if we have to get the darned things yearly, we do have a chance of getting something resembling true herd immunity, simply because people don't have to get uncontrolled infections to become at least temporarily immune. Unless the vaccines are surprisingly effective, Covid19 will always be circulating in lower numbers, but these cases (hopefully!) will be more treatable than uncontrolled spread. But it is and will be an endemic infection for the known future.

Also note that the US currently sucks plague-killed rat testicles when it comes to public mindedness, wearing masks, and social distancing. As a result, we're crippling ourselves badly. Or rather, than authoritarians who use their flags as diapers do. Guess they want an apocalypse. I got reminded of this when I saw a clip of a Taiwanese baseball game where the stands were full. In 2020. We can't do those things in America because, as a society, too many of us are like the proverbial Ik: too selfish to do the right thing even when we benefit from it.

228:

"With vaccines, even if we have to get the darned things yearly"

I remember when I had to have TAB vaccinations every 6 months and, from what I have read, antibodies fade even faster for COVID.

229:

You are obviously correct that brexit was something confected, and that a lot (although not all: something that the last few years seems to have shown is that there are a lot of people who have really, really vile views about various things) of the vote was just an incoherent protest at the damage done by the tories.

However it is not clear to me that the current government will run out of people to blame. What they are busily doing is manufacturing such people – the EU (and hence continental Europeans in general) will of course be to blame for the disaster of a no-deal brexit. The liberal elite will be to blame for whatever it is they are to blame for which is mostly everything, epidemiologists and academics generally will be to blame for CV19, Gypsies will be to blame for all the litter, and so on. This is of course the fascist playbook and it ends where the fascist playbook ends: camps and ovens.

Like you I suspect that a lot of people who voted tory will get fed up, and that they won't move to the left but to some not-so-crypto-fascist party. But I think that party may well be ... the conservative and unionist party, one-white-nation edition.

Going back to the original point: I think a proposed split of the UK which leaves a region which is (depending on where you draw the lines) more populous than Scotland and most of which (again, depending on where you join the lines) was fairly to very strongly remain in a fragment which does not rejoin the EU is implausible.

230:

A) This is actually in the category of pretty effing normal for royalty. If their realm can't afford to keep them in a capitol and/or their lords are uppity and restless, the royal court travels from castle to castle, spreading the misery of supporting the Court around and thereby keeping the lords under a bit of control.

That also points to some of the major weaknesses in this particular idea.

One is that you need massive infrastructure for the capitol to be effective. Dropping it in a place without that infrastructure takes more than 30 years, and after it's moved, you've got a lot of useless infrastructure rotting away. Since we're allegedly heading towards sustainability, building a new capitol every few decades seems more than a little wasteful.

Another is that peri-modern capitols like London and Paris actually control trade very effectively. It's the old all Roads Lead To Rome thing. The reason for doing this is not just to keep the city stocked, it's so that it's easier to tax trade. Washington DC is not at all set up for this, and that's a problem.

That said, I do actually support moving the capitol out of DC, because it's doomed by sea level rise. I'd support moving it to some place around the Great Lakes, like Cleveland, Detroit or Chicago, because trade does flow into the Great Lakes area via the St. Lawrence, and those lakes are going to be a lot more sustainable than the rapidly sinking Atlantic seaboard. With Chicago especially, a lot of highways and railroads already feed into that hub, so it would serve as a more traditional trade-taxing capitol, more like Paris.

But Chicago politics are already so corrupt, you complain. And to that I say: Yep. But that's a problem just about anywhere these days.

Corruption is not a function of the scale of the metropolis. Heck, some of the smaller of the 86 independent cities in Los Angeles County are essentially run as multi-generational aristocracies now. Others, like Commerce and the City of Industry, are areas that are primarily industrial districts with just a few full-time residents who benefit mightily from all that tax money flowing in. And they are rumored to dislike newcomers.

I could go on (Avalon) but the point is that Emperor Constantine's solution of taking a little fishing village somewhere and making it Constantinople to get away from Roman endemic corruption probably won't work so well any more.

Worse, if such a plan were instituted, the land speculators would get to the site first and drive up land values so much that the place would be unbuildable. That's what happened to California. Our first state capitol was supposed to be Benicia, on a bluff overlooking the Sacramento River. The speculators bought up all the land, so they had to move upriver and into the floodplain in a little place called Sacramento, just to get affordable land. Sacramento flooded 10' deep a decade or two later and bankrupted the state, and they actually raised the whole center of town 10 feet and remade the second floors as ground floors, just to deal. Successive floods ultimately led to the whole dam and aqueduct system on which California currently depends. Meanwhile Benicia is still a tiny little town overlooking the river.

231:

You may well be right. I missed the TAB vaccines. We'll see. The path to getting effective vaccines rolled out is a whole problem of its own. Derek Lowe's been blogging about it a bit on In the Pipeline.

232:

That said, I do actually support moving the capitol out of DC, because it's doomed by sea level rise.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/21/926042188/landscape-architects-unveil-plans-to-save-the-national-malls-tidal-basin

233:

And in Chicago, the center of the largest Indian and Pakistani community in the US, or maybe North America, is Dee-Von Ave (spelled Devon).

234:

Heteromeles This is where I disagreed with EC & certainly got it partly wrong ( "endemic" ) - however, however ..... The hope here is the in-trial "Oxford/Zeneca" vaccine, which targets the virus "spikes" ( which enable infection ) rather than the virus itself. Come to that ... so I have to have a booster shot every 12 months, so big fat hairy deal, I can LIVE with that. ( I've had at least three Tetanus jabs ... I'm not sure if I'm allowed any more, though the rules for that one seem to change regularly )

235:

Discuss...

Since nobody else wants to take you up on that...

The problem with your suggestion is that if we could pass a Constitutional Amendment, we wouldn't need to do any of that. Any program for reform in the US that starts with "we need an Amendment to..." is just flat-out wanking in public these days. I mean, you're not an American so you can be excused for the error, but any Constitutional text changes that happen before the wingnuts get marginalized somehow will be the stuff of nightmares.

For this reason i restrict myself to imagining paths that involve only legislation and legitimate executive action. Examples are Court reform (I favor appointing 18 new Justices, reducing the nutcase faction to a rump that can be ignored), elimination of supermajority requirements anywhere that the current Constitution dues not explicitly require them, reforming the lower House so that the disparity of representation for citizens of different States is lower, that kind of thing.

A D party with control of all the elective branches and a willingness to use it could still save the Republic. Signs point to their soon having a chance.

236:

Heard earlier. Yeah, the one and only Bond, James Bond.

237:

I am underwhelmed by Charlie Hebdo. It begins to seem as though they want trouble.

Were I them, I'd published cartoons also ridiculing Jesus, and Trump, and BoJo, and given yesterday I think, the "King of Europe" Nigel.

238:

It's all about racism, plain and simple.

Unless "religious schools" can prove that their syllabus includes ALL of the public school syllabus, the students are coming out of a NON-ACCREDITED school.

And completely wipe out charter schools.

239:

Don't despair :-) I have had closer to ten tetanus jobs - just possibly more. The rules do, indeed, change frequently and there have been at least six changes in the past 70 years, quite probably a lot more. I remember when it was 3 years (possibly even 2).

240:

No. I object.

The same way I object to Kim Stanley Robinson, in 2150, moving the US capital to Denver, which is idiotic, and could no way support the population needed... never mind that there will be people who can't deal with the atmosphere 1mi high.

There's a far simpler and more obvious solution, which has ALL the infrastructure, including rails... and, except for downtown, is > 24' above the current sea level, and even some of that is higher.

The original capital, and a lot of folks wouldn't even have to relocate, says the native Philadelphian.

241:

Charlie Hebdo has published several cartoons of all the members of the Holy Trinity and of the pope too. Many of them were obscene.

242:

Um yeah. And when Cat 5 Hurricane Iota takes out the 24' higher White House, drowing the POTUS in the emergency shelter beneath the building?

I think moving the capitol to Cleveland or Detroit has a certain poetic justice. If nothing else, it gives Canadians the opportunity of finally dealing with Americans and imposing the slightly more sane leadership of Rob Ford's relatives and descendants on us rowdy rhinos* down south.

*Referencing the metaphor where other countries dealing with the US find it like being in a party with a rhinoceros, where the US is the rhinoceros in the room: huge, shortsighted, and not housebroken. Even if the rhino is in a good mood, any time he moves, everyone else gets out of the way. And if he's in a bad mood...

243:

"Packing the courts is more achievable but would be returned in short order. Probably within 2 years."

Nope. To 'pack' the court you need the Presidency and the Senate. If the Democrats succeed with Biden and a newly blue Senate in 2021, the Republicans won't have the Presidency in two years, regardless of what happens in the House and Senate elections in 2022.

244:

"The Atlantic" is worried that the US supreme will replicate the 1850's - unless stopped.

In other news ... Lockdown for Engalnd, with ( FINALLY ) co-ordination with the devolved sections of the UK - postponed to Thursday morning, so there can be a debate & vote on Wednesday. Hopefuly, I & couple of friends will be able to toast the prospective downfall of a Tyrant before we part for at least a month .....

245:

That will reduce the life expectancy by only a few years, and have a negligible hit on the economy.

Wrong.

We have no idea what the long-term post-infection prognosis is for most survivors because the disease is only just reaching 12 months old.

However: we know there is widespread organ damage as a result of microvascular disease. We know that "long haul syndrome" is fairly common and can last for several months or longer -- going by other post-viral syndromes it could well last for years or decades to life.

Taking a one-time 1% mortality rate might be acceptable (not if you're in the 1%, or the 1% is in your family!) if that was all there was to it. But it's totally not acceptable if it comes as 1% mortality plus 10% permanent disability and 20% suffering some degree of low-level impairment for months to years. Never mind if it has a chickenpox/shingles like many-years-subsequent sequel condition that fucks shit up differently but badly for survivors who make it through the first few years.

Basically, we don't know jack about the long-term prognosis, nor will we for many years, and this should scare you witless. Because coming through the pandemic with 10-20% of the population seriously disabled is long-term worse in many ways than coming through it with 10-20% dead.

246:

And completely wipe out charter schools.

As a total supporter of public schools I disagree here. Sort of. Mostly. Kind of. Both of my kids did the public route the entire way. About 1/3 of that total in magnets.

What I've found in my very light weight research is that how charters operate, are certified, and so on in the US varies greatly by state. The nonsense I've read about in NYC is just nuts in my opinion. What we have in NC is mostly good. But some want to make it bad.

What some want though is to destroy public education and are using charters as that path. (DeVoss) And it's hard to separate the good aspects from the wing nut ideas.

247:

The original capital, and a lot of folks wouldn't even have to relocate, says the native Philadelphian.

You object to Denver for heath reasons of the air and want to promote Phili?

Never been in a more humid place in my life. At least one that's in the northern half of the US and not next to the lower half of the Mississippi. And I find the road system there to be much worse than DC. I'm talking routes to get around not maintenance. And that's saying a lot.

And I've spend a LOT of time in the DC area.

248:

Charlie Hebdo has published several cartoons of all the members of the Holy Trinity and of the pope too. Many of them were obscene.

My understanding is that they go after EVERYONE.

My favorite story in this arena is when Isaac Hayes quit the cartoon "South Park" after they ridiculed Scientology. Of which he was a member. This was after the show had ridiculed nearly ever other religion on the planet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Hayes#Departure_from_South_Park

249:

You misunderstood me. I was responding to a post that I understood to be referring to the 'immediate' deaths, and what I stated IS true for those (we do have enough data). Perhaps I should have stressed that the context was the 'immediate' deaths. As you say, if there are delayed deaths, it's a lot worse, but I ended that paragraph with "The bigger problem is the 'long-term COVID', which is FAR less age-dependent. Now, that IS a serious economic problem."

Obviously, I agree with the contents of your post, but it does omit one aspect. As I said, the 'immediate' deaths are closely pro rata to normal risk, and mostly take out the 'economically unproductive' (think: me and Greg), but what I have seen is that 10% of young people get 'long-term COVID'. And that's an entirely different matter and a serious economic problem.

250:

I was already scared witless because we don't know a thing about the prognosis for Covid-19. What got me even more scared was the lack of concern of my co-workers, who had all taken off their masks, once inside our mini-cubicle (low walls) work area.

I was visiting for a few minutes with my P 100 respirator on at all times. I went back home to my telework installation, shaken.

251:

What got me even more scared was the lack of concern of my co-workers, who had all taken off their masks, once inside our mini-cubicle (low walls) work area.

That's what pushed me into retiring — seeing colleagues less than 2m apart taking off their masks because they were 'tired of wearing them' and knowing that my health would potentially be in their hands. (And knowing I was far more vulnerable to immediate consequences.) I figured if the adults were that cavalier about it, the kids would be worse, and opted for early retirement. (I was lucky I had that option.)

Looking at the working conditions now, I'm glad I did it just on stress grounds.

Oh, and to improve morale the school board decided to give management an extra week's pay, because setting up for this whole remote/hybrid education thing has taken extra work. No acknowledgement that the front-line workers have been doing even more extra work for less pay, right from the get-go. Morale among my former colleagues is dropping. Wonder why.

252:

Many of the French place names that litter the Midwest have a common origin and a rather amusing story behind them

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visit_of_the_Marquis_de_Lafayette_to_the_United_States

253:

Sorry, but now you're being silly. I said downtown Philly, and I guarantee they'd be using further north in the city. Plus, with only two major rivers, and with the Schuylkill already having a dam by the Art Museum, putting in flood walls would be a relatively easy fix.

Philly, humid? In the middle of the summer, yeah, and you think DC is less? Really?

It's also got better public transit than DC.

254:

Disagree. For one, a lot of those damn charter schools, whose entire intent was a) screw the public school system, and b) keep their poor dears away from Those People (i.e. segregation).

AND many of them cherry pick the students. When you look at the ones that are not allowed to cherry pick, the results are dead even, or worse than the public schools.

Plus, I want real regulation on home schooling. We DESPERATELY NEED a common understanding, rather than the they think they know this, and y'all think you know that, and....

255:

I realize that "scared witless" is a metaphor, but since I've had to deal with any number of people doing the headless chicken dance when confronted by real emergencies, it's among my least favorite actions, and it's a pretty useless idiom.

For example, if you're scared witless by your coworkers' disregard for anyone's safety, you might, oh, rip off your mask and run away hyperventilating and screaming, thereby saturating your lungs with any viruses in the vicinity.

Presumably that's not what we're talking about? If so, let's find better metaphors. Please?

For the record, I'm not as scared of Covid19 as I am of resurgent smallpox, given the known outcomes.

256:

There are at least four kinds of coronaviruses that cause the common cold, and there's no vaccines for them. Immunity is - yeah, right. So unless people get shots several times a year, vaccines for COVID-19 aren't going to be all that useful.

Wear those masks. And get flu shots.

257:

Smallpox is a known quantity, and we could restart vaccination. Nipah virus and similar are more problematic.

258:

Capital in St Louis. Or Memphis. Or even Tulsa. Middle of the country, accessible by highway, rail, water, air. (Yes, there's a port near Tulsa: Port of Catoosa. Barges, mostly.)

259:

AND many of them cherry pick the students. When you look at the ones that are not allowed to cherry pick, the results are dead even, or worse than the public schools.

Some areas allow that. Some do NOT.

Here in my entire state a charter has to take anyone who shows up. And if over subscribed they must do a lottery. The only pass I know of is once a child is in the younger get a seat if they want to attend.

You're painting all of something with a broad brush that doesn't apply to all.

Which was what I said above.

260:

@ 194 P J Evans

Watch us fall down laughing. As They do to this very day, every second of every day They project on others what Their own objectives, goals and behaviors are.

[ "...it's also to keep it free of the various political desires of states - it's written into the Constitution, under things Congress does (Article I)." ]

Yes, that worked out very well for total domination of the Constitution, the federal government and Washington D.C. to be totally dominated by the Virginians and the slaveholding south until the civil war. When the prospect arrived with Lincoln that it would change -- well they declared war. And began the process all over again when Clinton -- despite being from Arkansas -- got the White House. It was intended forever to belong to Them. Reagan proved that!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

@ 206 Charlie -- It would be easier and cheaper to abolish the cheap airline flights and invest in D.C. which being run by these same sorts They always refuse. Which maybe the virus will have done. But the Capital will have to move (if a USA continues) because it is going to drown fairly soon.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, Mr Sean Connery Bond was a wife beater ... so one cannot really mourn him, yanno?

261:

I may be scared witless at times but I remain brave.

262:

On a Human level, we wish your Mental and Spiritual fortitude much strength.

You're Fucked

BUT HOLY FUCK DID Y'ALL DO FUCK ALL FOR 4 YEARS.

What did American Democrats do? Gave $70 million dollars to a scam outfit fronted by.... the fixers who got Bush and Cheney in power. No, really. Oh, what did they do? Democratic Party snorted up $400 million in donations and then let ACB get verified.

Y'all scooped up $15 billion dollars (btw, peanuts) while the average wealth of the top 1% went up by $850 billion dollars, meaning we could accidentally drop a wallet and have more money than your broke-ass scamming shit).

And...

No, really.

You're utter fucking clowns.

263:

I may be scared witless at times but I remain brave.

I'm the opposite. I'm pretty good at getting sensibly out of trouble, rather than getting scared and charging in without thinking.

To each their own.

264:

Capital in St Louis. Or Memphis. Or even Tulsa. Middle of the country, accessible by highway, rail, water, air. (Yes, there's a port near Tulsa: Port of Catoosa. Barges, mostly.)

Memphis is fair, at least for Mississippi River access, and above any high water line for sea level rise.

Tulsa depends on water from three reservoirs, so it's only as good as the (dust bowl) rain. Furthermore, it doesn't really serve anywhere: it's not a port, it's running out of oil, it's running out of farmland from the Oglalla, and it's in tornado alley. It's not clear what the advantage is of going there.

St. Louis is an unreinforced brick city sitting near the New Madrid Earthquake fault. As a Californian, I got the serious twitches every time I visited there. You're quite right that it's got access to the Mississippi and the highways east and west, but it's eventually going to get trashed the same way any west coast city will eventually go.

In contrast, Chicago is one transit point between the Mississippi system and the Great Lakes, so it's a natural transhipment point. So is Cleveland, which is on the old Portage Path between Lake Erie and streams leading into the Ohio River. Both lead to the Atlantic via the Great Lakes Waterway and St. Lawrence Seaway. By putting a capitol in either place, you capture trade between the Atlantic and the Caribbean, as well as through much of the northeastern US and the most densely inhabited part of Canada. With climate change, that's a pretty good choice.

That's my logic in pitching these cities as future capitals: it's about a future where people move north and inland. Cities along the Great Lakes are well-situated for it, more than cities south of there. Even without taking killer humidity into consideration.

265:

St. Louis is an unreinforced brick city sitting near the New Madrid Earthquake fault.

And you think Memphis is NOT? Seriously.

New Madrid runs from SOUTH of St. Louis all the way down to North of Memphis. Most of the last big quake occurred south of where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet. (I grew up in Paducah and I don't want to live where the ground moves either.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811%E2%80%931812_New_Madrid_earthquakes

266:

You're not.

Try matching a -$trillion hole to stop your SLAVE MASTERS utterly dominating your Minds. Or running guns in Mogadishu or surviving as a Muslim in 1947 India. Etc etc.

Running out of fucking granola in CA ain't it.

Point is: Nope.

@Naiai : new song by Sinead O'Connor - "Trouble of the World" (you remember her: Pope, picture , Islam, now this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lnYBbYeMts

Worth a watch.

$15 billion on the US President is now chicken feed. $500 mil in India for Modi? Cow Dung.

You literally just handed all the fucking psychos (outside of .mil funding) an infinite stack of cash that can never run out. Literally.

That's the point. And it's also True

[1] Btw Greg. We Survived.

267:

above any high water line for sea level rise.

Where would you put that line? I've seen an estimate of 80 meters sea rise if all the ice melted everywhere and the seas warmed, but that's probably a few hundred years out. But if I were building for the centuries, I'd want to be 100 m above current sea level, just to be safe.

If you were building to last to, say, 2150(*), where would you put the line?

(*) Attempts to extrapolate the next 130 years are, of course, mostly futile -- consider how an extrapolator in 1890 would have done in predicting the current state of affairs. But we do what we can with what we've got, and such exercises may not be totally useless.

268:

Love this discussion.

I am an American who studied a year in the UK and traveled around Europe a bit. The US has moved so far to the right in the last 40 years, and it is getting even worse.

After Trump won in 2016 I made what I considered an innocuous remark among coworkers who I knew were pro-Trump - that we really needed to get rid of the Electoral College (EC). Didn't mean it in any other way than it is not democratic and skews our politics. Two of my coworkers vehemently disagreed, because they didn't want this liberals on the coasts telling them what to do. I pointed out that that was not very democrat. They DID NOT CARE.

Over the last 4 years Trump and the Republican cult who follow him have wrecked about every norm we have had in politics, don't care about the law, don't even care a bit about trying to be truthful or trying to find out what the truth is. Maybe I was naive, but it seems there was some limits to what you could try to pull over on people 20 years ago. Now we live in a dystopia where people say and believe things that are demonstrably untrue.

When Sean Spicer insisted that Trump's audience at the inauguration was bigger than Obama's when it clearly wasn't, I knew we were in deep trouble. If they lie on the FIRST DAY about something that has NO REAL SIGNIFICANCE, they will lie about everything and anything.

Reminded me of Karl Rove's quote that "we make reality now" or something along those lines. This right-wing impulse to believe you can "make" reality bend to your beliefs has reached its final conclusion, where members of the executive branch claim "almost no one" is dying from Covid-19 and we have "rounded the corner" when we just had a day with over 100K new cases.

As many have said, the trouble with trying to shape reality with rhetoric is that you get used to it "working" but then you try to spin reality and reality bites back.

I think the Democrats will win every branch of the government and Trump will say the election was stolen from him and try to overturn the results, via state legislatures, SCOTUS, declaration of a national emergency, whatever he thinks will work. Pretty sure he will call out the right wing gangs to defend the "real" results of the election. As we are all aware, there are an enormous number of people with serious weapons and serious mental disorders who feel it would be patriotic to kill the "socialists" who are taking over the country. Trump stirs up trouble and people get killed on both sides and we slip toward serious internal political violence. Then the Trump people offer a compromise; maybe Trump and his gang are totally immune from prosecution (although I don't know how this would be enforced against the southern district of NY for example). Possibly Trump and Biden meet and Trump just flat out threatens to kill thousands of people at some anti-Trump protest unless Biden concedes defeat.

I am so angry at these criminal idiots that I am completely against any type of compromise a la Gore in 2000. And if and when the democrats take over, I demand that Trump, his family, his advisers all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I want to see Trump in jail, Kushner in jail, the whole lot (of course for actual crimes, but my God there is no end to the crimes they have committed).

And the Democrats should do whatever it takes to ensure - not continued democratic rule - but a complete dismantling of the voter suppression, police state. Get Fox News and other outright propaganda off the airwaves.

Four years ago I heard how "angry" these whites without degrees were, that they were so desperate that they took a chance on Trump (after being told for 20 years the Clintons were the anti-Christ). There are a LOT of people like me who are just or more angry than they were.

Four minutes after Trump either concedes or is dragged out of the White House he and the Rs will blame the whole virus and economic problems on Biden and the Ds. Typical.

I hope this post doesn't get rejected. Sorry if I am venting. Politically I am a left democrat, not antifa or extreme left wing or someone who wants to resort to violence. There are a significant number of like minded people (I think, I hope), and we will not just lie down and take it. I intend to protest and put intense political pressure on institutions if these criminals try to take power.

269:

I'm voting Biden, but I'm not happy over it. When it comes right down to it, the Democrats are, at best, the janitors - they clean up after the Republicans, quite submissively, but don't ever exert any discipline.

270:

Better to win with Biden than lose with Warren. The good news is that he's centrist enough to not scare off the independents.

Otherwise I agree with you. I liked the Faceplant snark saying that Biden was the rebound relationship after breaking up with the abuser. Not Mr. Forever, but the one to restore your faith in relationships. And, hopefully, the one to convince you that you're actually into women.

As for discipline, right now I'm humming a politics-swapped version of "Strange Fruit," so I'm certainly not the one to restore nonpartisan discipline in the mess we're in. Hopefully Ol' Uncle Joe was serious when he said he wasn't letting them walk, as they did in 2008.

271:

letting them walk

Yes, I think history is more on the side of 1945 than 1865 as far as the individual perps are concerned. They shouldn't walk.

But not collectively. Marshall Plan, not the Treaty of Versailles. Just how you do that for the red states and areas is something that needs a bit of consideration.

272:

I hope this post doesn't get rejected. Sorry if I am venting. Politically I am a left democrat, not antifa or extreme left wing or someone who wants to resort to violence. You're fine here. You do need to understand what your limits are, and more important how flexible they are given the behavior of the opposition. We've had discussions here about non-violent methods. (My default is that camp.) OTOH we have a regular here who once casually mentioned in a monkey-wrenching discussion that they knew how to adjust a helicopter so that it would spontaneously disassemble in flight. And ... stay super ready/alert for the next several months at least. Whatever prep you do will be like 10 percent of what the RW nuts are doing. Tool up with whatever tools you are good with. Read up on protest tactics and security and anti-coup tactics. Work a bit on COMSEC(and OPSEC) - e.g. reports are DHS broken some rules(maybe laws) in Portland: DHS analyzed protester communications, raising questions about previous statements by senior department official, and that included reading the messages on at least one Telegram group, somehow, perhaps phone cloning of a member's phone.

273:

Just how you do that for the red states and areas is something that needs a bit of consideration. Red-state hurricanes (check out the storm tracks the last several years), derechos, etc. Disaster relief money as leverage. The Red states threw the non-partisan disaster relief money norm into the woodchipper a while ago, stupid them. There will be other acute fracturing events impacting the US (the world, some of them) - they will also be political opportunities. All while being excruciatingly nice, and fair. :-) But yeah, a good question that would need careful consideration. Must separate Rs from power first(non-trivial), though, with eyes on back (and sides and top and bottom) of the head watching allies. (e.g. Lincoln Project; they've burned some bridges, but are still who they were, as mentioned I think above.) (And; these years will be golden years when seen from the future.)

274:

In Wellington, NZ, there's a Lancaster St. It is of course pronounced as God intended - Lan-cass-ter. This gave my English aunt conniptions.

275:

OTOH, your aunt should have been happy that, back when I were a lad, Majoribanks St were definitely "March-banks". Not so much in these degenerate days.

JHomes

276:

Er, how on earth was she expecting it to be pronounced?

277:

Lin cis ter ?

278:

Apropos the way forward for Mr Biden should he win, I suggest reading Bret Devereaux on the subject at his blog here :-

https://acoup.blog/2020/10/30/fireside-friday-october-30-2020/

My opinion, as a non US person, is that the US is too big and there is a distinct lack of commonality between the far-flung states. The best way forward would be to disassemble the US into a series of smaller states. An independent Hawaii and New England is an easy win-any ideas on the rest, would Canada accept Alaska as a member of the Dominion?

279:

The political divisions don't follow state boundaries very well at all.

Here in NC Charlotte and the Raleigh/Durham area tend one way, most of the rest physically the other.

Florida and Texas similarly except the differences tend to be more extreme.

Out west the coastal regions, west of the Sierra Mountains, tend liberal, while the eastern halves tend militia conservative. With pockets like Bend OR breaking even those rules.

The map of such a split would make what was Yugoslavia look simplistic.

Our biggest issue is the rural/urban divide. With the "burbs" in the middle. And it is driving the R's nuts that the burbs seem to maybe be trending toward the urban crowd. Especially as the old fart boomers like me die off.

280:

Bryan Kansas City The US has moved so far to the right in the last 40 years, and it is getting even worse. Same happening here ... except. There are serious forces resisting that change - many of us can see what is/has happened in the USA & don't like it. Unbfortunately, the most obvious example of that rightward drift is ... Brexit, which we are now lumbered with. At the moment, it is recognised that BoZo is a liar, but is still regarded as "funny" ... but that is diminishing rapidly. The centre/left is rapidly regaining popularity, fortunately - though we have 4 more years of this shower, if we are unlucky.

Bill Arnold Yeah, what about Thw Lincoln Project people? They're like the Conservatives ejected from the tory party by BoZo, I think, as an analogy.... Some of them have been actually honourable, i.e. "Never Trump" - others, not so much.

281:

Allen Thompson @ 267: consider how an extrapolator in 1890 would have done in predicting the current state of affairs.

Funny you should say that. The 1890s had a full-on environmental crisis going in the cities:

This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”

Of course it didn't work out like that. Henry Ford created affordable easy-to-operate motor transport, Edison and Westinghouse electrified the cities, and by 1944 horses were almost completely redundant in cities and increasingly redundant outside them.

283:

For the record, I'm not as scared of Covid19 as I am of resurgent smallpox, given the known outcomes.

Don't go there. Just don't.

Smallpox may be extinct in the wild but there are still samples in biological warfare labs around the world for an absolute certainty. Smallpox has been sequenced, it's a relatively simple RNA virus, and several years ago idiot journalists from New Scientist used a mail-order RNA synthesis lab to order sequences of Variola minor to prove a point -- that our defenses against some shitbag resurrecting this nightmare were minimal. Guess what? It's illegal to do that now, but enforcement ... almost certainly still minimal, because it's easier to legislate than it is to impose a weapons proliferation regime as picky as the one on plutonium sales on a standard medical/research technology.

Finally there are stories (not obviously supported by evidence) out of the collapse of the Soviet biological warfare program about a weaponized maximally-lethal smallpox loaded on some ICBMs reserved for a second strike role as a final "fuck you" to be used in event of the destruction of the USSR -- obviously this isn't a sane first strike weapon for even a paranoid, aggressive superpower, but if you're dead and you want to take your murderer with you, it kinda-sorta makes sense (if you have a reckless disregard for everyone else on the planet).

(The USA claims not to have gone down this road, and arguably didn't need to ... but remember the settlers and the smallpox-infected blankets? There's historical form. And who knows who the hell else went there. The sad fact is, biological weapons are a game that's easier to get into than nukes, as long as you're prepared to forcibly vaccinate your whole population.)

So: smallpox is a credible threat, and we have anti-Vaxxers coming out of our ears. What are you willing to bet that if there's a weaponized poxvirus outbreak there'll be an idiot chorus of "it's no worse than COVID19" and "stop exaggerating"?

284:

Another angle on Apple, the usable lifetime can be quite long, in effect, more economical than buying inexpensive hardware more frequently.

A few years ago, I was forced to throw away my perfectly-functional 4-year-old iPhone and buy a replacement, because the old phone could not be upgraded to any version of iOS that was still receiving security updates, and was thus permanently insecure.

285:

Yes, I think history is more on the side of 1945 than 1865 as far as the individual perps are concerned. They shouldn't walk.

I'd like to note that the Trump regime has escalated from petty insults -- exaggerating about the inauguration crowd size -- to criminal negligence in office -- the utter failure to promptly rebuild Puerto Rico after the hurricane landfall -- to crimes against humanity -- babies in cages; toddlers in the dock in immigration court: cops violently assaulting peaceful demonstrators: providing top cover for racist lynch mobs -- and now arguably genocide. The COVID19 death toll in the US is likely to be around the 240,000 mark by election day. If Trump loses the election, he will go on a superspreader rally spree, and block attempts at pandemic control. Upshot: I suspect the USA will be somewhere in the range 300,000-400,000 dead before he's kicked out on January 20th. Possibly as high as half a million, because exponentials exponentiate and the entire US healthcare system is poised for collapse. (You can't run a hospital if all the doctors and nurses need oxygen.)

The worst case for COVID19 in the US is that it's going to be the worst mass casualty event since the Slaveowners Treasonous Rebellion.

PS: not gloating. Our fuckstain prime minister has finally agreed to put England back into Tier 4 lockdown, about 2-4 months too late: we're looking at another 80,000-120,000 dead over the winter season, on top of the 60,000 already dead -- the per-capita equivalent for the US would be a million corpses: Boris Johnson is definitely going for the "hold my beer" in this race to the bottom.

286:

The centre/left is rapidly regaining popularity, fortunately - though we have 4 more years of this shower, if we are unlucky.

Four years is too much.

I don't think I'm sticking my neck out if I predict that the political climate of England on November 1st, 2021 will be absolutely unrecognizable from where it is today (November 1st, 2020). Certainly BoZo won't be PM by then, barring a miracle. Quite possibly Scotland will already have voted to leave the UK. But those are the predictable aspects of 2021, before the full onslaught of Disaster Capitalism strikes.

Less definite but equally possible and worrying: 250,000 to 300,000 dead from COVID19, Sterling crashing to below US dollar parity, several major regions and city councils going bankrupt, food riots, mass protests rising to the level of a general strike, resumed paramilitary bombing campaigns in NI, major banks going into public ownership (because they're not viable without government support -- see 2008), major banks going bankrupt (and by major I mean "pick any two of Lloyds, Barclays, NatWest, HSBC") and the government cancelling the deposit protection scheme because it costs too much (so millions of people lose their savings), collapse of the London stock exchange and/or Lloyds, one or more major climate change events directly affecting the UK (e.g. a summer drought), the car industry collapsing, Airbus shutting down production in the UK, TfL being forced into bankruptcy and parted out to private equity, the Biden admin deciding the UK isn't stable enough to be allowed to play with Trident missiles and a UNSC permanent seat, race riots and "anti-immigrant" pogroms.

I can't quite see England going the whole distance to a military-backed coup by November 2021, but by November 2023? All bets are off.

287:

throw away my perfectly-functional 4-year-old iPhone

  • You keep those and use them as iPods.

  • I'm guessing you bought it right before that model was discontinued or superseded? Apple typically provide five years of software updates for phones after introduction, but sell older models at reduced price/spec for a couple of years after they're superseded -- e.g. they just introduced the iPhone 12 range but are still selling the iPhone 11 and iPhone Xr (a rebadged XS) as entry-level models, so devices up to 3 years old.

  • There was one big rupture a few years ago when they pushed out a 64-bit-only update to iOS that obsoleted a bunch of earlier models, but that ain't happening again: it was a one-time-only issue (early iPhones used 32-bit ARM cores).

    Support for macs is even longer lived: I have a 2011 Macbook Pro -- technically obsolete -- that won't take upgrades as of the next macOS release, due around August 2021. A PC laptop would probably have crumbled into obsolescence well before then -- would you be happy installing Windows 10 (latest iteration) on hardware specced for Windows 7, which sunsetted in 2019?

    288:

    BKC @ 268 How about this for post coital regerets vide DJT? ( Scaramucci )

    Charlie : 285 BoZo is rapidly losing all credibility, after this, but .... 286 C-19 deaths & worse the Long-Covid afermath ... anyone's guess, but NOT GOOD is certain.

    Well, the Brexit negotiations are getting froaught with C-19 Assuming Biden wins, BoZo will cave to "Brussels" immediately ( i.e. come to some vaugely sensible arrangement ) but it will still be a shit sandwich. Miltary-backed coup - here? REALLY? More likely a "governemnt of national unity, led by Starmer - who can then be blamed by the tory rump, another 5 years down the line, actually.

    289:

    In the novel Warday, by Strieber and Kunetka, Canada buys Alaska from a USA weakened by a limited nuclear war with the USSR. In real life Vermont is much more likely to want to join Canada than Alaska.

    290:

    Miltary-backed coup - here? REALLY? More likely a "governemnt of national unity, led by Starmer - who can then be blamed by the tory rump, another 5 years down the line, actually.

    Remember there was nearly an MI5/Army backed coup in the early 1970s? Sterling crisis, IMF intervention, strikes, Northern Ireland going sideways and on fire, etc ...

    I reckon 2021 will be at least as bad as 1973-74, and quite probably much worse: remember, Brexit is cover for the application of the Shock Doctrine to the British economy. See also Chile 1973-80, Russia 1991-2000. Nobody getting paid, industries at standstill, oligarchs buying up everything that isn't nailed down for pennies on the pound.

    So I'm not ruling anything out -- although I think a government of national unity led by a sacrificial lamb/useful idiot from the Labour front bench is likely to happen first (then possibly a coup attempt if the GONU looks like it's working against the interests of the disaster capitalists who created the crisis in the first place).

    291:

    My uninformed take:

    Biden will get a clear majority of the popular vote.

    Trump will do anything to make sure the votes aren't properly counted, and make sure the electoral College delivers for him.

    Irrespective of who wins, there will be fallout. Expect increased "civil unrest" aided and abetted by the Blue Lives Matter uniformed brigade.

    And of course Borisconi won't do a damn thing to make things better over here until he knows which ass he's going to kick.

    292:

    which ass he's going to kick.

    Kiss, surely?

    293:

    See Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us".

    294:

    Really? Nearly a coup, that is. Unless you know something I don't, when I should be interested to learn.

    There assuredly was an attempt to start one, but that never got beyond the lunatic fringe - which, admittedly, included much of MI5. But I don't think more that a little of the army would have played ball, and it would have been jumped on almost as soon as it started. Well, it was :-)

    I think that a coup is almost more likely now. If things go as pear-shaped as in your or my posts, there is a high chance that Bozo's more insane successor will overstep and essentially suspend our 'democracy', and/or flagrantly sell out the country to the USA etc. At that point, it is possible that Sturgeon, Starmer, the Chiefs of Staff and Charlie Boy will petition HM, and we might see a Very British Coup (though completely the other way round from the book).

    295:

    "So: smallpox is a credible threat, and we have anti-Vaxxers coming out of our ears. What are you willing to bet that if there's a weaponized poxvirus outbreak there'll be an idiot chorus of "it's no worse than COVID19" and "stop exaggerating"?"

    At that point the attitude of the overwhelming majority of the US public will be 'let them die' combined with 'vaccinate the children by force'.

    The thing about COVID is that it's in the deniable range of infection and lethality.

    296:

    That's how my English parents pronounced it, too. (In the context of the WWII bomber.)

    I wonder if there's a regional/class difference at work?

    297:

    This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”

    My grandfather told me that the advent of the motor car made London a much cleaner and healthier place to live. Yesterday's solutions are today's problems…

    298:

    Less definite but equally possible and worrying: 250,000 to 300,000 dead from COVID19

    Going by published numbers [various caveats apply], UK fatalities, 46229 as of yesterday, have been sticking closely to an exponential increase with a doubling time of about 11 days since the first of September. Extrapolate to taste.

    299:

    OGH ... You seem to be getting more and more depressed about the possibility of the UK, or more likely England, coming through the next 5-years without massive socio political unrest. I'm interested know what was the tipping point that pushed you from pessimism to downright apoco-pessimism

    300:

    Govt "worst case" model projected 120,000 deaths over winter. For the past month cases (and the R coefficient) have been comfortably in excess of that worst case.

    Also: 46.2K COVID19 deaths on death certificates, but over 61K surplus deaths -- COVID19 recording as a cause of death is decidedly dodgy, with some clear cases being attributed to other causes (because no antibody test within a specific time window, or because they died of secondary issues in the immediate wake of COVID19). The government has a strong incentive to massage the figures downwards, so why wouldn't they?

    301:

    Brexit and Trump, with a side-order of the global alt-right front pushing forward with terminal disaster capitalist policies fronted by overt xenophobia and racism.

    It's a reaction by The Money to the dual-pronged threat of anthropogenic climate change and the End of Oil (and coal) as sources of rent, plus the more subtle effect of a global money laundering financial system increasingly divorced from actual wealth creation processes and instead focussing on wealth aggregation: basically, the kleptocrats have taken back control, and we're their victims, and it appears to be a global phenomenon and they don't even care that their own children are going to die as a result.

    I think we'll survive, as a species, but it's going to be unpleasant and many of us, as individuals, will not make it.

    302:

    Interesting. I was expecting Brexit, and wasn't expecting that bunch of charlatans to do anything other than fuck it up royally, so that didn't change my view. What triggered it for me was (a) the looting of public funds and fascism becoming overt and (b) the way the sheeple and Labour party were prepared to accept that.

    303:

    You still did better than the early adopters who bought Core Solo & Core Duo Intel Macs or the ones who bought Windows on ARM machines* a few years ago.

    *Windows on ARM may return, barring economic collapse, but not for those machines.

    304:

    Just what do the moneyed class think they'll be able to buy after they've killed the economy? Will they hover briefly over the abyss like Wile E. Coyote?

    305:

    (286) "Certainly BoZo won't be PM by then, barring a miracle."

    Hopefully he won't be PM by that time. But I think he still will be - bozo's an egomaniac who will seek to remain in power for as long as he can. And his own MPs, famous for their rubber backbones will never vote for something if it means their own party is thrown out of power or they lose their seats in parliament. So there's no chance of bozo being binned by his own. They'll always choose to remain in power even if it means they have an idiot as PM.

    I also think that a lot of the stories that appeared in the press recently and stories about bozo wanting to quit or not "enjoying" being PM are probably not much more than westminister chitter-chatter. Prehaps the origin of these stories are from within the tory party and from a small few tory MPs who don't really like bozo?

    Moving back to the US election I've read many times now if there is a trump victory bozo will throw his EU negociations under a bus, or if there's a biden victory he has serious problems as he'll have to upset one part of his party. But I doubt that even the upset part of his (bozo's) party will get rid of him. (See above about not wanting to be out of power).

    What I've not heard anyone talk about is what bozo might do if trump objects to the election result and sends the whole thing to court. Then since the whole thing goes to court it is unclear who gets to be next president and with the uncertianty and the brexit deadline looming ever closer what does bozo do without a clear answer?

    306:

    They'll buy sports cars from Japan and seal fur coats from Canada. There are other producers of luxury goods around the globe.

    307:

    Easy. He will do the first thing that passes through his, er, mind that he feels will get him off the immediate hook, until such time as he fucks it up SO badly that even his own MPs want him out. Has he ever done anything different? The only question is when that will be.

    308:

    What I expect for the Tories is that they'll let Boris run the country into the ditch for easy looting, and bottom put the place. Only after that will people be willing to replace him and only then will competent people want the post.

    Until then it's a poisoned chalice.

    309:

    Tim H @ 304: Just what do the moneyed class think they'll be able to buy after they've killed the economy?

    The trouble is, there is no Omniscient Council of Vagueness running capitalism. It would be a lot simpler if there was: we would just have to find them and explain things. But without such a council the billionaires are just as trapped as the rest of us.

    I've been looking for an alternative to capitalism for some years now and I still haven't found it. The best option I can see is a kinder, gentler capitalism along "Nordic" lines, which seems to work the least badly of any system I've seen so far. I'm reluctant to call that "socialism", partly because its still capitalism, but mostly because then I'd be agreeing with the Republican party.

    310:

    I'm reluctant to call that "socialism", partly because its still capitalism, but mostly because then I'd be agreeing with the Republican party.

    Also because it does not match the basic definition of socialism, which is "common ownership of the means of production".

    Really, to call Nordic system "socialism" is like calling a duck a fish. Duck has a few things in common with fish. It is still a bird.

    311:

    That might prove difficult to do with Dollars and The Pound Sterling if they no longer represent living economies.

    312:

    True, but capitalism with a few things borrowed from socialism, while being all kludgy, can save a Nation from hosting a piece of "Richistan", which seems to involve the wealthiest citizens being alienated from any sense obligation to the State which enabled their good fortune.

    313:

    This story (in a local Pennsylvania news outlet) made it to the Washington Post[1] (the Trump campaign was told no in this case). Ooops: Security info request from Trump campaign perturbs Cumberland County officials ahead of election (Zack Hoopes, Oct 30, 2020) (bold mine) The Trump campaign described the request as “standard election transparency details,” but local officials find the implication — that the President’s campaign staff is harvesting election security plans through what appears to be a personal web-based email account — to be extremely concerning. “It’s almost kind of chilling the sort of data they wanted us to provide,” Cumberland County Commissioner Gary Eichelberger said. “This is basically the whole security plan. We’ve never received a request of this detail and I find it troubling that one of the interested parties [in the election outcome] feels they have a right to information that obviously could jeopardize the security of the ballots.”

    This is especially funny: But the details O’Shaughnessy asked for in her email do not concern ballot verification; rather, they are specific physical security details for ballots and voting machines. These include information on “the location(s) that ballots are immediately sent to when polls close (including address and room number)” as well as “the individuals who transport the ballots to the location(s).” The campaign is also asking for “the time(s) when are ballots are transported to canvass site,” information on any security provided, and “the best point of contact for each storage location(s) of the ballots.”

    Better than even odds that a Team Trump Clown Ops A Team (and their vehicle(s), important) is caught and identified somewhere on high resolution surveillance cameras, and maybe in person, attempting to steal/manipulate/destroy ballots(/voting machines/whatever). And will then try to spin their own failed efforts as evidence of massive election fraud. Hell, if I were in that county, I'd quietly hide trail cams (or similar) (with cell links and email on motion detect) around and maybe set up ambushes, just for fun. Maybe the local officials already have. At any rate, the GOP has now announced their intent (they have clear motives; behind in polls). (Which could be attempted false flag ops, of course.)

    [1] Charlie asked for no WaPo links. The title of the piece is "Trump campaign sought sensitive ballot security information from Pa. county, alarming commissioner".

    314:

    Just what do the moneyed class think they'll be able to buy after they've killed the economy?

    Asia.

    Once they've finished asset stripping the West, The LocustsTM will move on to East and South Asia. But, I'm not enough of an expert on China or India to speculate on how that will play out. E.g. will they buy off the CCP or go to war with them as an enemy faction?

    As to the long game, to the extent there is one, I'm confident they're keeping an eye on Elon Musk's Mars project. If/when it becomes viable, they'll start planning to exploit it. Endgame: luxury villas overlooking the Martian plains with a vast, 3rd/4th-generation colonial servant class supported by AI running all the life support machinery.

    315:

    And yet my iPhone 4 and my wife’s iPhone 3 are both still working perfectly well, including the original batteries. Both were bought within a week or two of the initial release. And my 8 y.o. iMac is updatable to the next release of Mac OS, as is my 7 y.o. Mac mini. My 6 y.o. iPad is doing very nicely (it’s what I’m typing this on) and the original iPad was passed to a niece after replacing the drop-damaged screen. My wife’s 6 y.o. MacBook got replaced this Jan only because she managed to give it a large cup of tea. Previous Macs of various forms have lasted similarly. In fact another niece is still using a 2004 G5 iMac.

    So by and large I’d have to say that Apple hardware has been a pretty good deal for me.

    316:

    @310: What I think people want is "Capitalism with a Human Face." To counterfeit a phrase. I think it could work.

    317:

    You still did better than the early adopters who bought Core Solo & Core Duo Intel Macs or the ones who bought Windows on ARM machines* a few years ago.

    That was circa 2006-2009, for the first generation Intel Macs. They got software updates for about 5 years rather than the more recent models (still getting them at 9-10 years after introduction).

    Windows on ARM is returning, but it's all-new hardware and the first iteration isn't getting resurrected.

    318:

    The Core Solo & Core duo Macs were 32 bit and dead ended with 10.6 Snow Leopard, one major update more than the last PPC Macs. Though they did get security updates.

    319:

    It works in Denmark, where even the fire and rescue operations are run by a private company, Falck.

    320:

    BTW, I'm not referring to the slightly later Core2Duo, which was 64bit, to various degrees, depending on whether it was from 2007, 08 or 09.

    321:

    I have clients doing CAD on iMacs from 6 or 7 years ago. (They would like to buy newer but times are tough just now.)

    Anyway, swapping the spinning rust for SSDs gave them all a huge boost a few years back. Speed isn't all that bad except for some rendering which can be done on other systems. Biggest issue are that some of the displays have some burn in / burn out. We're shuffling them around to the spare pile.

    At home I have 2 MacMinis of "Late 2012" vintage. They run the Current macOS and will run the next one I think. But even with SSDs installed they are getting to be a bit slow. I guess I'll have to replace them after 9 years of service.

    322:

    Govt "worst case" model projected 120,000 deaths over winter. For the past month cases (and the R coefficient) have been comfortably in excess of that worst case.

    Headline from one of today's CNN stories.

    Boris Johnson accused of 'giving in to scientific advisers' as England heads for lockdown

    I guess the Ouija board users were miffed at not being consulted. Or maybe they were consulted bug lost out in the debate.

    Hold my beer indeed.

    323:

    Charlie ( 290 ) Really? Even for you, that's unduly pessimistic. There wasn't "Nearly" a coup - some idiots thought it might be nice, tried asking prospective "Leaders" & got told where to go, IIRC. SEE ALSO EC - yes ... I really don't think Brian, or Brenda, old though she is & CERTAINLY not William sitting still over that one! Correct in that IF we get crash-out, then 2021 will be very unpleasant indeed. I still think Wednesday onwards, as the US results emerge is the critical point. If Trumpolini wins we are all utterly fucked, with the UK becoming Österreich-Ungarn to Trump's Zweite Reich as a replay - if DJT loses, then a different path is taken - I have a question about that for our US correspondents, actually - at the end of this ... [ Murphy's Lawyer /Charlie - that should be LICK ] ( 301 ) Coal is DEAD, here .... See also Tim H's question - very apposite.

    EC @ 307 Correct Which is why if Trumpolini loses ( Including disputing an obvious "fail" for him & his goons that he does not accept ) ... then BoZo will break for a "settlement" with the EU ... It keeps him in suposed "control" doesn't it?

    Calling all US correspondents ( Esp inc Bill Arnold @ 313 ) MOST if not all of the key states that the D's need to win back are in the East or centre of the USA, 5 or 6 hours behind GMT. [ Florida / Georgia / Michigan / Minnesota / N Carolina / Pennsylvania / Wisconsin ] And most of your polls close ridiculously early ... Even allowing for the UTTERLY BONKERS different rules about counting & postal votes & pre-counting dropped-off votes between "states" ... By what time (GMT) will it be apparent ( see list above ) will it be clear, even given your, um "variations" that DJT has lost or is in actual dispute. I expect to be in a pub(*) on Wednesday evening - booked before the lockdown was announced - between 17.30 & 20.00 GMT, with the intertubes avalable on my magic phone-screen. Is it likely that I/we will know if Biden has actually won, or not, by then? I'm assuming the arsehole will cry foul & try every trick in the book, but am ignoring that, ok?

    (*) The Hope, Carshalton

    324:

    By what time (GMT) will it be apparent ( see list above ) will it be clear, even given your, um "variations" that DJT has lost or is in actual dispute.

    For a discussion, not an answer, see

    https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing/

    and

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-candidates-might-fall-short-of-270-electoral-votes-on-election-night-but-how-close-might-they-get/

    325:

    The people who own the UK do not keep their money in UK-dependent locations.

    326:

    I just replaced my daily work driver -- a 2014 27" iMac Retina -- with a like-for-like upgrade. The old one was a bit flaky at times and I decided I didn't want to wait for first generation Apple Silicon when I could get a final-iteration Intel model with hopefully all the bugs squished. It is a beast, and should future-proof me for the next six years, too.

    (And I just pulled the trigger on the same upgrade for my wife, b/c her iMac is only six months younger than my old one, I expect sterling to tank in January if there's a no-deal brexit -- buy now before the price goes up 30% -- and besides, this year's lack of travel has dented my business tax deductibles, so there' room.)

    327:

    One frustrating thing. When people debate herd immunity vs lockdown/contact tracing, the point they seem to miss is that the main observable economic effect is that virus prevalence drives economic effects, particularly in economies with high Gini coefficients.

    Discretionary income is mostly in the hands of the upper middle and upper classes, who can also mostly work from home.

    Regardless of lockdown status, most wealthy middle+ aged people are not interested in chancing a nasty hospital trip to go on vacation, paying for in person classes for their kids, or maid service. Given that those are also the people who still have discretionary income... And the reality is that you can't force people outside effectively, so herd immunity mostly takes as long as vaccination, assuming it is achievable.

    The question is whether or not strict measures can lower virus prevalence enough to lower the economic hit more than they cost. It has been successful in Asia and island nations, not so much elsewhere. There may be cultural issues...

    328:

    GMT

    Note that most of the US just switched to Standard Time, meaning that the East Coast will be GMT-5 on Election Night, West Coast GMT-8.

    329:

    By what time (GMT) will it be apparent ( see list above ) will it be clear, even given your, um "variations" that DJT has lost or is in actual dispute.

    You may be thinking on the wrong time scale.

    Enjoy your pints and maybe reserve the seat for a week or few. (Will pubs even be open after the recent new lock down in the UK?)

    If it comes down to Pennsylvania (PA), and that is way up above a trivial chance, you might be talking days. Ditto Texas(TX) and Florida(FL). Or even North Carolina(NC) depending.

    Here in NC and many other states law NOW says we count mail in and early voting ballots as they come in and just seal the results. Well count is a bit of a term as we feed them state wide into tabulation machines and stack the paper in case things really go south. So in NC, which may be a difference maker, around 8PM eastern, 1AM GMT you will know our totals for early voting and within an hour or two after that 95% of the total. But if the margin is less than the outstanding mail in ballots then WE IN NC get to wait until Nov 12 before we stop accepting ballots postmarked by Nov 3.

    In PA they, by law which made sense way back when, they can't start counting until election day. So it might be a while as they will have millions of ballots to feed into machines. And since most machines will be at actual polling places the ability to do so is limited. So if it's PA that determines things, buckle up. And they can't accept ballots after Nov 3 via the mail because that's the law there.

    TX is fairly fast at counting but they now have over 100K early ballots tied up in a lawsuit over how they were turned in via drop off boxes. So if the margin late night Nov 3 is under or even near 100K then things might take a few days/weeks.

    FL has similar but different issues. Ballots are piling up in some post office processing sites (as of Friday) and FL requires ballots to be in by election day, Nov 3. And a judge just told the post office to basically drop everything else and take care of the ballots. Period. Not sure if that was in FL or a wider area.

    Anyway, unless it's a blowout, the result will not be in for days. Maybe not till Dec 13 which is the deadline for the Electoral College to be set.

    And that date is what really drove the 2000 BvG issue. The SCOTUS voted 7-2 that the recounts violated the equal protection clause. The 5-4 vote was about the law stating that Electors must be set by "Monday after the second Wednesday in December". One day I need to read the actual decision by the 4 about why that should have been ignored. Other than "we do/do not like the result" that most people yell about.

    330:

    Also, in this video Nate Silver (fivethirtyeight) says that there's a (roughly) 60 percent chance that Biden wins AND we know by "3 AM". (The link is to the relevant bit.) Nate Silver On Whether We'll Get Final Results On Election Night l FiveThirtyEight (30 Oct 2020, 2:52) He is a stats + heuristics guy, and is not modeling ratfucking etc, so I'd lower that percentage quite a bit.

    331:

    "Lin cis ter ?"

    In a lifetime in England I've never heard anyone come out with anything resembling that. I guess Phil the Greek might say it a little bit like that, but nobody else talks like him.

    We do have craploads of place names whose pronunciation is a matter of debate and/or plain fucking silly, but Lancaster isn't one of them; it's invariably pronounced just as you would expect from the spelling. Off the top of my head I think that is the case for all the "-caster" and "-chester" towns, though not for "-cester", which is just "-ster" (except for Cirencester).

    332:

    Now, I realized that you're not from the US, but please, at least look before you accuse: the Dems actually walked out, trying to keep the GOP from having a quorum on the Judiciary Committee, and Mis Lindsay misused a rule to vote it out, and the GOP have the majority in the Senate, and it was pretty much a party line vote, The Dems did what they could....

    333:

    Biden said, in so many words, there will be no pardons.

    334:

    Partly, because the goddamned racist bigots are doing their best to destroy the US public school system.

    335:

    Heh. I just retired my workstation that I built in '12, with a Core I-3. At that point, I start worrying about MTBF.

    I'd keep using my '09 HP Netbook... but it's 32-bit.

    And I run CentOS Linux, and there's no official 32-bit release....

    336:

    What, you don't want to be what your ancestors, 500 or so years ago, were, serfs? (Hmmm, and if your lord didn't like you, did you get serf-boarded?)

    337:

    I see from the link someone posted to 538 that PA, for example, won't be all in by the end of the day (04:00 GMT).

    338:

    Comparing machines that some of us build ourselves to those people buy "off the shelf" isn't very fair.

    339:

    Sorry. As of yesterday mail in ballots in PA can arrive by Nov 6 if postmarked by Nov 3.

    Gee, you'd think it would be simpler. [snark off]

    340:

    Rabidchaos @ 223:

    JBS @ 222: But what would you do with all the museums & monuments?
    Leave them in DC? Let that bit stay (with the current WH and Capital buildings joining the Smithsonian), while the new builds in other states get built bigger from the start to support growing beyond 435.

    So, shut the whole government down for a month while everyone traipses off to DC for the Kennedy Center Honors?

    341:

    would you be happy installing Windows 10 (latest iteration) on hardware specced for Windows 7, which sunsetted in 2019?

    looks over at cheapo 8" Win10 tablet running on dual-core 1.6GHz Celeron with 2GB of RAM

    Actually Win10 will run on quite old PC-specced hardware. There's a supported 32-bit version of the OS (unlike Macs) which is getting upgrades and patches (see tablet mentioned above). The 64-bit version of Win10 can run 32-bit programs without sandboxing or recompiling (unlike Macs). I'm running a 20-year-old program executable on that Win10 tablet regularly with no problems other than it is limited to 4GB of working storage since, you know, 32-bit but that's not a deal-breaker.

    I saw a Youtube video a while back where someone loaded Win10 onto older hardware, stuff built to run Windows XP and later (Vista, ME and Win 7) and compared the boot times and utility run times with the original native OS. Win10 ran as fast or faster than the original OS. The only problem with it was that Win10 took up more disk/storage space than the original OS when loaded, not really surprising. He did have to slipstream a cut-down version of Win10 on some of the machines since 20GB HDDs wouldn't cut it but it booted and ran without some utilities pre-installed, the voice and assistance support and the like.

    342:

    60 percent chance that Biden wins AND we know by "3 AM"

    I assume that's EST, so 2020-11-04T08:00Z. Best get a night's sleep and check in the morning. Which is what I'm going to do, and I'm in GMT-5.

    343:

    The thing about "herd immunity" as I understood what the Doctor was saying is that it will come will or nil. It's the only thing that will end the epidemic.

    The argument is over what we are going to do getting from here to there. The doctor's point was that just letting people get sick and die won't produce "herd immunity" any more quickly. We won't get "herd immunity" without the vaccine, no matter how many people die in the interim.

    Prophylactic measures like wearing masks, avoiding mass gatherings & practicing social distancing with a massive campaign of vaccinations will get us to "herd immunity" just as soon as "do nothing and let people die" will.

    And over the long term having fewer unnecessary deaths will have less deleterious economic impact, even if the short term effects of the closings are a bit greater.

    So which is preferable - a short term economic boost with lots of excess deaths & long term downsides OR short term downsides with a long term economic boost from having better survival rates?

    344:

    For good or bad MS HAS to support a lot of this older "crap", err 32 bit apps. Way too much critical stuff uses it. MRI systems, power plant control systems, process control whatnot.

    So they keep supporting it in ways to allow companies to keep things going but push them hard to move to 64 bit and Win 10 and whatever is next.

    Large airline my wife just left. Someone in Switzerland was reporting an issue on their Win 10 Explorer (or whatever was MS current at the time). This was about 5 years ago. Her developer team in Argentina said their MODERN software only was supported on Google Chrome. She got to firmly, but politely, explain to them that in much of the world airlines had to use what the airport put in front of them. Web based apps only. And how it was a call to tech support for her to get Chrome on her standard issue Win 7 Pro laptop. Which is what was in use company wide as of this summer.

    Now I'm sure that MS likes the income from paid support for this company's Win 7 Pro usage but at some point the complexity of such support becomes a drag on the company's developers no matter how much money it brings in.

    345:

    Elderly Cynic @ 257: Smallpox is a known quantity, and we could restart vaccination. Nipah virus and similar are more problematic.

    They have restarted vaccinations for Smallpox.

    I got one in Dec 2003, just before Christmas. The Army decided we needed smallpox vaccinations before deploying to Iraq. I think some of the younger soldiers in the brigade had never had smallpox vaccination.

    Wasn't able to celebrate with family that year because I have a niece & nephew young enough they had not been vaccinated. I and all my sibs were vaccinated for smallpox in the 1950s to early 1960s (you had to have a smallpox vaccination at age 5 before you could attend public schools).

    Maybe they've stopped again since then, and maybe the vaccinations are not quite general now, but they did restart them at least for a while.

    347:

    Tim H. @ 304: Just what do the moneyed class think they'll be able to buy after they've killed the economy? Will they hover briefly over the abyss like Wile E. Coyote?

    I don't think the moneyed class comprehend that they're killing the economy.

    348:

    From the guardian, "Trump plans to declare victory before election is called - reports".

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/nov/01/us-election-2020-donald-trump-joe-biden-mike-pence-kamala-harris-coronavirus-covid-19-live-updates

    Wait...he's going to declare victory before the election? ----- (!)

    ljones

    349:

    I don't think the moneyed class comprehend that they're killing the economy.

    This.

    Most are wedded to an ideology of capitalism good / socialism bad without understanding they are already benefiting form a huge does of non capitalistic policies. And so since it ideological it must be correct and can't fail.

    350:

    Allen Thomson & others inc Bill Arnold I assume that, both from exit polling & from actual counts, even in US states which are not expected to change hands, a realistic picture, of whom the real winner is will be presented by Wednesday, 12.00 hrs EST = 17.00 GMT (?) ... Unless it's a really tight result, yes/no? Irrespective of whatyever bullshit DJT puts out, that is. Please inform.

    Thanks - those links are useful ... So: we need to watch the indicators as well as the swing states & the early-reporters are likely to be: From the 538 site - Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, S Carolina & Florida ( though I thought the last was likely to be delayed? )

    351:

    He's going to declare his victory if the early results show he's leading.

    352:

    If you’re a politician with an election coming up, the first often looks better.

    353:

    The question is whether or not strict measures can lower virus prevalence enough to lower the economic hit more than they cost. It has been successful in Asia and island nations, not so much elsewhere. There may be cultural issues...

    You think? (sarcasm)

    Chatting with friends overseas, the big difference seems to be that people here (GTA, Canada) have been ignoring the virus restrictions way more than people in China or Thailand. Which kinda surprised me: given how much the average Chinese person happily ignores rules I'd have expected a lot of evasion but apparently that's not happening (at least, not as much as here).

    Looking at South Korea, their biggest source of spread seems to be evangelical Christians — and evangelical Christianity is a Western import (especially the "we're victims, everyone is out to get us" vibe that the Korean sects apparently have going on.

    354:

    Bill Arnold @ 313: This story (in a local Pennsylvania news outlet) made it to the Washington Post[1] (the Trump campaign was told no in this case)

    [edited for brevity]

    Better than even odds that a Team Trump Clown Ops A Team (and their vehicle(s), important) is caught and identified somewhere on high resolution surveillance cameras, and maybe in person, attempting to steal/manipulate/destroy ballots(/voting machines/whatever). And will then try to spin their own failed efforts as evidence of massive election fraud. Hell, if I were in that county, I'd quietly hide trail cams (or similar) (with cell links and email on motion detect) around and maybe set up ambushes, just for fun. Maybe the local officials already have. At any rate, the GOP has now announced their intent (they have clear motives; behind in polls). (Which could be attempted false flag ops, of course.)

    Doubly disturbing in light of Eric Trumpolini's call for supporters in Texas to Have fun" harassing the Biden Campaign

    Democrats cancel Central Texas events after Trump supporters surround, follow Biden bus on I-35

    FBI investigating alleged harassment of Biden campaign bus in Texas

    How to spot voter intimidation and what to do if it happens to you

    Spotting The Difference Between Poll Watching And Potential Voter Intimidation | NBC News NOW

    355:

    Should note that that sarcasm is directed at those idiots holding huge parties, yelling in the middle of shops about how they can't breath with a mask, etc, not at Erwin.

    Given I've just has a precautionary surgery cancelled because of the Covid uptick, I'm rather cranky at idiots ignoring precautions right now.

    356:

    Pigeon @ 331:

    "Lin cis ter ?"

    In a lifetime in England I've never heard anyone come out with anything resembling that. I guess Phil the Greek might say it a little bit like that, but nobody else talks like him.

    We do have craploads of place names whose pronunciation is a matter of debate and/or plain fucking silly, but Lancaster isn't one of them; it's invariably pronounced just as you would expect from the spelling. Off the top of my head I think that is the case for all the "-caster" and "-chester" towns, though not for "-cester", which is just "-ster" (except for Cirencester).

    The only one I know is Worcester, pronounced "WUUS-tər"

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/En-worcester.ogg

    Wikipedia's Pronunciation respelling key is an interesting read.

    357:

    Worcestershire sauce is terrible. I wish the Unifon alphabet had caught on in the 70s.

    358:

    Unless it's a really tight result, yes/no? Irrespective of whatyever bullshit DJT puts out, that is. Please inform.

    You have to wrap your brain around that it is really 51 or so individual elections. Popular vote across the country is just an indicator. It can be like 2000 where it was obvious who was going to win what states EXCEPT for Florida. So it was all about Florida for weeks.

    Or it can be that PA, NC, FL, TX, AZ, WI, MI, etc... are some or all close and depending on which ones break which way the results can vary all over the place. Who's leading at 11pm EST doesn't matter unless it's a win by then. If the too close to call states hold the balance, get ready for a long night or few weeks.

    I might have a feeling for it but the mix is just hard to read. I know many committed voters to each side. But the real decision is which is larger and motivated to vote: Love Trump + D's are evil or Love D's and Trump is a steaming pile of dog poo.

    Texas and North Carolina have early voted more than voted in total in 2016. So either no one will show up Tuesday or the numbers will blow away election rates going back 100 years. I'm betting the latter. But that means guessing just who all these never voted before folks are and which way they will vote.

    And in reality, no one knows the answer to that.

    Obama won NC in 2008 due to weather IMNERHO. D's get out the vote for early voting was very strong. Then the entire state was rainy and 45F/7C. The R's stayed home and O won the closest state race in the country that year. Tuesday is supposed to be sunny here. But I wonder about TX, MI, WI, PA, etc...

    359:

    I saw something the other day about him canceling his election night party and that he'd spend it in the White House.

    360:

    He'll be spending it in the bunker under the East Wing of the White House. He's scared of the violence he'll start by declaring himself victor the moment he sees an early lead.

    361:

    A big part of that party was flying in a few "winners" from each state to celibate the win. Given how his campaign squandered their cash I'm thinking there were 2 reasons it was cancelled.

    Celebrating a possible defeat is anathema to Trump.

    Trump wasn't going to pay for it out of his pocket. He really is a cheap skinflint.

    362:

    @358: 50+ individual races

    This is correct. But some matter lots more than others.

    Florida is particularly important. Florida has a record of fucking up elections but this year might be better than in the past. If they don't fuck up this time they are expected to report almost all of their ballots soon after the polls close.

    If they manage that, and the result is D by an un-ratfuckable margin, the game is more or less over. Trump needs support for a coup to defy the results unless a whole bunch of really unlikely things happen.

    363:

    JBS @ 340: So, shut the whole government down for a month while everyone traipses off to DC for the Kennedy Center Honors?

    So, I haven't heard of the Kennedy Center Honors, so I had to look it up. It's a long weekend event with a bit hosted by the State Dept and traditionally a bit hosted by the President + spouse. Probably not all that many people to fly across the country for the weekend.

    Though, that does bring to my mind another question regarding the rotating court capital idea: do all the embassies move too?

    364:

    Heh. No worries.

    My general impression of Chinese disregard of rules ( being somewhat of that persuasion ) is that it is much more prevalent when not visible. (Eg, we'd save a lot of money building with the noncompliant building materials and no one will find out...). Masks, on the other hand, no one likes being beaten to death by a mob. ( Or being repeatedly browbeaten. ). So, not exactly surprised that compliance is higher. Couple that with a federal government willing to enforce policies and a populace capable of understanding that modest improvements in containment shorten lockdowns significantly, and you get a recipe for success.

    That, and killing your parents is rather more likely ( parents not stuck in nursing homes ) and also less accepted.

    365:

    There is indeed a Mac OS 32bit still getting updates; I’m using it. The version currently on my iMac (Mojave? I forget) runs 32 or 64 bit apps with no complications. The very latest is, I think, 64 bit only, which seems fairly reasonable all in all - it’s not like they haven’t been waving the flag for years. Tbh the main reason I haven’t moved to the latest is that I have a copy of SketchUp 2017 that I really don’t want to fart around with - they have gone annoying web based subscription etc - and that is 32 bit. I suppose I should do the virtual dance with it some time. I’d really hate to try to learn any of the other packages in that space. Mac OS is awful. But all the other plausible GUIs are far, far, worse. Linux UIs are lamentable and I only tolerate using it for Smalltalk where I can have a decent ui. Windows... just no.

    367:

    The Oglalla is farther west (the Panhandles of TX and OK, and mostly under Nebraska). Eastern OK does get rain - it was pretty when I went through there in mid-October one year.

    St Louis - yeah: one of my friends, who was working in Dayton and traveling through St Louis one summer, described it as "the world market for used brick is Not That Large". But it's possible to fix that.

    368:

    Teehee, I know that one rather well. There's even some nipple driving around with a number plate on his Mercedes that spells it like that.

    But there are plenty of others, eg. Alcester (Alster), Bicester (Bister), Towcester (thing for burning bread in), and lots more. Cirencester is AFAIK the only one that is pronounced with greater precision, without the elision.

    The related suffices -caster and -chester, however, are pronounced according to the spelling. If there are any exceptions, I can't think of them. So Manchester is just Manchester, and Lancaster is just Lancaster, and if someone thinks it is something different they must be very weird.

    The one which is probably guaranteed to produce arguments is Shrewsbury, because even the people who live there can't agree whether it's Shroozebry or Shroazebry.

    I've probably mentioned before that my favourite toponymic mispronunciation is of Loughborough (Luffbra), which Americans are reported to pronounce as Loogabarooga. I now call it that as well because I like the sound of it, and I want some French film-maker to make a Loughborough-based spoof version of American Werewolf in London just so that it can have the title "Le Loup-Garou de Lougabarouga".

    369:

    California law says up to 38 days after Election Day for counting - so final by Dec 8. (The ballots are paper. At least if you use the one that was sent to you. Not sure what the "voting centers" have; I opted for mail before the primary, because of warnings about the machines being unreliable and also the county effing it up.)

    370:

    No nuclear testing was done in the Marianas, they were in the Marshall Islands like Bikini, Johnston and Kwajalein Atolls. The Chemical storage and destruction was at Johnston Atoll.

    Forgot to acknowledge this earlier, but you're absolutely right. My bad.

    If someone wants to discuss the ethics and practicalities of the mainland US offering resettlement to all the islanders our carbon emissions are displacing, I think that's a good discussion to have. It might even be the best argument for statehood, actually. Unlike Floridians, who had a choice in our climate change politics and refused to exercise it, the atoll-dwellers and others really are getting screwed here.

    371:

    Some 32-bit programs won't run under Win10, even with compatibility set as far back as possible. I need either XP or Win7 for some things to work properly.

    372:

    The voting centers have paper ballots and big shiny boxes to put them in after you finish inking the ovals on your ballot.

    To be fair to California, I'm pretty sure they've already processed the ballots they've received, so there's going to be a big old bolus of results at 8 pm Pacific Standard Time when California early votes get announced.

    Where the 38 days matters is in the small elections, when you've got a few thousands or tens of thousands of people voting, and the race is basically 50/50. At that point, every vote does, in fact, matter. Since California has non-partisan races, it's entirely possible to have two democrats or two republicans running for a position, so you can't forecast the results by looking at party affiliation in an area. Also, our ballot propositions often go down to the last day, or at least until it's mathematically impossible for the losing side to close the gap, based on how many ballots are left to be processed.

    For example, in San Diego County, there are two democrats running for the District 1 County Supervisor seat, two republicans running for District 2, and two democrats running for mayor of the City of San Diego.

    373:

    "Mac OS is awful. But all the other plausible GUIs are far, far, worse. Linux UIs are lamentable and I only tolerate using it for Smalltalk where I can have a decent ui. Windows... just no."

    UIs? I'm still using PSPICE version 5.0 for DOS (in QEMU) to simulate circuits because it has such a super UI. I reckon the good DOS UIs, like that one or the Borland Turbo one, beat anything else I've come across. The Linux variant of SPICE has a crappy UI, and I've seen screenshots of Windows variants and they look no less of a pain in the arse than graphical interfaces for any program that involves craploads of parameters/variables usually are.

    It has its limitations - it crashes if the output file gets too big - but I can work around that and it's rarely a problem. What is a problem is that it's so bleeding slow, but I don't think there's any good answer to that. AFAIK the basic SPICE engine pretty much fossilised ages ago in a form which more or less precludes any useful parallelisation, so whatever version I use I'll have 7 cores idle and one getting red hot.

    Why this should be the case I don't know; I thought it was basically doing iterative solutions of a ruddy great matrix of equations and should lend itself quite well to being split up into subsections to do them in parallel. But Berkeley say you can't. Maybe the original development didn't take account of the possibility because there wasn't much call for it at the time, and they wrote themselves into a corner so now you'd have to more or less start again in any case.

    374:

    Maybe the original development didn't take account of the possibility because there wasn't much call for it at the time, and they wrote themselves into a corner so now you'd have to more or less start again in any case.

    Having written more code like that than I care to think about, that sounds completely plausible.

    I hadn't heard of PSPICE before and after googling I have to say I hope they write better simulation code than websites. I guess they figure if you're there you already know what you want.

    375:

    SPICE is the industry standard circuit simulation engine, which came out of Berkeley in the early 80s IIRC, maybe earlier. There are numerous prefixed variants which are basically different people's attempts at bolting on some better interface than the fuck-awful teletype graphics mess it had as original. PSPICE is one such variant which also tweaked some of the models for active devices and is sometimes more accurately predictive of the real circuit. I've never got anything at all that I wanted off that website, but since PSPICE is probably the most popular commercial variant there's no especial difficulty about finding models for it all over the place.

    376:

    The locusts are Already In Asia. Really. Apparently, one hasn't made it in China until one has a Cayman Islands Trust handling one's account.

    The simplest model for the future that I know of is Piketty's redistribution or revolution. Obviously both can fail, badly, but his point is that the concentration of wealth appears inevitable in all kinds of societies, and it's a problem that certainly goes back to the iron age and probably the bronze age. The ancient solution was the jubilee, where all debts were wiped out, prisoners freed, etc., and the whole system was reset to start over. This was in service of keeping the king on his throne, of course. But the problem, as I understand it, isn't just that some people are better at particular things (farming, herding, leveraged buyouts), it's that luck is also unevenly distributed. Some people get unlucky just because excrement occurs, and people get lucky for exactly the same reason. Since people with property tend to accrue more of it, at least while they're alive, if property is inherited, over time it builds up, along with influence, until you have rich and poor as we do now. At that point, the system is unstable. The question then becomes whether to break it down or let it break down, to the degree you have control over it.

    Now this is overly simplistic, because wealthy families tend to have huge problems hanging onto their wealth and power. Versions of the "shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves in three generations" metaphor reportedly shows up in European, Chinese, and Muslim societies, and it's about the problems of the normal descendants of financial geniuses hanging onto any parts of the fortunes their ancestors amassed. The current US president is a classic example of the problem. Indeed, many political/aristocratic dynasties don't last more than a few generations, probably for the same reason.

    In our current situation, the super-wealthy are trying to game the systems to stay in power and keep their wealth. That's to be expected. Even Gates and Buffett, who pledged to give away their money, have somehow only become richer since they made those pledges. The question is whether they lose their wealth because things fall apart, or because people take it from them and tell them to start over. The latter is actually less dangerous, but given everybody's apocalypse-addled brains, many of them seem to think that building disaster-proof hideaways and trying to be both a survivor and in power makes more sense.

    377:

    Just for fun, here's two California place names that most people have trouble with, one that some have trouble with, and one that is pronounced as it's spelled. I'll let you figure out which is which and how to say them right

    Del Norte County Sepulveda Suisun Zzyzx

    Oh, and get out of Wikipedia. Sheesh!

    378:

    First Sunday of the month. Isn't that "Pico and Sepulveda" Night?

    "You can keep Alvarado, Santa Monica, even Beverly Drive.

    Vine may be fine, but for mine I want to feel a-live and settle down in my La Brea... (Pico and Sepulveda, Pico and Sepulveda) ...Tar Pits (Pico and Sepulveda, Pico and Sepulveda)"

    379:

    I had a brief play with Fritzing the other week. It promised to do breadboard layouts from a circuit diagram and I was looking for some independent advice that what I was doing with the breadboard made sense. I gather it's got a SPICE implementation built in, but didn't go that far with it. I believe it works as a graphical thing on linux... have you had a go with it?

    380:

    Pigeon Note for our US readers: -caster or -cester endings indicate a Roman foundation or re-foundation.

    Reverting - so ... which states are likely to both report first & give a reasonably accurate picture of whether we have a definite Biden win - even if that state has (eventually) voted for for the turd?

    381:

    Trump has said "we’re going in the night of - as soon as the election is over - we’re going in with our lawyers..

    His strategy for winning the election really is "send lawyers, guns and money".

    382:

    Reverting - so ... which states are likely to both report first & give a reasonably accurate picture of whether we have a definite Biden win - even if that state has (eventually) voted for for the turd?

    As several of us have said. There is no easy answer.

    If you want to experiment try this site: https://www.270towin.com/ You'll have to enable scripting but it allows you to game it out. Their Consensus seems to be their analysis of the polls added to the polls. Their Polling map is just that. How things look based on an average of a lot of polls.

    They show 7 states that "lean" Biden. If all go to him plus the ones assumed to be a lock then he wins. If not then it depends on the 5 other states which this site and many others feel are too close to call. Then you have Texas which seems to lean Trump but...

    As I and others have said, there are a LOT of first time voters showing up which makes polling hard to do as you can't use the past to predict the future.

    Plus the demographics of all of these states that may be in play are each wildly different.

    So visit the site and click on the states and play it out.

    Now at around 1 am if it's a blow out for Biden you can head to bed. If not a blow out, well Wednesday might be an interesting day. If a blowout for Trump it will not show up till much later as early voting has been dominated by D's doing about 1/2 of it. I's and R's split at about 1/4 each. So it means that R's will be playing "catch up" in the count Tuesday night and Wednesday.

    383:

    There is indeed a Mac OS 32bit still getting updates; I’m using it. The version currently on my iMac (Mojave? I forget) runs 32 or 64 bit apps with no complications. The very latest is, I think, 64 bit only, which seems fairly reasonable all in all - it’s not like they haven’t been waving the flag for years.

    The move to 64 bit was trailed with the release of 10.5, Leopard, in 2007: and they finally pulled the trigger and killed 32 bit compatability with macOS 10.15, Catalina, released in 2019. So a 12-year cut over period for a primarily consumer-oriented OS, with a couple of years of security patches for machines still stuck on the older OS version (because: critical apps hadn't been upgraded in over a decade).

    PowerPC support ended with Snow Leopard, 10.6, in 2009 (107, Lion, in 2011, dropped support for Rosetta binary emulation of PPC).

    This level of backward compatability is obviously not what you want if you're supporting a deep space mission or an obscure piece of industrial or medical equipment manufactured in the 1990s, but then, nobody was using Apple kit as a platform for that sort of application back then.

    384:

    I've probably mentioned before that my favourite toponymic mispronunciation is of Loughborough

    Edinburgh.

    Pronounced "Edinburruh". Fools a bunch of Americans.

    385:

    I reckon the good DOS UIs, like that one or the Borland Turbo one, beat anything else I've come across.

    You are not obviously wrong, but they lack a bunch of modern bells and whistles (support for networking tools is just a start).

    This shouldn't be a surprise: they're all descended from IBM's CUI or Common User Interface, a mid-1980s attempt at designing a common UI for all their kit, on the then-reasonable assumption that the future consisted of mainframes connected via LAN to PCs running front-end apps. The idea was that CUI would replace all their old terminal interfaces, would run on DOS, Windows 3, and the shiny new OS/2, and mean users only had to learn one set of accelerator keys (eg. Alt-F-S for File menu->Save) regardless of the underlying platform.

    Windows 3 did indeed follow the CUI guidelines rigidly (as did Microsoft Word 5.5, or Microsoft Works 3, the last DOS versions) and it was reasonably smooth.

    But the writing was already on the wall. CUI support for mice was lamentable but Apple/Atari/Commodore had already popularized the rodent-driven interface which was clearly superior for free-form graphics and stuff like page layout which (who knew?) turned out to be a killer app for GUIs. Apple did not buy into that CUI stuff, though, so MacOS never followed the same rules (although the File and Edit menus look superficially similar -- I think they go all the way back to Xerox) and then Microsoft broke everything at the UI level in Windows 95, emphasizing eyeball candy over compatibility and functionality.

    386:

    Look on the bright side. We are hearing all the classic slogans that predate a fascist coup, and his supporters have armed themselves to his teeth. If he were competent as well as evil, 2016 would have been the last time the USA elected a president for at least a generation. That might still be the case, but it's not even odds-on.

    387:

    On this matter, what do YOU look at for Scottish news?

    388:

    "Smallpox may be extinct in the wild but there are still samples in biological warfare labs around the world for an absolute certainty"

    It's not even needed ; I remember reading an article about rebuilding it starting from cowpox (which happen to be named "vaccine" in french), maybe some 10 years ago, and while looking for this article I landed on this :

    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/paper-showing-how-make-smallpox-cousin-just-got-published-critics-wonder-why

    Smallpox can be resurected by any sufficiently competent biologist with the right kind of hardware. At least several hundreds people in many nations.

    389:

    I was involved in the CUI project, as a sort of external adviser, and have a copy of the original document somewhere, unless I have thrown it out. Yes, that's basically right.

    IBM originally designed it to be a common interface on both IBM display stations (3270s) and IBM PCs (IBM DOS and OS/2 only); Microsoft was not involved, but had rights to use it, and then shafted IBM with Windows 3 (another story). Many of us advised against that, because it was only a few aspects that were in common, and we said the 3270s would not last long, but IBM disagreed; in the event, the 3270 mode rapidly disappeared during CUI's development, as IBM realised we were right.

    CUI was pretty ghastly, largely because it was designed by people with 3270 but no WIMPs experience, and people like me were consulted only at a late stage and on details. As you say, they didn't think that mice would become important for general use, and had other blind spots.

    Inter alia, I tried to argue against having a direct (single action) menu item and accelerator for quitting, but was told people needed it to be easy and fast because they did it so often (eh?) I wasn't surprised to see the next release come up with a nag box, thus negating the whole point, which is clearly a good idea when quitting an editor with unsaved data but a damn-fool one when quitting a game of patience with no game in progress!

    But that's what we got, and it's why so many of our interfaces are what they are.

    390:

    On this matter, what do YOU look at for Scottish news?

    No single source will suffice. The Scotsman is a generally centre-right broadsheet with an Edinburgh bent and a unionist editorial stance. The Glasgow Herald is its west-coast equivalent. For a pro-independence perspective, there's The National. The Daily Record is a tabloid but often has some interesting political insights from the unionist side (lots of Scottish Tory and Scottish Labour infighting, mostly).

    391:

    Thanks very much. For my purposes, adding The National to The Scotsman should do - but, Oh! God!, its ad.-suppurated Web page!

    392:

    uBlock Origin will help you here, under Firefox,new Edge and even ad-friendly-Chrome, I just checked.

    393:

    Thanks. My problem is that I also run a secure environment, and (a) the number of pop-up screens for XSS is a real pain and (b) some Web pages bypass my mechanisms and go into a loop, soaking resources.

    394:

    Modern Internet is a pain, more often than not.

    I have a special place in hell for the sites that only load thru Javascript.

    Even, with my standard uBlock + Cookie Autodelete settings blocking a lot of crap the difference in speed between a newspaper with and without Javascript is quite telling about the level of spying involved.

    You should not need Javascript pure content sites, it should be reserved for interactive graphics these days, useless for editorials and standard news.

    395:

    a populace capable of understanding that modest improvements in containment shorten lockdowns significantly

    As opposed to North America, where flaunting containment seems to have become a badge of political allegiance…

    (And I'm including Canada because defying containment measures seems to correlate quite well with populist/right-wing political positions. Which isn't surprising, given how much of our politics — and culture — comes from south of the border.)

    396:

    Mac OS is awful. But all the other plausible GUIs are far, far, worse.

    So every OS sucks?

    397:

    @380:

    Reverting - so ... which states are likely to both report first & give a reasonably accurate picture of whether we have a definite Biden win

    To reiterate, Florida could be a bellwether if it votes D by more than a few %. Florida tabulates early votes as they come in, so those ballots that have arrived have already been counted. If there are no major fuckups/disasters on Election day, Florida should be reporting enough votes to close the deal on Election night. If the result is an un-ratfuckable Biden win, the Trump campaign is in the following position (using State-by-State odds from the 538 projection):

    They need to win every State that has even a 51-49 R lean. There are five of these.

    Then they need to win three States where the odds are 70/30 against them.

    Then they need to win certain big State that is projected 85/15 odds for D.

    Then they need at least two more wins (they're making up for Florida here) in places where the odds are even worse, in to 9:1 range.

    That is, with Florida off the table on the D side and the Ds otherwise winning only places that are more or less overwhelmingly Blue, Trump needs a 1:10E6 (that's what I get, multiplying out the odds) series of wins at the State level for an EC victory.

    If Florida calls an unquestionable win for Biden on Election day, the i's will not be dotted nor the t's crossed until the Upper Midwest reports results. The dust might not be settled for days or weeks. But assuming the D's win only races where they have 9:1 odds, plus one 8.5:1, there is no way for Trump to win an EC majority if he loses Florida. He leaves, or finds support for a coup.

    398:

    He already has support for an attemoted coup ..... However ... if the D's win, the very first thing they need to do is reverse that Supreme decision that screwed the voting rights Act, tes?

    399:

    For your night of election how to call it? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-02/your-hour-by-hour-guide-to-an-election-night-like-none-before

    As to the voting rights act. Like a lot of other unpopular SCOTUS decisions, they say to write a better law. Which in this case means rules must apply to all states. The original voting rights act was written such that states not mentioned could pull crap and not be in violation like the states mentioned doing exactly the same thing.

    Laws should be forward looking, not punishments for past crimes.

    But, yes, a new law would be good.

    400:

    My personal nightmare is that a Biden victory is probably much less certain than polling would indicate. First, polling errors in states tend to be correlated. That brings us to 538 levels of uncertainty (9%) at the moment.

    But...the pandemic has affected broad changes in voting patterns, which will likely affect turnout and ballot spoilage in odd ways. Coupled with an administration that is demonstrably ready to cheat... I worry that the odds are probably closer to 1 in 3.

    On the bright side though, more likely than not, turnout will tend to favor democrats. The odds of a wave election are probably as good as those of a trump victory.

    Longer term, once Texas turns blue, the Republican position is much worse than is appears. Their racism is probably close to a local maximum in support, so getting back to 50% would involve a significant leftward shift.

    402:

    Also, per slightly reputable source, best to avoid Chinese groceries, other possible right-wing nutter targets until maybe a week after election day.

    Source probably advising out of an abundance of caution, but, meh.

    Personally, we've stocked up, so, eh.

    403:

    "The Whale Saves!"

    404:

    "Just what do the moneyed class think they'll be able to buy after they've killed the economy? Will they hover briefly over the abyss like Wile E. Coyote?"

    If you are an individual, your best chance for yourself and your family is to have a lot of money. Stepping out of the game will not slow it down even a bit.

    Also, if you are in the game, you spent years working extremely hard to get in and advance. You're not going to suddenly change your mind.

    405:

    to Heteromeles @376:

    The simplest model for the future that I know of is Piketty's redistribution or revolution. Obviously both can fail, badly, but his point is that the concentration of wealth appears inevitable in all kinds of societies, and it's a problem that certainly goes back to the iron age and probably the bronze age. The ancient solution was the jubilee, where all debts were wiped out, prisoners freed, etc., and the whole system was reset to start over. This was in service of keeping the king on his throne, of course. Redistribution of wealth is a normal and natural process, and it is inadvisable to prevent it in the long run - the wealth is going to be accumulated in the hands that are not suitable to hold it and thus provoke the obstacles to collapse with catastrophic results. The problem is that jubilee would only be effective in the society that fearfully rejects and detests money brokering operations - the Middle Age society. Usury, in particular, was very much frowned upon by religions of all types. In modern times, exponential runaway processes are so ubiquitous that even if somebody successfully persuades everybody to wipe their sins, debts and crimes, the next time they will have to repeat the process will come even faster. Exponentially faster - all the smart people know that this cannot continue for too much longer. They can only be checked by other processes of the same property and magnitude.

    But the problem, as I understand it, isn't just that some people are better at particular things (farming, herding, leveraged buyouts), it's that luck is also unevenly distributed. Some people get unlucky just because excrement occurs, and people get lucky for exactly the same reason. Since people with property tend to accrue more of it, at least while they're alive, if property is inherited, over time it builds up, along with influence, until you have rich and poor as we do now. At that point, the system is unstable. This might seem to be rather cynical, but I do not believe "people" to be better at anything by themselves, not at significant levels of biology - I see them as a blank template in this context. It is the knowledge and tradition they bear that makes better at something - this naturally includes all sorts of "luck". I am, of course, not very familiar with such terms except when it comes to technology.

    Now this is overly simplistic, because wealthy families tend to have huge problems hanging onto their wealth and power. Versions of the "shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves in three generations" metaphor reportedly shows up in European, Chinese, and Muslim societies, and it's about the problems of the normal descendants of financial geniuses hanging onto any parts of the fortunes their ancestors amassed. The current US president is a classic example of the problem. Indeed, many political/aristocratic dynasties don't last more than a few generations, probably for the same reason. Wealth is supposed to be based on something, and also it is to be maintained by something. AFAIK, there are a lot of things that can constitute to that - industry, culture or trade. But none of them are as effective as finance and everything that is connected to it. Well, in the end, finance acquired so much wealth that it becomes impossible for them to maintain it with sources they have and the crash follows - because they do not generate any value themselves (it is all fraudulent).

    TBC

    406:

    In my admittedly cynical opinion, software vendors are all in favor of CUIs so long as their application is (a) an exception, or (b) their bindings can override everybody else, or (c) both. In the case of (b), if their apps add a new binding, it means anybody else already using that binding has to retroactively change.

    407:

    Cont.

    In that manner, modern public associate "wealth" with money, or securities, and maybe property (especially intellectual). They assume that ideas, knowledge and tradition is not something that fits to be valuable because they can't be moved, sold or liquidated fast enough. You have to think a decade ahead for something like that. That is a big downside, because if they transition from one system to another, values themselves will change, rules will change, and all of top-99% of wealth will vaporize in instant. That is why I believe that it is impossible for modern Capital Sharks to migrate into Asia as whole and abandon Europe at once - this is their ship and they will sink with it. The exception might be in those people who actually base their money on less virtual skills and have more of the "tangible" value.

    It is not entirely obvious for many people, especially wealthy, but technology we operate costs A LOT of money, and not because of intellectual rights only. Not only direct costs, but also indirect infrastructure and social expenditures. Sure you can buy yourself a gold bathroom, or cool electric yacht, but you would be surprised that just a proper schedule upgrade for a substation nearby will cost a comparable sum of money, especially considering that it hasn't been considered for too long. For the same reason we can't really go to space either.

    to FUBAR007 @314: As to the long game, to the extent there is one, I'm confident they're keeping an eye on Elon Musk's Mars project.

    I assure you, there isn't enough space on this comment section to describe how I detest modern "venture capitalism" and similar - those people who (act as if they really) believe that any problem can be solved at no time if unlimited amount of money is thrown on it. Modern financial system cannot even remotely fathom what amount of money and time is to be redistributed to allow casual spaceflight like "private spaceflight" likes to preach. Most certainly it is measured in hundreds of trillions, and require greater planning than any imaginable climate change plan can provide.

    408:

    Early voting is over in Virginia. The final tally for my small town in the Shenandoah Valley: 50% of registered voters, 36% in person and 14% absentee ballots already received and scanned. Only about 2% more absentee ballots remain outstanding. So, barring intimidation tactics outside the polling locations, neither side is doing any ratfuckery as Virginia doesn't report results until the after the polls close on election day.

    We had some non-voters show up, including several 70+ women who told me that this was the first time that they'd ever voted. The number of registered voters increased by about 4% during the early voting period, but Virginia doesn't ask for party affiliation as we have open primaries here.

    The only thing that I feel confident about in this election is that voter turnout is going to be very high, possibly over 85%.

    409:

    There’s also Happisburgh pronounced Hazeburra!

    410:

    Try Mousehole and (I believe) St Osyth, at least until my youth.

    Answer: Mowzle (ow as in plough) and Toozey. The first I can guarantee.

    411:

    How do you pronounce Chichester?

    412:

    whitroth @ 359: I saw something the other day about him canceling his election night party and that he'd spend it in the White House.

    He ran up against a DC city ordinance that required all attendees to wear face masks & maintain social distancing (which also limited the number of people who could be in the room at the same time).

    413:

    What's been mind-boggling has been registration, and turnout. The early votes/mail-in votes broke 90M - about 3/4 of the entire vote in '16.

    And Austin, TX, reported 97% voter registration, something I've never heard of.

    414:

    Right. The stock market, for example, is literally a Ponzi Scheme - musical chairs (if you know that kid game) with money. If I understand correctly, right now it's about 90% fantasy (I'll pay x, even though it can only make a dollars, and it's not even paying dividends, because it's HOT and COOL!)

    [shakes head] As I've been saying for decades, to paraphrase the Batman, stock traders are a superstitious and cowardly lot.

    415:

    Best ever: Brief (by Underware - &ltG&gt). Easiest to use, didn't even use a mouse, and it was the preferred programmers editor late eighties into the nineties.

    My copy's on the shelf above my head to the left....

    416:

    100% agreement: there's a reason that venture capitalist is often referred to as vulture capitalist.

    There is zero interest in the long term (ok, 99 44/100%) disinterest in the long term. For them, as the joke goes, "long term" is "next quarter".

    And space travel... I saw something recently about PRIVATE SPACE STATIONS, which is the most mind-bogglingly STUPID IDEA EVER. I want to grab the morons by their lapels and shake them - why do they think that, in the US, most big cities have a train station called "union station"... which is where ALL the railroads that came into the city, passenger, came to? For that matter, name a single major airline with its OWN, privately owned, airport.

    417:

    Pretty much a clone of the Rand Editor (PDP 11 Unix), itself heavily influenced by the Yale Editor (PDP 10).

    Brief was good. Was it withdrawn/sold/or something strange?

    418:

    Yeah...

    I think you'll do better if you parse out history better and get a better handle on what's going on now.

    One example is that bronze age, iron age, classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and current transnational wealth all work on different systems. While yes, this is obvious, you have to be careful about mixing eras. The bronze age had international commodity trading with credit but without coined money, for example. Money (as in coins) was an iron age invention.

    The same problems of accumulation, wealth attracting wealth in a way that results in rich and poor, seems to be universal in hierarchical societies. I've even seen reports of it from the Andes, and they certainly were not part of the Old World trading system. The destabilizing effect of wealth and poverty also seems to be universal in hierarchical societies, again regardless of system (cf: Andes, Central and North America). Therefore, we can probably get away with talking about this issue somewhat abstractly. Wealth accumulation is not a problem that capitalism invented. It's a problem that capitalism has failed to solve, although good attempts have been made in Scandinavia in the last few decades.

    In reference to modern transnational capitalism, I'm not sure you realize how utterly pervasive the system is. American ultra-rich tycoons won't flee to Russia or China, because there are already ultra-rich tycoons there. China has homegrown billionaires exporting capital to hide it from authorities, the same way Russia, the US, and every other large country does.

    Moreover, when you're talking about individuals whose net worth is greater than the GDP of about half the countries on the planet, the notion of citizenship gets very odd indeed. This seems to be one reason why the wealth management industry tend to operate on smallish islands: they're too small to put up a fight, but the fact that they are recognized nations in the international community of nations makes them extraordinarily convenient places for the wealthy to manage their wealth from.

    Anyway, if you want to better understand how modern wealth is managed, I strongly suggest getting a copy of Brooke Harrington's Capital Without Borders. I don't think ownership of the book will get you in trouble, as it's a sociological study, not a polemic.

    But the problems of wealth accumulating in the pockets of transnational billionaires are analogous to those of bronze age slaveowners: wealth accumulates, but too much inequity in the distribution of wealth throughout a culture destabilizes it. That leaves us stuck with the possible solutions being some combination of rebuilding the system (revolution) to (temporarily) do away with the inequities, or resetting the system (redistribution) so that the wealth is (temporarily) more evenly spread around.

    It is apparently possible to have a resilient meta-system of many cultures working together to avoid accumulating wealth and manage their resources sustainably for a very long time. The only example I know of is from aboriginal Australia (see Dark Emu), and it was rapidly destroyed by English invaders. Unfortunately, that kind of resource management probably only works at very low human populations. Getting from our current status to population densities on par with those of Aboriginal Australia require well over a 99.9% reduction in human numbers. That little problem make revolution and redistribution more palatable, even if they're only temporary fixes.

    419:

    @413:

    What's been mind-boggling has been registration, and turnout. The early votes/mail-in votes broke 90M - about 3/4 of the entire vote in '16.

    Early voting in TX was more than all voting in 2016.

    420:

    And space travel... I saw something recently about PRIVATE SPACE STATIONS, which is the most mind-bogglingly STUPID IDEA EVER. I want to grab the morons by their lapels and shake them - why do they think that, in the US, most big cities have a train station called "union station"... which is where ALL the railroads that came into the city, passenger, came to? For that matter, name a single major airline with its OWN, privately owned, airport.

    I saw a episode of the Amazon Prime series Beyond Geek that covered good old JP Aeronautics and their quest to put airships into orbit. Two things I didn't realize were a) how far along they are (they've actually got and tested first generation electrochemical engines for their orbital ship), and how serious this nonprofit is about taking people's experiments up to 100,000' on the rigs they use for testing their equipment.* And how cheaply they're doing their efforts.

    If they can get a human to orbit for $50,000 and have suborbital stations at 140,000' doing industrial work, then yes, I could believe in private "space" stations.

    More to the point, if and when our society gets on a geoengineering kick to deal with climate change...giant, high altitude airships are a really good system for hacking the atmosphere to reduce insolation. And guess who's developing really cheap, really effective ways to get cargoes to the right height?

    *Seriously, they launch balloon platforms 4 times per year. Any experiment (within reason) that you can fit into a ping-pong ball they will rack and send up to 100,000'-130,000' for free. You can get bigger boxes lofted for a few hundred dollars. For student science and basic stuff, that's a tiny price compared with what it costs to do something with NASA.

    If nothing else, let the nerd kids in your life know about the pongsat program. Or heck, do it yourself.

    421:

    Pigeon @ 368: I've probably mentioned before that my favourite toponymic mispronunciation is of Loughborough (Luffbra), which Americans are reported to pronounce as Loogabarooga. I now call it that as well because I like the sound of it, and I want some French film-maker to make a Loughborough-based spoof version of American Werewolf in London just so that it can have the title "Le Loup-Garou de Lougabarouga".

    I'd expect it to be pronounced "Loffburra".

    422:

    Charlie Stross @ 384:

    I've probably mentioned before that my favourite toponymic mispronunciation is of Loughborough

    Edinburgh.

    Pronounced "Edinburruh". Fools a bunch of Americans.

    Didn't fool me because I had an Edinburgh "native" explain it to me before I got there, along with how to tell the natives from the tourists.

    423:

    wealth management industry tend to operate on smallish islands

    A refinement on that may be in the works:

    https://www.seatrade-cruise.com/ship-operations/crypto-cruise-ship-satoshi-soon-heading-panama Crypto cruise ship Satoshi soon heading to Panama Tourism Authority Administrator Ivan Eskildsen has welcomed plans for the crypto cruise ship Satoshi to be located off Panama. It is being touted as a place for 'everyone from digital nomads to YouTube influencers, start-up teams and established businesses.'

    A Panamanian newspaper adds the detail

    https://www.laestrella.com.pa/economia/201025/golfo-panama-recibira-crucero-residencial-nomadas-digitales Este lujoso barco saldrá del 4 de noviembre próximo del Puerto de Pireo en Atenas, Grecia con destino a Panamá y donde permanecerá anclado a 22 kilómetros de la costa. (where it will remain anchored 22 kilometers from the coast)

    Undoubtedly by coincidence, Panama's territorial limit is at 12 nautical miles, 22 km.

    424:

    whitroth Masive registration & turnout ... Most seem to think this will mostly turn out ot be "D's" - yes? Is this likely to be the case?

    I note that DT's "supportes" have been blocking roads, bridges & attempts to block Polling Stations! - WHY? What's the supposed point of this? Or are they really as stupid as that seems to show?

    From the reports, here, it seems that ... unless it's really close - like last time - a winner ought to be apparent by or soon after 08.00 GMT ( = 03.00 EST? ) & certainly by 12.00 / 07.00 Yes? Please inform.

    I am expecting Trumpolini to go utterly bonkers ( I mean REALLY bonkers ) unless he's got an obvious win, which does seem unlikely on today's form.

    AT "Cruise ship Satoshi" - as in Bitcoin? Wait until it's full, then hit it with a cruise missile.

    425:

    "Cruise ship Satoshi" - as in Bitcoin?

    Exactly so.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_(ship)

    426:

    Didn't fool me because I had an Edinburgh "native" explain it to me before I got there, along with how to tell the natives from the tourists.

    • Is it wearing a kilt? (While being male -- female clothing rules mean the tourist detector trick doesn't work.)

    • If "yes", is he also:

    • Wearing a dinner jacket

    or

    • Wearing Football or Rugby colours

    • If "yes" to the above, is he Drunk?

    If you got a string of yes's, then congratulations: you spotted a native.

    If the kilt-wearer is sober and not dressed for a match or a wedding, he's probably a tourist.

    (You occasionally get weirdos who wear utilikilts while sober or to goth night clubs, but they're pretty rare, and the goths don't stay sober for long anyway.)

    427:

    Masive registration & turnout ...Most seem to think this will mostly turn out ot be "D's" - yes? Is this likely to be the case?

    Per Talking Points Memo, it appears to be voters of both parties, with a slight edge in democrats. TPM is partisan left-wing, so I don't know how true that is. We'll find out during the rest of this week.

    So far, there haven't been massive, coordinated attempts to block voters, just possibly because in the US that's a federal and often state crime. Equally likely, everybody saw how many people voted in advance and gave it up as a bad job.

    There are also reports that the Biden campaign is swarming with lawyers who've spent months gaming out the possible legal challenges to the votes in each state and are ready to go with counters. Again, I don't know if this is true, but we may find out.

    One reason for optimism is that there's been a glut of lawyers coming out of law school in the past decade or two, and taking apart the current administration in court could keep many of them gainfully occupied for years, if they can get those jobs to materialize. I'm hoping that someone (potentially someone named Harris or even Obama) started organizing that effort awhile ago. Come to think of it, this may be why Senator TurtleWight has been corrupting the courts as fast as he can approve justices--to try to keep his fellow undead from being turned into "men of conviction."

    428:

    "How do you pronounce Chichester?"

    /ˈtʃɪtʃɪstər/

    "Chi" as in chicken (twice) then "st" then an indistinct "er" or "uh" sound (then an optional r on the end, depending on your regional BrE accent.)

    In ad-hoc spelling pronunciation, "chi-chi-stuh" or "chi-chuh-stuh" Definitely not anything with "chest" in the middle.

    (The first syllable gets all the stress, so the vowels in the second and third syllables are not very distinct.)

    429:

    Most seem to think this will mostly turn out ot be "D's" - yes?

    A week ago in NC and a few other places it was 3 to 2 R's over D's new registrations in the last month or so.

    Both sides are energized. Which makes polling so frigging hard just now. Surveying 1000 people in a very diverse population in so many ways is based on apply historical standards.

    No matter what the result there are going to be a lot of frustrated/pissed off people.

    430:

    @398:

    Certainly he has support for an attempted coup. What he needs is support to actually pull it off.

    As for voting rights... The House already passed a voting rights act at the beginning of the session. It's languished for want of attention from the Senate. I didn't look at the contents, but I assume it denies the rationale Roberts used for gutting the previous version by making all the States get pre-clearance. If Ds win the trifecta, I expect prompt action on a voting rights law.

    Obama called for sweeping reform in his memorial speech for John Lewis earlier this year, and made explicit that it's worth ditching the Senate filibuster to get it. Personally I'm hoping for universal automatic registration of voters and making Election Day a national holiday, and you-lose-your-business fines for employers who won't let employees have time off to vote. Since Court reform is approaching Conventional Wisdom, if they threw in redistricting rules for Congress requiring some kind of neutral procedure, it could turn into a threat to the Supremes to either refrain from attempting to kneecap D governance, or be demoted to irrelevance by appointment of enough reliable D partisans to ensure a majority.

    431:

    AFAIK, not ported to Windows.

    Haven't seen it in Linux, either, though I suspect I could run it under wine.

    433:

    And how much wealth accumulation begins in outright force and violence?

    As I understand it, the lower castes in India were the previous inhabitants, before being invaded.

    Then there are mine-owners... (see the wikipedia entry on the Molly Maguires).

    I understand that part of the Roman Empire's wealth came from expansion, that is, conquest.

    434:

    The blocking the way to the polls isn't just "attempted". It's just more blatant this year.

    My late ex, a Floridian, told me how in 2000, a Black friend? co-worker? was on his way to the polls, and a cop down the end of the street looked at him, and said, "You don't want to be here".

    Yes, that wide-spread.

    435:

    There's a Brief-alike called "Grief" which you can find on github. You might have to do a "configure, make, make install" to get it working, but it's available.

    436:

    to Heteromeles @418:

    Moreover, when you're talking about individuals whose net worth is greater than the GDP of about half the countries on the planet, the notion of citizenship gets very odd indeed. This seems to be one reason why the wealth management industry tend to operate on smallish islands: they're too small to put up a fight, but the fact that they are recognized nations in the international community of nations makes them extraordinarily convenient places for the wealthy to manage their wealth from.

    I remember now that about two month ago I've had a strong urge to read more about thalassocracy in general and about several examples such as Venice, Genoa, Hanse or Byzantium. They are all ancient powers of considerable weight (before the colonial era), but I am sure history does not put enough attention to them since they are just not associated with certain big nations of today. But they all did play significant role in history of Europe. My country, too, and in many ways the same role modern West does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazaria_(Genoese_colonies) What if I to review them with respect to their economy in the same way that we treat our current situation.

    to whitroth @416: And space travel... I saw something recently about PRIVATE SPACE STATIONS, which is the most mind-bogglingly STUPID IDEA EVER. The funny thing is what happened about decade ago when Space Shuttles went out of use. And even a bit earlier, when ISS became operational. My country's "tech giants", the remnants of USSR engineering bureaus, jumped up and presented new systems to the world "markets". This is how we got variants of mini-spaceplanes, air launch from a large plane, and privately-operated space stations. Not owned or constructed privately - they were only looking for funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Technologies_Commercial_Space_Station Predictably, every single one failed to gain any traction, despite the fact that they have actually had all the technology they've advertised at their hands and did not require a decade of "incremental testing" or changes of plans. They could just salvage decades old technology and adapt it to new commercial rails. Now it is just too damn late - it seems that not even NASA is going to cooperate.

    437:

    And how much wealth accumulation begins in outright force and violence?

    That's a loaded question, but a good one. You're absolutely right that, by the time a bunch of hierarchs are trying to make empires for themselves, violence seems to be inevitable. Rome, the Inkas, England, France, Spain, Japan, etc. all invaded their neighbors and imported the booty as a way to enrich the imperial citizens. China's the one that doesn't quite seem to fit that trend, but the way the emperor ran the Middle Kingdom(s) isn't that much different. And the same is true for most empires, actually. A good empire is one where the benefits of being subjugated outweigh the costs (taxation, corvee, resettlement) of being subjugated.

    The problem's at the other end of the scale. To pick absurd examples, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Alexander didn't set out as five year-olds in hunter gatherer villages and end up as military rulers of sophisticated civilizations. They all were able to conquer because they were in the right place at the right time, building on military infrastructures that others had created before them.

    That's the deep problem: how do groups of people gather resources to get to a situation where they can send out conquering armies that essentially forage for slaves and booty, expand the territory, grow the conquering machine, and keep doing it again? They need to develop some set of advantages, either resource-based or cultural, that lets them become conquerors. That's where inequalities and luck seem to come into play.

    That probably didn't make much sense, but if you see imperial expansion as a massive avalanche, there are two different questions: what started the avalanche, and what made the avalanche unstoppable when it took off? Genghis Khan, Alexander, etc. are examples of unstoppable avalanches, but they benefited from others who got the rocks rolling long before they were born.

    438:

    Far out. I'll look at that. I don't see an rpm, damn it.

    439:

    I remember now that about two month ago I've had a strong urge to read more about thalassocracy in general and about several examples such as Venice, Genoa, Hanse or Byzantium. They are all ancient powers of considerable weight (before the colonial era), but I am sure history does not put enough attention to them since they are just not associated with certain big nations of today. But they all did play significant role in history of Europe. My country, too, and in many ways the same role modern West does.

    Oddly enough, I've been reading Lincoln Paine's The Sea and Civilization, which takes an ocean-centered view on the development of civilization. You might like it if that's something you're interested in.

    So far as the whole offshore financial center phenomenon, it seems largely to be a follow-on of the British Empire, which as you know was a thalassocracy. The key point here is that English law back during the Crusades developed the legal mechanism of the Trust. It run under the church courts, rather than the king, and the point was so that some lord going off to fight in the Crusades could entrust his property to an honorable friend or family member to manage on his behalf (if he came back) or on behalf of his heirs (if he died on crusade). This was critical for the Church in that it meant that nobles could go on crusade without risking their lands and family.

    Jump to the 20th century, and hugely sophisticated trusts are a centerpiece for how the super-rich manage their money. They actually don't own it, the trusts do, and since a trust is a relationship, it can't be taxed.

    Most of the offshore financial centers are current or former members of the British Empire, governed by some descendant of British law. Thus offshore wealth is not about a thalassocracy, but rather it depends on the legal mechanisms laid down by a former thalassocracy.

    440:

    A quick web purusal reminds me that Brief eventually ended up at Borland, which killed it.

    None of the articles I just read mentioned the Rand editor. The user interface and appearance were almost exactly identical.

    441:

    Heteromeles imperial expansion as a massive avalanche Like the Han, repeating previous attempts & are doing exactly that in "Xinjiang" & elsewhere ( like Tibet ) "Slaves & Booty" indeed ....

    Back to the main subject: We all know, that last time, the polls actually got it correct, Hilary C won by about 3 million votes, but lost the election, because "electoral coll/apse/age/spiracy" How bad COULD it be? Could DJT lose by 10 million votes & still game the "college" to win? Expert opinion, please?

    Footnote: If DJT wins, that's it for the anglospheric global civilisation ... because BoZo will jump back into DJT's pocket & we are all seriously shafted. If I was under 50, I would seriously consider moving country - to either Germany or NZ ... As it is, I will be 75 in January & if the worst happens, there are worse ways to go than going down fighting.

    442:

    Damn.

    I had such hopes with Apollo-Soyuz in the seventies. But Fucking Raygun, the GOP, and the ultra-wealthy (WE CAN'T LET SOCIALISM SUCCEED, WE'LL LOSE OUR MONEY) cheated us out of.

    443:

    @434:

    What you're describing is ordinary garden-variety ratfucking. It works to cloud the issue when the result is close, but when margins get to 2% they can't change things.

    If Florida looks like a 2% win for Biden by midnight, Trump needs Republican officials to say "Elections don't matter after all" or he's done. It's not clear he has that kind of backup.

    444:

    Could DJT lose by 10 million votes & still game the "college" to win? Expert opinion, please?

    Mathematically possible. But very very unlikely. 10 million is a big number.

    And it wouldn't be gaming the system if it was within the rules. Win enough states with enough electors and you win.

    Basically you have California and New York which have lopsided D majorities. So you get more electoral votes from them relative to the popular vote than a win in Texas where the popular vote is close.

    PS: Not an expert in any fields you are thinking of.

    Just someone who has been watching the polls state by state for months now. Too much at times.

    445:

    If you are interested in how and where billionaires stash the cash then you should read "Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back" by Oliver Bullough.

    Moneyland is a country I invented; it doesn't exist in the way that any normal country does. But it's basically the place where you can put your money, you can put your reputation, you can put your children, if you are rich enough to afford it services. And it is essentially a hybrid country that exists outside of ordinary nation-states, where the reach, the power of law enforcement, doesn't stretch to. So essentially, it's a secret country, a private country for anyone rich enough to afford its services, and it's essentially government, sort of, of the rich, for the rich, by the rich.
    (From this interview)

    446:

    It was Nixon who torpedoed NASA, not Reagan. Reagan poured billions in the aerospace industry. It was for totally loony projects like the Space Defence Intiative, but it kept the industry working.

    447:

    In my city we had nearly 1million, 200 thousand early voters last week. This despite the entirely incompetent, lazy and jerkish Board of Elections doing their level best to make voting if not exactly impossible, as difficult as possible. Mail-in is a total failure due to BOE incompetence teams with Team DT's sabotage of the US Post Office.

    ~~~~~~~~~~

    @ 436 Reply

    [ " ...Venice, Genoa, Hanse or Byzantium. They are all ancient powers of considerable weight (before the colonial era), but I am sure history does not put enough attention to them..."]

    That's not true among responsible historians everywhere, particularly in Europe. And particularly in Italy! And especially in the medieval centuries, they were utterly entertwined via trade rivalry, which so often became outright war.

    Though ignorance of even the existence of these long-standing cultures and powers us true in the US.

    For ex, the Ottoman Empire is hardly acknowledged in Western Civilization survey, beyond the mention of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and then the parceling up of the middle east and other territories of the losing side's empires in Asia, Africa etc. among the winners of WWI. But I don't think anybody teaches the history of so-called Western Civilization at any level in the US anymore. Colleges and universities have gotten rid of history departments entirely. Now with the virus, cost-cutting includes getting rid of graduate history study departments too even at the a-tier schools in a lot of places.

    However, it's pretty hard to get a decent handle on the history of Europe without the Ottomans (or another very neglected, long-running empire, the Holy Roman Empire), particularly in the 16th century, particularly if one is studying France. Among the reasons France is the most islamicized European country presently goes back to that century and the alliances François I made with the Turks.

    I've branched out from my specialties, US history and slavery, to, since the election year of 2016, studying Merovingian, Carolingian, Mongolian, and Ottoman, and European medieval history, systematically. It's called escapism, even the 14th century -- maybe even the 14th century especially, with its hinge of the first visit of the Great Mortality.

    448:

    Re: IBM CUI - yes, I was a minor consultant on that when I was at IBM UKSC. Basically it was a fairly typical xkcd “one standard to unify all the other standards “ approach. I tried to discourage the inclusion of the horrible mainframe terminal stuff and the 80x25 PC pseudo terminal stuff but... well.

    I’d already got hooked on the Smalltalk approach and al those other systems just feel so utterly lame by comparison. I remember ‘Brief’ for example, and tried enacts and vi and E and so on over the years. The least awful (but still so very annoying) is/was StrongEd on RISC OS, the Acorn OS. Which one can still try, for free, on a Pi. So many nice ideas with so much promise. Sadly, no proper multitasking etc, no multi core support. But wholly khao, it’s fast on a Pi4!

    But really, when you’re in Smalltalk you just don’t have much use for a mere string editor.

    449:

    Apollo-Soyuz was dead on delivery, at least at the US end: it was using up the last flightworthy SIB launcher left over after the end of the Skylab program, which in turn was the final whimper of the Apollo Applications Program, which was a bunch of follow-on programs to use Apollo hardware tech in human space exploration. AAP was killed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, and Saturn V construction ceased in 1968. Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz survived, but Apollo 20 was cancelled in 1971 and Nixon cancelled Apollo missions 18 and 19 in 1971 -- he was minded to cancel everything from 16 onwards, but was talked out of it.

    450:

    Don't forget that Nixon also cut the budget for the original, totally reusable space shuttle. He was the one reponsible for the kludge that we eventually got instead.

    451:

    I am so tempted to buy the new Raspberry Pi 400 and install OpenRiscOS on it. Just because! I never had an Archimedes, now I can buy a ridiculously over-powered one and have change from a hundred quid.

    (Edit: Luckily for me the Rpi 400 is currently sold out -- on launch day! -- so my wallet is safe for a few weeks.)

    452:

    Space pedant - Nixon landed up cancelling Apollos 15 and 19, the original 16-18 then got renumbered. The original 15 was going to be using the handcart to lug gear around with the astronauts but the first Rover was ready, along with the LEM capable of carrying it, so the 15 crew got to drive instead of walk.

    On the private space station front, Axiom Space is worth keeping an eye on. NASA is paying them to launch a new module in 2024, and between now and then they have three Crew Dragon flights lined up. Further along they have grandiose plans to add more modules and then detach the whole thing as an independent flier when the ISS is decommissioned. How well that will work when, in the same timescale, it's likely firms with the cash to spend can go to Elon and get him to put something the size of the Skylab workshop (no room for the telescope mount, and you need to shorten the docking adaptor a bit, but width-ways it fits the Starship cargo area with room to spare) into orbit and even bring it back rather than scattering it across Australia.

    And, for those of a certain age, SpaceX, Gerry Anderson style

    453:

    Raspberry Pi 400

    Since you brought it up.

    Someone in Ukraine or Obscure Chinese province invests a few $1000 in those. Maybe $50K to $100K total. Scours the data bases of C-Level execs in big companies, but not too big, in various Europe, North and South Am, then packages up it up. Ship via FedEx or similar. "Here's your new work from home keyboard kit and instructions on how to set it up. This is all a part of our home based work newer security setup. Please call this number if any questions."

    It would take a bit of effort and planning to pull off but the reward could be off the charts.

    Correct letterheads and such.

    But the most important thing is to get them all to arrive the day before Christmas or similar world wide.

    Oh, yeah. Appropriate software to collect all keystrokes and phone them home when possible with least detection possible. Maybe wrapped up in photos of the kids for grandma.

    454:

    (451) I managed to get my paws (just about!) on a pi 400. Have you looked at pimoroni btw? I did see that thepihut had run out although pimoroni still seemed to have a few pi 400s left.

    As for risc OS you can always run it on another pi btw, downloads are here > https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi

    I remember using the acorn archimidies at school back in the late 80s :-) !

    ljones

    455:

    I know. Partly, because even though Ike created NASA, the GOP always saw manned civilian spaceflight as a Democratic thing, and partly, no ROI.

    456:

    Now Just One Minute. What was wrong with that?

    In the upper right corner of my screen, right now, are two xterms (ok, urxvt), 25 lines, in the colors God (and IBM) intended them to be, green on black.

    humph

    457:

    Oh, it was more than that. The original was much smaller. But in '83 or '84, a coworker tole me he had a buddy who worked for one of the aerospace companies on DoD work... and that the Pentagon had insisted the Shuttle be upscaled, to carry a specified number of "nuclear devicies".

    Yeah.

    Meanwhile, I'm waiting for them to launch an X-37, and find out later it had a crew.

    458:

    SpaceX, Gerry Anderson style... ROTFLMAO!!!

    459:

    Promising signs.

    Hoping to be sleeping better by the end of the week.

    460:

    Don't forget that Nixon also cut the budget for the original, totally reusable space shuttle. He was the one reponsible for the kludge that we eventually got instead.

    Not sure that a totally reusable, rocket-powered space shuttle is possible. The problem is that you've got to fly the booster back to somewhere. But before you even get to flying the booster back home, (IIUC) you've got this interesting moment when you have a (manned?) booster separating, slowing, and flying back to Earth, while the shuttle ignites, flies off its back (!) and goes to orbit.

    Yes, this is the SpaceShipTwo model, but its upside down from the SpaceShips. Also, SpaceShipTwo is only suborbital, and it gets dropped before launch because (like sane rocket plane designs) its slung under the launch vehicle. It's not launching off the top.

    461:

    @37: The Army, for all its reluctance, will be forced to take sides.

    Have you been paying attention to the growing number of senior retired generals and admirals that are calling out El Cheeto's administration? This is breaking a norm that's existed practically since the start of the United States, and includes many of the most respected (by servicemembers) senior leaders. I would NOT assume, as we've discussed in earlier posts, ANY action by active duty units. While the National Guard is a slightly different matter, we've all been doused repeatedly with the same koolaid for generations.

    @51: What y'all should be worrying about is after 5-9th November, when the resuts are in, & DJT has comprehensively lost ...... And refuses to accept it & starts issuing orders, backed up by his cronies like McConnell to deny a hand-over & to totally trash the place. It could easily end up considerably worse than if the screwing-around was "successful" between now & 5th November, I think.

    Hey Greg, remember the "Deep State", which El Cheeto's administration has just announced it wants to royally fuck over? How much grit do you think they can throw the gears of Executive Orders and other bullshit between 3 November and 20 January? It's a LOT.

    @84: Trump apparently means for his order enabling the purge of the Civil Service to take immediate effect: he might start the firings more or less right away.

    Somebody's got to cut the 100,000 SF50s to change the designation of those positions, and this administration is not good at - administrating. Plus, if they try that, the Merit Systems Protection Board is going to have a backlog of claims that will go on for YEARS.

    @multiple: Stop worrying about "The Football". It's not an automated Start the War toy. There are multiple responsible persons who have to validate and execute those orders - at the bottom end, they're extensively vetted to exclude extreme and unstable personalities. And most of them have families. And would like to have homes to go to. I'd think it more likely that the officer with the Football would suddenly show up at Evil Race Bannon's side once El Cheeto Grande really starts bouncing off the walls.

    @317: The spouse just replaced her 2009 MacBook Air since it was not going to be compatible with the next OS release - still works like new. It is annoying that the high level of physical quality of Apple products means you wind up with perfectly functional items that haven't kept up with software requirements, like my old iPad Mini or, soon, my iPhone 6. Bother.

    @457: But in '83 or '84, a coworker tole me he had a buddy who worked for one of the aerospace companies on DoD work... and that the Pentagon had insisted the Shuttle be upscaled, to carry a specified number of "nuclear devicies [sic}".

    Nope, sorry. That requirement was for a certain class of "observation" satellites.

    462:

    That requirement was for a certain class of "observation" satellites. AKA space telescopes? (Is that article accurate?)

    463:

    Re the size of the Shuttle: that's fine - you have your informant, I have mine.

    464:

    Since this is "Countdown to Crazy," I just had a sudden brain eructation of how to build a totally reusable SolarPunk launch system.

    The bottom end is something like JP Aerospace's Ascender airship. For those who haven't rolled their eyes and clicked on the link, it's a lamba-shaped semi-rigid airship with individual wings about 300 meters long. It's propeller driven (they've already designed and flown the high altitude propellers), and its mission is to lift the payload to around 50 kilometers elevation and drop it, then fly back to Earth.

    The payload is the shuttle, some sort of rocket plane. It gets dropped at 50 kilometers up and a fairly low velocity, and its job is to reach escape velocity and some sort of orbit. I have no idea what the ideal body shape for this mission is. It might be a hypersonic waverider, it might be a flying lambda with the rockets on the inside of the V*. Anyway, this is a rocket plane, not JP Aerospace's mile-long orbital airship. Once it does its thing in orbit, it flies and glides back to land on the ground.

    Since JP's already building prototype ascenders and they're really simple, I think they're a good candidate for lugging stuff to the top of the stratosphere. That cuts down on a fair amount of the fuel that the shuttle would need to reach orbit. IIUC, an ascender lugging a space shuttle would have to be considerably larger than the one proposed in the link above, but how much bigger I don't know.

    Oh, and the "nice thing," for those who think atmospheric geoengineering is worth contemplating, is that as pointed out above, ascenders have other uses than just boosting shuttles to orbit. This actually makes a big difference in their utility, since they're not necessarily sitting idle between shuttle launches.

    Also, ascenders are cheap. They're basically huge balloons with a minimal carbon fiber and airtube frame, powered by thin film solar panels on the top of the envelope. Can't say whether the shuttle ship is comparably cheap, but those of you who like designing rockets can figure out the best way for something to fly from the top of the stratosphere to space.

    *from my sub-miniscule knowledge of hypersonic plane design, it appears that flying a V with rockets or jets on the inside of the V might get around some of the pressure wave weirdness that makes it so energetically expensive to fly at hypersonic speeds. My reasoning reason is that the outwash (rocket or jet) is accelerating the air on the back edge of the lifting surface, right where it needs to suddenly accelerate to avoid shockwave problems. But I'm probably wrong on that.

    465:

    That requirement was for a certain class of "observation" satellites.

    I have no direct knowledge, but once upon a time had an interesting conversation about that with someone who was involved with the matter. According to that someone, the initial requirement was for something KH-9 in size, which evolved into a KH-11 requirement. Big optical spysat in any case. Overall, that seems like it might be true, or true-ish, but no guarantees.

    466:

    Emperor Elon 1st is doing his level best to accomodate the future: Your Commie laws don't apply to us Martians!<\a>

    Oughtta be a story in there somewhere...

    467:

    Great! So, new laws: no one may be worth more than $10m/2020 dollars. Everything else goes to the public coffers.

    Any religious institution pays taxes like everyone else.

    Accredited news media are all non-profit, with no advertising.

    I think that's a start....

    468:

    OT: Server build update It's past 300 & this is what I'm doing to try to keep myself from going crazy in the last few hours before I go vote tomorrow.

    I got all the parts - the SATA cards came today. I assembled everything and smoke tested. Someone suggested FreeNAS, but that has been replaced by TrueNAS (same product if I understand it, just a merger between the names of their commercial product & their Open Source product.

    Anyway, no smoke, but there are things not working. It warned me I don't have the recommended minimum memory installed. But I'm not going to try to use it for streaming, so that might not be a problem.

    I have two 5 in 3 HDD enclosures and one of the HDDs in one of the enclosures appears to NOT be working. I think the problem is with the cage itself, because I swap drives and the problem stays with the same slot in the cage. I replaced the SATA cable & the problem still exists. I switched the SATA cable to a different port on the SATA card and the problem still exists.

    And I must have done something wrong while I was troubleshooting because now it boots to a blinking cursor rather than the menu to load TrueNAS. I hope that will only require a reinstall from the DVD.

    Thinking about it I also got an error that the system battery is dead & the system time cannot be set correctly. That may be part of the problem with the boot, because I did take a break for a while to think about it (and have something to eat). I'll have to get a replacement battery tomorrow and try again.

    But I don't think that's going to solve the non-functional drive channel. I don't know what I'm going to do about the drive channel in the cage not working. I want all 5 drives functional so I can have a 5 drive Raid-Z2 (which I understand is the ZFS equivalent of RAID6). I may have to purchase a replacement drive cage because I'm pretty sure I sat on this one long enough for it to be out of warranty.

    Anyway, I've had several hours today not fretting over politics, so that's a plus.

    469:

    Charlie Stross @ 426:

    Didn't fool me because I had an Edinburgh "native" explain it to me before I got there, along with how to tell the natives from the tourists.

    * Is it wearing a kilt? (While being male -- female clothing rules mean the tourist detector trick doesn't work.)/i>

    * If "yes", is he also:

    - Wearing a dinner jacket

    or

    - Wearing Football or Rugby colours

    * If "yes" to the above, is he Drunk?

    If you got a string of yes's, then congratulations: you spotted a native.

    If the kilt-wearer is sober and not dressed for a match or a wedding, he's probably a tourist.

    (You occasionally get weirdos who wear utilikilts while sober or to goth night clubs, but they're pretty rare, and the goths don't stay sober for long anyway.)

    I was told it's the One O'clock Gun - tourists freak out while locals look at their watch to see if it's got the correct time.

    470:

    Dave @ 461:

    @37: The Army, for all its reluctance, will be forced to take sides.

    Have you been paying attention to the growing number of senior retired generals and admirals that are calling out El Cheeto's administration? This is breaking a norm that's existed practically since the start of the United States, and includes many of the most respected (by servicemembers) senior leaders. I would NOT assume, as we've discussed in earlier posts, ANY action by active duty units. While the National Guard is a slightly different matter, we've all been doused repeatedly with the same koolaid for generations.

    I suspect that if there is significant lawlessness Governors will call on the National Guard in their states to restore order. It would take only a small escalation from what happened down in Texas for that to happen. I think we might see red state/blue state play in that with Democratic Governors tolerating less lawlessness on the part of Trump supporters. It really troubles me to think Republican Governors would not act to stop violence against Democrats, but there it is.

    I don't think the Army would step in to stop that violence in the face of Republican opposition, but if Democratic Governors asked for assistance & support I think they'd get it whether Trump approved or not.

    471:

    I'll predict that if we get the current administration illegally attempting to extend its rule, then we'll see the Army sit on its hands except for natural disasters.

    Here's why: It's a standard nonviolent tactic (e.g. one that's undoubtedly been implemented for months now) to "pull away the pillars of power" from the dictator. This is the model of government as the roof of a Greek temple, supported by pillars of power such as the military, the legal community, churches, businesses, labor unions, government bureaucracy, and so forth. If enough of them refuse to support the dictator, the government falls.

    That, I suspect, is the point of all these denunciations by ex-military, ex-AGs, ex-bureacrats, businessmen, churches, and so forth. They're pulling on the groups that might support the current government in an attempted coup to get them to withdraw their support from illegal activity.

    Note here, I'm specifying illegal: if Trump loses the election and claims victory or refuses to leave office, the "pulling on the pillars of power" will be a general strike: businesses refusing to service government contracts, the military on their bases and refusing orders to quell protests, the bureaucrats slow-rolling SF50s and any other non-critical order, churches calling on their members to remember the golden rule and not follow the Golden Bull, white house staff not showing up for work, and so forth.

    How do I know? The reading material is freely available from places like the Albert Einstein institute that Greg Tingey can't find his way through.

    The critical problem is whether Trump knows. Personally, I doubt he does, and I doubt anyone in his immediate circle is paying attention, although Republicans certainly are. That's what makes things a bit messy.

    472:

    I long ago sold or gave away my Archimedes A540, RISC PC 700s and Iyonix, but I still have the A500. Which is not an amiga, but one of the hand made prototype Archie’s that Acorn made for internal use. It originally had an ARM1 but got upgraded to an awe inspiring ARM3 and turbo memory bus - an amazing 12MHz cpu with 4kb cache and 8MHz memory bus. 4, count’em, 4 megabytes of ram!

    And yes, it ran Smalltalk. In fact Smalltalk was the first windowing system that actually ran on them. The official Acorn ARX system never managed to get off the .. .ground?... and the first OS was Arthur. Which was “A risc by Thursday”. Eventually there was the windowing system we came to know and love and it was named RISC OS because why wouldn’t it?

    It hasn’t been powered up in probably 25 years nd I long since lost the very weird keyboard and mouse (no USB in those days, no cpu in either, direct hardware scanning for all of it) and you try finding a monitor that will take the deranged signal format.

    473:

    I gave my 17-year-old cousin a Pi, and gave them an 8-gig Linux desktop with 128-gigs of storage plus a backup drive with keyboard and mouse for around $120.00. Unfortunately I ordered about ten days too early to buy one built into a keyboard.

    I also have three of the 8-gig models plugged into my home wifi router, and I'm using them to build a mini-cloud and learn KVM.

    If I were you I'd buy two, but wait until they come out with the 8-gig version built into a keyboard. Travel with one of them and when you get to your hotel, plug it into the HDMI port of the hotel-room TV. If Customs confiscates it while you're crossing a border, you're out less than a hundred bucks.

    None of the Pi OSes seem to install very well - they all need a little help to inhabit more than 4-gigs of storage, but you can install Ubuntu Server, expand the partition, and upgrade to the Xubuntu desktop, which comes with LibreOffice. Raspian might work just as well, but I have my doubts...

    475:

    Heteromeles, your link is borked.

    JHomes

    476:

    Going back a bit ... Charlie on Edinburgh natives Listen to their speech? Re-run old episodes of "dr Finaly's Casebook" for comparison .... /snark

    JBS Not necessarily ... I've been down near Waverley when the gun went off & simply checked my watch - though there a couple of obvious tourists in sight who jumped, visibly. I've also been up there when the gun was fired though in better weather than shown here.

    Returning to the nightmare, it's theoretically possible, say, for every single voter in New York & California to vote for Biden & DJT to "win" just enough battleground/swing states by say 0.2% ( As happened last time ) .. Isn't it?

    Foxessa You HAVE read Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" haven't you?

    Heteromeles That slow puling at the pillars is slowly, very slowly working in Belarus, I hope. ( The "A E institute" website was basically unusable - here. Might be usable in the USA. - I only just realised that might be the problem ) Broken link? Try this one?

    477:

    Always worth remembering what the Duke of Westminster (richest man in uk) said when asked if he had advice for anyone who wanted to be as wealthy as him

    "Have an ancestor who's a close personal friend of William the Conqueror"

    478:

    Reverting - so ... which states are likely to both report first & give a reasonably accurate picture of whether we have a definite Biden win - even if that state has (eventually) voted for for the turd?

    And they're off.

    Trump is ahead of Biden in New Hampshire 16 to 10.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/us/politics/dixville-notch-biden-millsfield-trump.html

    479:

    "Here's your new work from home keyboard kit and instructions on how to set it up. This is all a part of our home based work newer security setup. Please call this number if any questions."

    Nope, the RPi 400 is too obviously not a corporate-issue keyboard: for one thing, it feels cheap, for another, the exposed PCB breakout board on the back ...

    Meanwhile USB spy cables with built-in 4G, GPS, and microphones are a thing: and here's the O.MG USB cable, which packs its own CPU with wifi and enough processing power to run a pentest kit. Comes in Lightning-to-USB versions as well, so that Apple cable you use to sync your iPhone with your Macbook? Might be spying on you.

    (Don't get me started on Thunderbolt cables which all come with AT LEAST two ARM cpus already, just to handle the i/o ...)

    480:

    Pimoroni notified me by email that they had a few this morning. Now they have one less available.

    481:

    That "study" is by some Standford economists who are getting dragged by real epidemiologists for basic analysis errors such as using economics resource modelling techniques instead of proven epidemiology stat tools.

    In today's times everyone's an expert. Being right is secondary.

    482:

    Yes. I was in SEAS, but it was very clear that the debate within IBM was the old guard and execusuits versus the young turks and technopeasants. Nothing new there, but the long-term consequences were more than any of us expected. It's one of the things that converted me to the random walk theory of technological development.

    483:

    Ah. The link's broken, and I can't be arsed to search.

    The problem about epidemiology is that the mathematics is simple (well, to a probabilist), but the results are highly dependent on extremely uncertain data (a.k.a. guesswork), and cause and effect in complex, probabilistic systems is extremely ill-defined. Most physical scientists and engineers are completely clueless when it comes to the last.

    The problem about economists is that the best of them are very good, but the vast majority of ones that you hear about are primarily bullshit artists.

    I can easily believe that 700 deaths are attributable to that event, but would there have been 700 fewer if the event had been cancelled? A damn good question.

    484:

    Meanwhile, I'm waiting for them to launch an X-37, and find out later it had a crew.

    X37B is a lot smaller than the Shuttle, and typically stays on orbit for 3-9 months. It'd get pretty smelly up there by and by, with even one astronaut aboard.

    You'll know they're using it for spam-in-a-can if it sorties for less than two weeks.

    Much more likely: DoD could rent seats on a Crew Dragon, if they had a mission. (SpaceX is a DoD-approved contractor.)

    485:

    It's one of the reasons I prefer aristocracies to plutocracies - they have more style :-)

    486:

    Crew Dragon like Soyuz is spam-in-a-can. They can only go to the ISS and return, or spend time going round in orbital circles like 1960s Mercury capsules. I assume Soyuz could do (limited) solo spacewalks if suitably configured, I'm not sure about Crew Dragon. Exactly what a DoD flight in Crew Dragon would achieve I'm not sure. They certainly wouldn't be allowed on the ISS, not as DoD personnel explicitly.

    At least with the military flights of the Shuttle the crew could do stuff in orbit, deploy and recover material from the cargo bay using the Canada Arm and/or carry out properly-equipped and task-oriented spacewalks (plural). But, you know, the Shuttle was terrible despite its long successful track record of doing stuff like building the ISS, launching, repairing and maintaining the Hubble etc. etc.

    487:

    2 catastrophic failures in 135 missions is pretty poor with space technology being as mature as it is, or even as mature as it was in the early 80s.

    488:

    David L That is verry worrying, given that Clinton won "NH" by 0.4% ( It says here ) last time around. OTOH, a final exit poll may show different, plus already dropped-off or mailed-in ballots. Um.

    489:

    To my eyes the Spacex Starship looks more like Fireball XL-5 than anything else Gerry Anderson got flying.

    490:

    It's one of those variable pronunciations, like Shrewsbury - my sister lives there and tends to use a very abbreviated 'e' sound for the middle vowel. But it's pretty much a schwa.

    Loughborough I pronounce as Luff-bu-ru - and it's the only example I know where a word uses two different spelling and two different sounds within its three syllables, but the spellings and the pronunciations don't correspond - so the first and third are both spelt 'ough', but the second and third are the same sound.

    That's for me - the second and third are both unstressed, and 'Luffbra' isn't a bad approximation either.

    (Disclosure: I was very smitten by a lass from there when I was a teenager - her father was a professor at the University)

    491:

    "That is verry worrying"

    Perhaps you should read the article.

    16 votes to 10 votes, that's a turnout of 16 people, from two tiny towns racing to be the first to declare a midnight vote, and you're extrapolating already?.

    492:

    cause and effect in complex, probabilistic systems is extremely ill-defined. Most physical scientists and engineers are completely clueless when it comes to the last.

    In the mid-90s I had a chance to attend some briefings by [$well-knownlarge_contractor] on their use of probabilistic risk assessment to estimate Space Shuttle chances of RUD. It was pretty obvious that they were putting their thumbs on the scale to come up with customer-pleasing numbers. Nobody, AFAIK, ever called them on it, or perhaps even realized what was going on.

    493:

    The Shuttle put over eight hundred crewmembers into orbit, maintained them there in a shirtsleeve working environment for up to two weeks and brought them home in a reusable spaceplane that landed on a long conventional runway. People often forget the cadence of Shuttle flights was quite intense, as many as five flights a year, a real push given the 1960s-based technology the stack was designed and built with. Sure it could have been better and safer knowing what we know now but we didn't have the materials, the design tools, the manufacturing and inspection technologies, the control systems etc. etc. The first Shuttles flew with glass cockpits i.e. vacuum-tube CRTs, for example.

    494:

    Yeah, that's the same data issue, but that's a simple system. The other problem with complex systems is that the feedback is such that it's often impossible to describe it in terms of simple causality. Using the arrow of time doesn't help, because it's common for an event A to affect B in one way directly, another way indirectly, and yet other ways as time progresses.

    Cause of death is a simple example of that. If someone with hypertension gets COVID, largely recovers, and dies a few weeks later from a stroke, what is the cause?

    495:

    With the payload bay on the X-37B being 7ft by 4ft (2.1m by 1.2m in civilization) the crew would need to be really good friends if there were more than one of them...

    496:

    Maxime Faget thought it was possible and his design is in the "North American DC-3" Wikipedia article. Furthermore, 3 other USA aerospace companies submitted completely reusable 2 stage designs too.

    497:

    "that's a turnout of 16 people" * or even 26 :-)

    498:

    I voted early this morning. First in line at my polling place.

    499:

    I agree that it was very cool and cutting edge.

    It was also unfit for purpose.

    500:

    Not sure that a totally reusable, rocket-powered space shuttle is possible. The problem is that you've got to fly the booster back to somewhere.

    Elon Musk is building one. First test flights are due next year.

    As with trans-Atlantic steamers, it turns out that a large part of the problem is you have to go large in order to carry enough extra fuel to go the distance (in this case, for the first stage to fly home and land vertically).

    The Shuttle's big mistake was to go with wings: wings and a wheeled undercarriage are of zero use once you're on orbit, they're purely parasitic until it's time to land -- meanwhile, the rocket motors that got you into space in the first place are parasitic weight on the way down. It's all surplus complexity and structural mass. SpaceX don't bother with wings, just guidance fins and retropropulsion.

    501:

    "I believe it works as a graphical thing on linux... have you had a go with it?"

    Ah... what I like about the PSPICE for DOS interface is its non-graphicality :) Of course it uses a graphics mode to plot curves, but all the driving of it is done from the keyboard. Don't have to touch the mouse at all, ever.

    It is purely a simulator, nothing more, with its input in textual form as a netlist. It does not have any facilities for drawing circuit diagrams and deriving the netlist from the drawing, or anything like that. But that's fine: I almost never use the computer for drawing circuit diagrams anyway, because it is vastly quicker and easier to sketch them out on a piece of paper. Having done that, all I need to do is jot down a number for each node and then type in the netlist.

    You may well think GAAH at the idea of doing it like that; I thought GAAH at the prospect back when that was all there was. But once I'd actually done a couple of simple circuits that way I was pleased to discover that it's nothing like as horrible as it sounds. Very quickly my mental model of the circuit takes on the form of a netlist more than the form of a diagram. Quite often I don't even bother with the diagram at all to begin with; I mentally model the circuit in netlist form as a starting point, type it in, play with it until it's working properly in simulation, and only then draw out the circuit diagram from the netlist. It's quite possible that by the time I get that far I don't even need to read the netlist while I'm drawing the diagram.

    502:

    Since this is "Countdown to Crazy," I just had a sudden brain eructation of how to build a totally reusable SolarPunk launch system.

    Again, Elon Musk is ahead of you.

    Superheavy/Starship runs on liquid oxygen and methane. Methane can be produced from carbon dioxide and water with enough electricity, with LOX as a by-product -- this is important, because it's a fuel mix you can synthesize on Mars from locally available resources. But you can also do it on Earth, with enough electricity.

    Have you noticed who owns the largest PV panel outfit in the USA? Yup, Elon's been thinking ahead. His long term plan is for his reusable space launch system to be photovoltaic-powered and carbon neutral, and no messing around with wings and aerostats and similar nonsense.

    (Yes, he's still a flaming asshole with horrible labour relations and some weird ideas and some failures like hyperloop as well. But he's still right about the optimal pre-space-elevator space launch system, and he's building it: probably a side-effect of hiring the right domain-specific experts and arguing with them over a couple of decades.)

    503:

    Going large in spaceflight means lots of extra fuel and oxidiser is needed to lift the extra fuel and oxidiser needed to launch the over-large spacecraft. See, for example the bloated pig Saturn V rocket which was barely able to burn off fuel and oxidiser fast enough to get off the pad -- for the Apollo missions it used up ten percent of its launch weight just to clear the tower, accelerating at about half a gee relative to the Earth's field (losing a first-stage engine at that point would have been an unrecoverable catastrophe). The other monster rocket from that period that actually flew, the Soviet N1 was not a success.

    The obsession with supersizing-in-space continues to both amuse and confuse me. I've said it before here, the past fifty years and more of spaceflight has taught us how to reliably put small ten-tonne and twenty-tonne packages into orbit and assemble modules there automatically, transfer liquid fuels safely into human-occupied spaces like the ISS etc. Why the 1960's-era "everything must go up in one stack!" dream continues to dominate the planning and designs for manned spaceflight outside LEO I don't understand.

    504:

    I'm just guessing here, but it might be that each launch is considered a risky affair, so having less of those is good. I really have no idea of the real probabilities and issues involved, but if you are having multiple launches and need all of them to succeed, you are kind of getting the bad end of cumulative probabilites.

    For example, if there's a small rocket you can use which has two percent failure rate, and you need five launches to get all the stuff up in orbit, you'll have only 0.98^5 chance of success, which is a bit over 90 %. (This obviously gets worse the more launches you need.) Then if you can single-shot that with for example 95 % success, it's better in that regard.

    Of course you could then re-try with the smaller launches, so it's not as clear-cut.

    It might also be that the fixed costs for each launch, even if small, are big enough that it's cheaper to go with one big one.

    But, as said, this is just speculation.

    505:

    "Wait until it's full, then hit it with a cruise missile."

    I was thinking "torpedo", but of course that's basically just an underwater cruise missile.

    On a similar note, all the discussion of airshipoids for lifting things nearly all the way to orbit makes me think that they would also do very well for lofting asymmetrical nukes to the ionosphere above tax havens.

    506:

    See also SS Great Western. Doubling the length of the steam ship allowed Brunel to cube its available volume for fuel, giving it the range to go trans-Atlantic: earlier, smaller steamships ran out of coal.

    Again: fuel is the cheapest component of a space launch, coming to about 2% of the bill for a disposable flight.

    (Starship is designed to hold enough fuel to make it down to the ground safely once it arrives in Mars orbit. That puts a floor under its minimum size.)

    507:

    The only critical launch in a LEGO(TM) mission is the manned flight to deliver the mission crew to orbit, everything else can fail and be replaced by the next package in the design/build/launch pipeline if needed. In contrast to the "all-in-one" missions everything can be put together in orbit and checked out, fuelled etc. remotely and/or autonomously well before the squishy meatbags make their own flight into orbit to dock and board the ready-to-go package. If something in orbit breaks before that happens then it's possible to hold the meatbags in safe storage at the bottom of this here gravity well while stuff gets fixed or replaced or at worst the entire mission is cancelled.

    We can do this now, we've got 10-tonne and 20-tonne launchers ready, tested and in production today. In other news Constellation/SLS is about to run into a change-of-government funding and appropriations hiatus because "DEFICIT!" and manned Starship is nowhere near flight-ready.

    508:

    Right. The economies of scale are real, because a lot of costs are independent of size and become less important as the size goes up. There is often a point where that stops working, because costs become non-linear in size, and an obvious one is the structural strength of the materials used to build the rocket, but I don't know of any that bite even for the largest rockets we have yet built.

    509:

    If someone with hypertension gets COVID, largely recovers, and dies a few weeks later from a stroke, what is the cause?

    My aunt died on Saturday. She had a serious stroke about three weeks ago and was hospitalized (and isolated from family because Nottingham is not in a good place with Covid). Took a turn for the worse and her sons and grandson visited before she died. Then they were informed that she was also being treated for pneumonia and tested positive for Covid and they should isolate themselves. Worrying as all of them have spouses in high-risk groups. (Eg. chemotherapy.)

    Secondhand information, so I'm not certain but the impression I got is that the family were told she died of Covid — although that could be wrong.

    510:

    Re: Exit polls

    Election Day exit polls are not a reliable indicator for this election because as per CNN:

    'More than 91.6 million Americans have voted so far ... These votes represent about 43% of registered voters nationwide, according to a survey of election officials in all 50 states and Washington, DC, by CNN, Edison Research, and Catalist.'

    Suggest you look at 538's variables in their models - it's a fairly extensive list yet even they're saying there's some iffiness. Their methodology is here:

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-fivethirtyeights-2020-presidential-forecast-works-and-whats-different-because-of-covid-19/

       

    511:

    Sorry. Should have made it was obvious it was a joke related to you wanting a key state on which to base the total outcome.

    These small villages in New Hampshire vote just after midnight so they can be the first in the country to report their results. 26 votes doesn't indicate much of anything.

    And as SFReader said, exit polls don't mean much this year due to over 1/2 of the likely voters have already voted.

    Both of these items were in some ways dependent on the vast majority of people voting on the official "election day". That is just no longer true.

    512:

    The SS Great Western didn't have to burn coal to stop it sinking and of course it didn't have to carry any oxidiser whereas a rocket has to burn fuel and oxidiser to fly all the time and it has to lift and accelerate all that fuel and oxidiser as it flies. I also would point out that the Great Western had several large sail-carrying masts to help it on its way, not something that would be of much use to a rocket.

    513:

    Re: '... "pulling on the pillars of power" will be a general strike: businesses refusing to service government contracts ...'

    Might be enough just to have Twitter shut down his and associated/like-minded sociopathic idiots' accounts. Have zero faith that FB would do the same until advertisers pulled their ads very publicly.

    514:

    Might be enough just to have Twitter shut down his and associated/like-minded sociopathic idiots' accounts.

    Good luck with that: a couple of years ago it was estimated that Donald Trump's presence added 10-20% to Twitter's market cap. Turns out he's an attractive nuisance: if they fire him without a very good reason, the shareholders will sue.

    515:

    Once more social media provides a perfect bite-sized realtime demonstration of the fundamental problem with late-stage capitalism: Trump's presence increases a fundamentally meaningless number*, and that utterly outweighs the fact that his outbursts reliably cause hate crimes up to and including murder.

    • a number representing an entirely imaginary quantity of money (which is itself not, of course, a real thing)
    516:

    Re: ' ... the shareholders will sue'

    Think it might be possible to track down a list of major shareholders and not just the institutional investors (below). Hmmm ... wonder if these institutions' taxes are up-to-date, and what their total revenues/income vs. taxes paid are and how these compare to Joe/Josephine Average Taxpayer.

    Also - Twitter operates internationally therefore is subject to a variety of laws that they can't steamroll through.

    And -sometimes raking in a ton a money isn't enough, e.g., Purdue.

    And, and - scariest of all, esp. to SocMed giant tech corps - there's an uptick in gov'ts going after 'monopolies'.

    https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=TWTR&subView=institutional

    Public outcry can still work. Plus there's a gamut of private lawsuits to chase down every loop-/rabbit-hole. Wonder if John Oliver has done a piece on Twitter yet: he/his staff are very effective journalists/communicators.

    517:

    Several of you: I've revisted 538 just now - very informative. Take the point about exit polls, because of the vast numbers of early voters, by whatever means.

    518:

    That's correct, actually.

    The point of strikes is that they're a demonstration that the strikers are so motivated that they're willing to hurt themselves to stop their opponents. So yes, if Twitter and Facebook cut all feeds from the White House (or even the government, for that matter), then they might well get sued, but that's the cost they're bearing to protect the system they need to stay afloat.

    This gets at something really fundamental about capitalism, the idea some hold that it's an utterly spineless, cowardly machine that effectively runs on beginning calculus-level ideas of calculating local maxima of curves, to thereby maximize return on investment in the short term. That's overly simplistic and destructive. The people who own corporations live in human communities, and therefore live with the consequences of their actions, like it or not. Therefore, many times they act in ways that are more complex than this simple ideological model suggests.

    The point of a corporation joining a general strike is to demonstrate that it's part of a community and that its leaders are unwilling to be ruled by a despot, regardless of how much the transition hurts.

    If the investors are anything other than spineless profit maximizers, they'll go along with it. And if they're not, they deserve what they get, which is dealing with a defense whereby the company says that in their judgement, continuing on with business as usual was ruinous, and therefore they acted to protect their shareholders' investment.

    519:

    JBS at 468: Are you sure it's not the lack of RAM that's preventing the TrueNAS install process starting? It would be a simple check to add to the installer.

    520:

    Although we're unlikely to know for a while exactly who won this election, I was wondering what a move-in to-do list would look like.

    So, here's my preliminary to-do list for prepping the WH for the next resident - whenever that might be:

    1- Throw out all mattresses and mattress-like coverings, e.g., large cushions, bath mats, etc. (Ref: DT - Moscow hotel, prostitutes)

    2- Sanitize all doorhandles (Someone might have deliberately licked them.)

    3- Get some COVID-19 sniffing dogs and patrol the entire residence, offices and entrances/exits including any tunnels.

    4- Count the silverware - does anyone keep an official inventory list of what belongs to the WH vs. what items are personal property? (Anything given ‘officially’ to a sitting POTUS is historically considered to be the property of the WH therefore is supposed to stay there.)

    5- Check that all portraits of Past Presidents are still there - Sharpie-free - and genuine.

    6- Check the President’s OO desk drawers for any funny stuff. Do not throw out any badly scribbled/scrawled crumpled notes that you may find: this could be the traditional private personal note that leaving Presidents write to the incoming President.

    7- Cancel life-time Faux News cable subscription. Replace TV remote so that all channels are accessible.

    8- Cancel all automated fast-food home delivery and related OO credit card charge authorizations (BiGMac’s, pizza, etc.)

    9- Delete all anonymous or ‘MAGA’-related and ‘OO’ user names/passwords to porn, NRA and Russian Twitter-bot accts.

    10- Check LAN/VPN etc. systems and update as needed to most recent/current software/fixes.

    11- Check/remove access to OO legal and ‘discretionary' funds linked to no longer POTUS lawyers/lawsuits.

    Feel free to add. For some reason, to-do lists get longer as the move-in date approaches.

    521:

    Fuel may be the cheapest part of a space launch, but if you're blowing vast quantities of CO2 or other greenhouse gases on liftoff from Earth, it's already obsolete and just hasn't realized it yet.

    That's Musk's problem: he does do cute engineering solutions to comparatively simple problems, but he's pants and dealing with complex systems. That's why his Boring company failed in LA, and I suspect his hyperloop's going to fail for the same reason.

    As for his huge egg crate rockets? All he has to do is lose a couple of multi-billion dollar missions with dozens of people incinerated, and one announcer crying "Oh The Humanity" will doom the program.

    That's why I like the Ascender airships: they're basically big bags of helium and run on solar electricity. Their "fuel" cost is the helium, or if we get really freaky, hydrogen, and that lasts for multiple missions. I don't know the cost of launching into the mesosphere, but it's dense enough for aerodynamics to still work, but it's above 99.9% of the atmosphere, so there's going to be a lot less friction from rapid acceleration.

    As for safety, an Ascender would take about two hours to reach 50 kilometers, so if it springs a leak, it can come back fairly easily. Compare that with a rocket, and you'll see the advantage. That's one advantage of the whole ATO thing, one of many: if it works, it's a lot safer, since things like holed balloons can take hours or days to leak out. The downside is that we don't know if you can accelerate an airship to orbit from 50 km up, mostly because we don't really know that much about the mesosphere it would have to fly through. Right now, we just shoot rockets through it at high speed, and burn up shuttles and other meteors as they hit it going too fast.

    522:

    @462: Is that article accurate?

    I don't have direct knowledge of that, but it seems accurate.

    @463: you have your informant, I have mine

    I don't have an informant; I have experience and the ability to analyze. Consider, for example, Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which prohibits the placing of nuclear weapons in space. Further, we saw the extensive, and sometimes extended, pre-launch preparations of the Shuttle over 30 years. Given that we have existing ICBMs such as Minuteman III that can deliver warheads in under 30 minutes, why use the Shuttle? There's no military utility to it.

    @465: From the Wiki article on the Space Shuttle:

    The Air Force expected to use the Space Shuttle to launch large satellites, and required it to be capable of lifting 29,000 kg (65,000 lb) to an eastward LEO or 18,000 kg (40,000 lb) into a polar orbit. The satellite designs also required that the Space Shuttle have a 4.6 by 18 m (15 by 60 ft) payload bay.

    Now, from the Wiki article on the KH-11 reconnaissance satellite:

    Size and mass KH-11s are believed to resemble the Hubble Space Telescope in size and shape, as the satellites were shipped in similar containers. Their length is believed to be 19.5 meters, with a diameter of up to 3 meters. A NASA history of the Hubble, in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."

    Different versions of the KH-11 vary in mass. Early KH-11s were reported to be comparable in mass to the KH-9 Hexagon, i.e. about 12,000 kg. Later blocks are believed to have a mass of around 17,000 kg to 19,600 kg.

    N.B. (I am NOT vouching for the accuracy or truthfulness of the second article; it merely provides an interesting comparison of sizes and masses.)

    @470: I don't think the Army would step in to stop that violence in the face of Republican opposition, but if Democratic Governors asked for assistance & support I think they'd get it whether Trump approved or not.

    Remember, unless Federalized, the National Guard in a state us under the command of the state governor. Those governors do not need permission from the Federal government to use the Guard within the state. This is subject to a number of caveats, particularly with respect to the Insurrection Act.

    [[ link fixed - mod ]]

    523:

    I've read A Distant Mirror several times. Problem is she's not a medievalist and those secondary sources out of which her research was compiled have been in many areas refuted or superceded, particularly via the new enlightenment provided by archeology, since gatekeeping historians'(and still not all of them) reluctant acceptance. Her work on art is -- just so wrong. Also that declaration that medieval parents didn't grieve for lost infants and young children -- also so wrong, among many other declarations.

    524:

    Fuel may be the cheapest part of a space launch, but if you're blowing vast quantities of CO2 or other greenhouse gases on liftoff from Earth, it's already obsolete and just hasn't realized it yet.

    Not if the CO2 and H2O it's kicking out is coming from synthetic CH4/O2 that was created using CO2 and H2O pulled out of the atmosphere in the first place: the net carbon emissions are zero. The problem with greenhouse gases is we're contributing to them by burning fossil carbon, and Musk's medium to long term plan is to Not Do That.

    As for his huge egg crate rockets? All he has to do is lose a couple of multi-billion dollar missions with dozens of people incinerated, and one announcer crying "Oh The Humanity" will doom the program.

    His target for Superheavy/Starship is to get the cost of the rockets down to single-digit millions of dollars -- not building them like airliners, but building them like D-Day landing craft. I have my doubts, but the price he's targeting is ridiculously low by space launch standards, and it's going to drive payload prices down in due course: so the cost of a complete hull loss will be more akin to losing a Boeing 737 than a Space Shuttle. (It's bad, there will be lawsuits and investigations, but it won't ground civil aviation worldwide for two years.)

    525:

    Check the man pages on the board. I worked on servers, and, IIRC, my last m/b here at home, where I could activate either this set of SATA ports OR that set, but not both.

    526:

    Sorry, I should have specified that I was assuming a two week or less mission. It just ain't got the space for longer-term life support.

    527:

    Yep. Or Zarkov's rocketship, from the Flash Gordon serial.... I keep looking for the wires.

    528:

    I meant to make the same cmt - and torpedoes are a lot cheaper and more common than cruise missiles.

    What, EMP the tax havens? No! You want the records. On the other hand, cutting their underwater cables, and there's no 'Net to do anything.... A simple naval blockade, and cut cables, and no supplies, and see how fast they surrender.

    529:

    Sorry, the capitalists do operate that way. Remember, "long term planning" is next quarter?

    And then there's the willingness to bite their nose to spite their face. In the mid-nineties, I heard a story about some town out west, where WalMart (aka "China-mart, aka scum) opened one of their stores on the outskirts of town, and literally drove every single business except for the drug story out of business in the town.

    Then, five years later, they decided they weren't making "enough" profit, and shut the store down, and told the town to drive to one 30 mi away....

    530:

    Let's see, it's the seventies, under Tricky Dick... and the Pentagon's going to pay attention to the Outer Space Treaty? Esp. if they're saying "well, not now, but if/when we need to"?

    531:

    We're already in the danger zone where we need to not just be carbon neutral but carbon negative. So no, carbon neutral exhaust isn't sufficient.

    Also, if the airship to orbit thing actually worked, the price point they're aiming for is $50,000 to put a human or 100 kg in orbit. The thing is it will take days to get there and no acceleration couches will be required.

    Now I agree that there's no proof they can fly the final leg (stratosphere to orbit), but given that their tests currently are around $30,000 or less and they're innovating as a non-profit, it's seriously worth watching them, as opposed to thinking that ground-based rockets are the only way to go.

    532:

    whitroth Unless you are very lucky/unlucky ( depending on p.o.v. ) a ship will sink realtively slowly if hit with a torpedo, whereas a cruise missile strike is, by definition, above the waterline, with lots of fire & "stuff". The opportunity for the arseholes to escape a torpedo-strike is a lot greater than that from a missile ( I think )

    I find the discussion regarding the staged / involving aerostats / transfer-journey metod of getting to orbit - cheaply utterly fascinating.....

    I may well join this dicussion before collapsing tonight, probably about 22.45 GMT, but when I get downstairs tomorrow moring - 07.00 GMT, I will certainly be paying attention to the news. Personally, I think DJT is going to lose & then the REAL "crazy" starts & people had better hang on to their hats & everything else .....

    533:

    Assuming a carbon neutral fuel technology, plus enough fuel to both land on Mars then make a return trip, and the whole thing might be carbon-negative. (They might do best leaving the first few Superheavies on Mars and feeding them to smelters so there can be Martian manufacturing of simple tools.)

    534:

    The last leg requires a mile long spaceship. Even the monsters in the Strategic Defense Initiative weren't that big.

    535:

    Modern torpedoes are kind of terrifying: they're underwater guided missiles designed to create a pressure wave beneath a ship's keel, breaking its back. And here's what happened when North Korea torpedoed an ROK ship in 2010 -- the Cheonan, a 1200 ton corvette, was ripped in two and sank instantly: larger ships are also instant kills when the weapon is effectively a 300kg shaped charge detonated at very close range.

    536:

    Update Article in the Atlantic - use an incognito window - explaining in more detail as to how DJT will do his "best" to negate a result unfavourable to himself. This quote is the key: Donald Trump decided months ago to run against the election itself. ... Quote.

    537:

    I'd be careful about overgeneralizing. There are a fair number of VCs with significantly longer horizons, at least in the scientific instrumentation market. (in the 20 year span...albeit with hatred) Given the failure fraction and the time investment, their returns on capital were probably good, but not great.

    For, at least these sorts of companies, most of the issues about 'short-term' focus have related to companies muddling along with small-large losses while spending VC money for 10+ years. At which point, the VCs tend to demand unpleasant short-term changes while prepping the company for sale. It sucks, but they mostly weren't short-sighted, just more realistic than the employees.

    There is a gap for relatively safe investments with limited upside, but the issue is that people overlook stuff enough that it is difficult to make a good case for investment there.

    538:

    Re: 'Donald Trump decided months ago to run against the election itself. ...'

    Yeah - that's why the attack on (defunding/scrapping) the Post Office, rushing the SCOTUS appointment, etc.

    Gods, what a mess!

    539:

    Yes. Totally.

    PUBLIC companies in the US stock markets tend to have a very short term outlook. Unless they are in a place were they can (and want) to ignore it. Apple mostly. Berkshire Hathaway for sure. BH's stock price is so high they can ignore short term traders.

    VC's come in multiple flavors. The "buy strip and sell for parts" have very short term plans. But to them that means a year or two at most.

    VC's that want to invest in high risk tend to think in terms of 5 years, maybe more. They are placing big bets on expecting many will fail but that some will hit it huge. Google anyone?

    540:

    Yes, but then again, aircraft aren't even as long as the 1930s zeppelins. Building huge airships is more like building a bridge than building an airplane, anyway.

    The thing you don't see unless you by the ATO book is that they're actually being kind of clever: their basic testbed is a lattice of carbon fiber struts, with stages of foamboard strengthened with carbon fiber tape, all hauled up with a weather balloon rated to 130,000 feet. They've got a two-balloon testbed that's a truss with two of their propellers on it (electric engines), but it's the same tech only bigger. The ascenders are basically a very long carbon fiber truss (they've gone over 100' IIRC), with an envelope over a bunch of weather balloons, propelled by two propellers.

    See how this goes? The cute wrinkle is that they're testing airtube struts in place of the carbon fiber frame on the bottom, to see if they can make it even simpler.

    Basically, the orbital airship has 2000 meter-long wings, but it's fundamentally the same structure of a long truss lifted by balloons and surrounded by an envelope. So the sheer size doesn't matter. The very real problems they do have are a) building it at the top of the stratosphere (where the air is very thin and very cold), then flying it to hypersonic velocities and ultimately to escape velocity, which is faster than a balloon has gone in the atmosphere (the top speed so far was Mach 9 or so, and the balloon survived). So the envelope around the airbags has to be shaped the right way, and they have to get sufficient thrust out of their electrochemical engines (which they're already test-firing).

    That's why I like it. The first two stages of the system, the Ascender and the Dark Sky Station, are probably doable, and they're probably worth doing for R&D, because they have many of the advantages of the space station without freefall and with a much shorter shipping distance. Going from the DSS to orbit is the leap into the unknown, because no one knows whether a mile-long airship can go hypersonic in a near-vacuum, and assembling the orbital airship at the DSS will be a bit tricky. But the cost is trivial compared with what Musk's spending to go to Mars, so I agree with the lunatics doing the work that it's worth pursuing, far more so than something like a beanstalk.

    The other cool thing, again, is that JP Aerospace is selling (or even giving away) space on their high altitude testbeds right now. Unlike Musk or any of the other private efforts, you don't have to wait more than a few months to fly, and unlike a rocket, you don't have to pre-test to see whether your experiment can survive liftoff before you launch it, because the acceleration rate is so low. Maybe I'm an old softie, but I like this ethos.

    541:

    Nojay @ 503: The obsession with supersizing-in-space continues to both amuse and confuse me. ... Why the 1960's-era "everything must go up in one stack!" dream continues to dominate the planning and designs for manned spaceflight outside LEO I don't understand.

    I think there are four or so things you're missing. One was covered earlier: launch risk (including part that hasn't gone away: weather risk!) lead to choosing Lunar Orbit Rendezvous over Earth Orbit Rendezvous. Another thing to keep in mind is production rate: IIRC, a Delta 4 takes about 6 months to make. You don't plan a mission around multiple launches without spending a lot of time storing launchers.

    Another is the technological constraints of the 60's, and the institutional mindset that got baked into booster designers as a result. Rocket engines involve very, very complex shapes that need to withstand incredible environmental extremes. Manufacturing them required a combination of lots of really small, really good manual welds and lots of very precise manual milling. (I believe the latter went away in the 90s with programmatic CNC machines, and the former is currently on its way out with 3D printing.)

    As a result, engines were extraordinarily expensive to make, so the learned mindset in the US was to make them as effective as possible; which, once you're off the ground, means ISP. Thus the American fascination with hydrolox which started with the Saturn. And, if hydrolox is anything, it is big. You pay for that perfect ISP with enormous tanks (See the Shuttle ET, the Delta IV, and the SLS). Additionally, I think there's been a learned helplessness when it comes to manufacturing costs; after all, engines are by nature super expensive, everybody else's engines are similarly super expensive, and we are guaranteed government contracts no matter how expensive the rocket gets, so... why optimize for cost? Of course, even a little cost-consciousness will lead to a cheaper product than no attention to cost, so Ariane and Roscosmos came to dominate the commercial market.

    That covers why US government projects kept going big, but SpaceX is currently showing the error of that mindset, so why are they, also, going bigger? Reusability. They've made the Falcon 9 about as reusable as they can, boosting back the first stage and catching the fairings. But the second stage doesn't have the margin to get anything to orbit, get itself back out of orbit, and carry a thermal protection system to survive the way back down. Starship is as big as it is so that the second stage can be reused. Second stage reuse has been the holy grail that SpaceX has been chasing since the first booster successfully touched down. The Big Falcon Rocket is the smallest they think can get away with to bring both halves back. With full reuse, the mission profile you suggested with many, many launches to lift enough fuel to go anywhere with anything becomes even cheaper than if you do it with Falcon 9s, nevermind the state-of-the-art pre-SpaceX.

    The final bit is just politics. With a big showpiece rocket (Senate Lunch System) in the works that is driving contracts to all sorts of congressional districts, Congress does not want anything to come along and kill the golden goose. ULA started looking into in-space refueling, but was quietly told to drop it as, as you recognize, that kinda kills the point of an old-style giant rocket stack. Notable is the Senate head space-person, Senator Shelby (R-AL), discouraging NASA from even using the word 'depot'. Since Congress holds the purse strings, NASA does not disagree when Congress tells them to spend most of their budget on a rocket to nowhere. Better that than not get a budget.

    542:

    Ah, so now we have a 2km wing. Things are starting to scale up. What is that envelope made of?

    543:

    Let's see: about four years ago, my company (federal contractor) was going to IPO... then, after months of saying this, we were bought ("merged") with a spinoff of CSC. Merging the systems took over a year. This was via venture capital.

    Then we were bought by General Dynamics, and the vc cashed out.

    544:

    Ah, so now we have a 2km wing. Things are starting to scale up. What is that envelope made of?

    Per Floating to Space, the current design for the orbital airship has: --Outer envelope of nylon or rip-stop polyethylene or something similar that's resistant to UV damage.
    --Top deck: Kevlar. It's the upper surface opposite the bottom keel that holds the solar panels and the piping, as well as helping to hold the shape of the upper wing. --bottom keel: carbon fiber and inflatable members. This is where the access tunnel and the crew compartments are located. --Internal gas cells (filled with hydrogen, because above 50 km, hydrogen burning is not an issue): nonmetallic coated mylar, with up to 20 bags per arm.
    --Space between bags: filled with nitrogen that's ejected as the pressure drops and topped up from an internal tank on the way down.

    Two more design details that I didn't get. --Most airships use an outer envelope for shape and inner gasbags for lift and ballasting. There are a couple of reasons. One is that if the airship is one huge balloon, getting it to fly level after being tipped up to climb is difficult. Having the lifting gas in a bunch of smaller airbags keeps the lifting gas evenly distributed. Ballast bags pump air in from the outside and back out, as in submarine ballast tanks, and do it to change the orientation of the ship, again like a submarine.

    --What if a meteorite or debris pops a balloon? There won't be a catastrophic blowout. Most likely, either the hole gets patched (as they did with WWI zeppelins hit by gunfire) or they pump the gas out of the holed gasbags and move them to adjacent gasbags, install a new gasbag, then inflate the new one by moving gas around. It's substantially easier to fix than a big rocket getting a propellant tank holed on the way up.

    And again, no one's yet gotten to the altitudes or speeds where they need to fly to test this, so I wouldn't put much faith in this being the final design, although it's likely to be something like this if it works.

    545:

    Merging the systems took over a year. This was via venture capital.

    Then we were bought by General Dynamics, and the vc cashed out.

    My list wasn't meant to be exhaustive. You pointed out a 3rd way. From my limited experience most VCs have a method and stick to it. If big then they might have more than one.

    546:

    OT: Update on Homebuilt NAS server It works!

    Mostly.

    I still have a few things to work out. I found a tutorial on YouTube on how to set it up initially. The OS did recognize all 5-4tb drives once I installed a new CMOS battery & reinstalled the OS.

    The only thing wrong now is I want to set it up with 2 disk pools, 1-5x2TB drives & 1-5x4TB drives. I set up the first pool with the 2TB drives.

    When I went to create the second pool, it only shows the 5x2TB drives I used for the first pool. Got to figure out how to get it to offer the other 5x4TB drives for the second pool.

    I won't start trying to copy files to it until I figure it out, just in case I have to start over. Which I think I'm going to have to do because the reported capacity for the pool is greater than it should be for a RAID-Z2 (double parity). It's showing 10TB when it should be 6TB.

    Don't remember if I mentioned I voted this morning. I was there when the polls opened & was first voter in line. I'm going to try to stay away from the news until late tonight when most of the results are available. North Carolina is supposed to be able to report about 97% of the vote tally within 2 hours of the last polling place closing. That will be a Volunteer Fire Station down in Sampson County that opened 45 minutes late this morning, so the State Board of Elections will allow them to stay open 45 minutes after the scheduled closing time at 7:30pm.

    So, 8:15pm + 2 hours and we should begin to have a good idea of how things are going in North Carolina.

    547:

    Oh, and of course raises were, ok, but the cost of benefits went up. Even though the company was very profitable.

    548:

    Heteromeles Building huge airships is more like building a bridge than building an airplane, anyway. Ask Barnes Wallis - his design worked & was scrapped in a peculiarly British hysterical panic. It had a geodesic style framing, like the later Wellington bomber .....

    JBS 20.15 hrs + 2 + 4 for time zones = 02.15 GMT Should be quite a few preliminary reaults by 4hrs 45min later than that, then ( = 07.00 GMT ) Will switch raido "on" .... As before, I'm expecting a comfortable Biden win ( NOT a landslide, unfortunately ) followed by as much insane trouble as DJT can manage to stir up,lasting months. Te Crazy actually STARTS tomorrow, I think.

    549:

    I didn't find anything about a balloon surviving mach 9 in the JP article in Wikipedia (or how it would have reached such a speed) and I still see weight issues with the framing and envelope.

    550:

    waldo @ 519: JBS at 468:

    Are you sure it's not the lack of RAM that's preventing the TrueNAS install process starting? It would be a simple check to add to the installer.

    It installed. Worked "fine" on the first reboot where you have to remove the installation media. Rebooted several times as I started it up & shut it down. But it just wouldn't boot after I had it shut down for a longer period while I dug around inside - swapping components to see if the problem with the hard-drive bay would follow a drive or a cable or a port ... I think the dead CMOS battery let the SSD where the OS is installed go flat so to speak while the power was off.

    I put in a new CMOS battery today and was able to get into BIOS to set the date & time.

    I installed TrueNAS again. It still kvetched about not enough memory, but it installed and it's running. I haven't shut it down since the first reboot. The problem with the drive cage may be just a faulty LED. When I went into the console to configure the drive pools, it was showing all 10 drives installed (actually 11 since the OS is installed on a separate SSD.)

    I've still got stuff to figure out before it becomes usable, but it IS up and running right now. I've got one folder with one text file on the share to prove I can get into it from Windoze.

    551:

    Just watching some of the start of the bbc coverage of the US election and they seem to be convinced that it is going to be a very tight vote. Trump reportedly "feels better" about winning btw. And then there's the electorial college to worry about, how well will biden go there?

    Would not be very sure at all about a biden win really right now.

    ljones

    552:

    Dave P @ 522:

    @470: I don't think the Army would step in to stop that violence in the face of Republican opposition, but if Democratic Governors asked for assistance & support I think they'd get it whether Trump approved or not.

    Remember, unless Federalized, the National Guard in a state us under the command of the state governor. Those governors do not need permission from the Federal government to use the Guard within the state. This is subject to a number of caveats, particularly with respect to the Insurrection Act.

    I have a good bit of experience with what the Governors can do with the National Guard & what happens when a state needs to use the National Guard while it is on Federal Service. The Louisiana National Guard was in Iraq when Katrina devastated the state in 2005. National Guard units from adjacent states were loaned with coordination between states through the National Guard Bureau, including some Active Army units deployed to make up some of the difference.

    I was in the National Guard for 32 years, called to Federal Service 3 times and called for state duty (fortunately none of them for civil disturbances) more than a dozen times.

    IF Trump is losing & his Second Amendment supporters rampage against Black Lives Matter or "Anti-FA" or Vote Fraud or ... the Democratic Governors will almost certainly call out the Guard to restore order. And if the problem is too great to handle with state resources, the DoD will likely provide additional resources whether Trump approves or not.

    Where the Republicans are currently in control of state governments, I'm not confident the Governors will call the Guard to protect non-Republicans, i.e. non-whites, Hispanics, Orientals.

    I would not put it past Trump to interfere with State Governors using their National Guards to control rioting Trump supporters, but I do think the DoD would resist such interference, although what form that resistance might take I don't know.

    But, as has been pointed out several times this year, the military swears their oath to the Constitution and they take that oath seriously, and will not unthinkingly obey unlawful orders.

    I hope it turns out I'm worrying for nothing.

    553:

    whitroth @ 525: Check the man pages on the board. I worked on servers, and, IIRC, my last m/b here at home, where I could activate *either* this set of SATA ports *OR* that set, but not both.

    All of the SATA ports on the Motherboard & on the two SATA controller cards appear to be working properly. The problem with Setup was fixed by replacing the dead CMOS battery.

    Subsequent developments suggest the SATA channel in the back-plane cage is working properly as well. I couldn't tell that at the time because the dead CMOS battery was limiting how far I could go with the installation. It now looks like it's only a faulty indicator LED for that channel/bay.

    554:

    CNN projects that Indiana voted for Trump. Well, duh. The only time in recent history Indiana voted for a Democratic candidate was 2008 and that was just barely, 49.9% to 48.9%. Dems are usually doing well to get 40% of the vote (in 2016 Trump got 56.8%.)

    I was born, raised and educated here, which actually explains quite a lot. While I and my kids voted for Biden/Harris none of us had any expectation of Democrats being elected here. I believe that the last Presidential candidate of any party to campaign here was President Obama in 2008 and 2012. Indiana voting for a Republican means absolutely nothing on a national scale.

    555:

    My local polling place was the most crowded I’ve seen it in 20 years. Can’t stand the thought of watching the news so I’ll retreat to a more pleasant fantasy land ... I just downloaded Dead Lies Dreaming.

    556:

    Straight from the front lines! My precinct, one of five in my small town in the Shenandoah Valley, went for Trump 707 to 278, although that doesn't include the early and absentee votes. Kanye got three write-in votes, but I didn't note the few votes for the Libertarian candidate. Some caveats, my precinct has been the most Republican precinct in town since at least 2018, last Presidential election, but it is also the largest precinct in the town.

    The most surprising thing was that voter turnout today was far less than I'd expected. My precinct had 47% in early voting and received absentee ballots by Monday, but only added 24% more for a total of 71%. So this victory could be entirely illusory since our turnout today was only one half of the early voting. More than once we had people tell us that they were voting for the first time, including a woman of 76(!), so who were the voters who didn't show up? I dunno, and I don't think that the usual presumption that early voters lean more to Democrats holds up in this rural area.

    Virginia's polls closed an hour and a half ago and the precincts should be reporting the state-level Board of Elections as I write this.

    557:

    I didn't find anything about a balloon surviving mach 9 in the JP article in Wikipedia (or how it would have reached such a speed) and I still see weight issues with the framing and envelope.

    The "inflatable micrometeroid paraglider" was launched in 1964 from a sounding rocket. It was released at 96 miles up, inflated but didn't shed the sounding rocket as planned, hit 5,000 mph at 300,000 feet, and survived to hit the ground with the film recording the flight intact.

    Unfortunately, there's no wikipedia entry on it under that name. The envelope was multiple layers of aluminum foil and polyethylene. They ran a charge through the aluminum layers. Every time the wing got punctured, it would short out, which was recorded on telemetry (it was a Rogallo Wing, with inflated struts, basically). The reason for the experiment was to see how many micrometeroids and other crap were lurking in the upper atmosphere, and it was a flying success. They designed a bigger version as a spacecraft escape pod, but it was never built.

    Project ECHO inflated 100' balloons in orbit in 1960 and 1964. These were passive signal reflectors. They worked just fine.

    Many of the details are in the book Floating to Space, which you have to order in dead-tree form from JPA.

    Weightwise, I'm looking for the picture of the 100' carbon fiber triangular truss that weighs about 50 pounds, but the key point is that their work looks ridiculously flimsy. Since I've played with the numbers, I'd suggest doing likewise before having concerns about weight. That's not the big problem. The big problem is keeping something large and delicate, like the orbital airship, intact at high speed. The other two segments are a lot more robust.

    558:

    @530: Again, there's NO military utility to sticking nukes in the Shuttle when you have Minuteman III, Peacekeeper, B-52s with ALCM, and Trident III, all capable of hard target kills - and this was in the age of counterforce theory. There's simply no reason to strap nukes to a Shuttle.

    JBS @552: Good on ya', mate. I have no direct experience in the Guard; my time was active duty, Reserves, and since 1990, civil service. But I learned a lot as a USNORTHCOM plankholder.

    Katrina was quite an experience. I spent August to November 2005 in the USNORTHCOM command center. The turnout for Katrina was AMAZING - we had to turn active duty units around from Fort Hood when they simply launched without any orders. And of course homeboy Honore was out there giving the press juicy quotes. Don't even ask me what happened to the German MRE equivalents they sent us.

    Frankly, I'm not impressed by the "Proud Boys" and other so-called militias; I doubt they're anything a moderately competent mid sized city PD can't handle. Granted, there's going to be some good ole' boy bullshit between the redneck cops and the wannabe fascists, but most of the cops I've worked with will come down on the side of citizens versus criminals - there being only three kinds of people, counting police.

    I agree El Cheeto Grande will TRY to interfere with governors' use of the Guard. I don't think he'll be remarkably successful.

    I'm worried too, but I think our training will hold.

    559:

    So, basically it could be (among other shapes) a 2km wide Rogallo wing.

    560:

    So I’m sure we’ve been there before, but what would another 4 years of Trump mean? Don’t think it’s settled yet, but it’s come up not quite close enough for the “declare victory on the night” tactic, but close enough for a long rambling exposition of how he thinks he should win from here and anything different means they’re stealing it from him. I quite liked Biden’s patience message, but it’s not clear how that will turn out.

    What would it mean? Would we expect more of the same, or would we expect an escalation of the madness, maybe now we’re at ten and it will go one more, eleven and all that?

    561:

    So, 8:15pm + 2 hours and we should begin to have a good idea of how things are going in North Carolina.

    I'm posting this at 2:30am North Carolina time and have some data. The ABC site currently says Trump at 50% with 2,732,120 votes and Biden at 49% with 2,655383 votes. It's gone back and forth repeatedly over the evening; at this point it's a tossup for NC's 15 electoral votes.

    Meanwhile Trump has tweeted that he's ahead (he's not) and that Democrats are trying to "steal the election" (they're not), and as I type is having a press conference to boast about how amazingly far ahead he is and talk about his victory. In case you're wondering, he's 'ahead' 213 electoral votes to Biden's 221 (ABC) or 225 (NPR). With math skills like that it's clear how he keeps going bankrupt.

    562:

    Trump has just given a speech and said he's not going to abide by the results, he's won and the vote doesn't matter. He's taking it to the supreme court.

    563:

    Gasdive I heard some of that, before I could stand no more.... He claimed they had won Pennsylvania, whhich is complete bollocks ... Other worrying thoughts: The D's may not take the Senate & I heard a Florida "Latino" ( their description ) saying that he voted for Trump, because he's "Strong" & Biden is a "Socialist Communist" ... Macho & bullshit & SCARY. WHat haooens if Biden wins by a thread, but the R's retain control of the Senate?

    564:

    Yeah, the amount of disinformation is amazing. I saw a black man saying he was voting trump because the Democrats were so violent, shooting people and destroying things. How in dog's name you manage to get that out of this situation is beyond me.

    565:

    I am so tempted to buy the new Raspberry Pi 400...

    I have no need of a Raspberry Pi (and believe me, I've looked at the toys and tried to invent one) but just a few hours ago saw this Raspberry Pi 400 in a keyboard. Dang that looks like fun.

    566:

    If every vote is counted, if, then Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan will probably let Biden ooze over the finish line by a small margin. He will also probably have a popular vote win by roughly the same margin as Hillary (adjusted for more total votes than 2016.)

    The Senate is toast. The House is still clean.

    Muse, speak of the Trilogy of the Demonic Democratic Dicks:

    Fellowship of the Cockring: Bill Clinton's member turns off a number of independent women who find Gore guilty by association.

    The Two "Towers": The wraith of Bill's wang blunts the shock value of the Access Hollywood tape. Weiner's pics give Comey the pretext to "reopen" the Clinton email investigation right before the election.

    Return of the Cringe: Cal Cunningham's dick is not only disloyal to his wife, it violates the espirit de corps of the US military: one Senate seat down. Candidate Gideon steps on a landmine for Biden's dick, thus losing the high ground she gained on Senator Collins, when the later confirmed Justice Kavanaugh. This also gave Collins the opportunity to reclaim even more ground when she got the opportunity to perform as "the Voice of Virtue and Senatorial Gravitas" in the Comey Barret hearings.

    So, we can enjoy more gridlock as my country winds toward the vortex. And to think that a few days ago I was angsting about conservative Democrats being a limiter on how much the Dems could get done. No need to worry; they won't do anything that cannot be accomplished by executive fiat.

    I don't find it plausible that the elections won't eventually get tallied and respected, but I've been wrong before. And some right wing nut jobs will probably still hurt a few innocent people before it's done.

    567:

    I'm posting this at 2:30am North Carolina time and have some data. The ABC site currently says Trump at 50% with 2,732,120 votes and Biden at 49% with 2,655383 votes. It's gone back and forth repeatedly over the evening; at this point it's a tossup for NC's 15 electoral votes.

    At 3:30am local time in NC.

    NC has all precincts reporting and counted including early voting. And Trump and Tillis(R-Senate) both are ahead.

    But there are 113K mail in votes that have yet to be received and they have a week or so to show up. Trump and Tillis are ahead by about 80K. But I'm betting that only 1/2 or less of those outstanding ballots show up. Nothing nefarious, people asked for one and just didn't fill it out or mail it. Plus there are some that decided to early vote or vote in person and so they have a provisional ballot that replaces the missing mail in.

    Anyway, while mathematically Trump and/or Tillis can loose, the odds are against it.

    But there are some state wide races where some Rs are leading by 10K or less. And the mail in ballots tend to break D. So while we have some state races that may flip R to D the national vote for Trump and Tillis will likely hold.

    Lots of ticket splitting as our D governor is ahead by 240K votes. Most folks like what he has done so far and his opponent was way more Trump like in terms of the pandemic and too close to home to get their vote. They stuck with what they knew.

    So why did so many split. Personally I think that Cunningham, running as the D against Tillis, getting caught with his zipper down cost the D's in NC a big win. He was leading by a lot until that happened 2 months ago.

    568:

    A reminder ... That if the DT wins, then Britain is utterly fucked. If you are under 50 years old - LEAVE - go to mainland Europe or NZ ( Aotearoa ) Scotland will probably not escape, even if "independant" - otherwise that would also be an option.

    If Biden scrapes it, without control of the Senate, something will be done, but not a lot. [ Can Pres + supermajority of lower-house over-ride the senate, if the majority of votes is big enough, or can the R's simply refuse to pass legislation for another 4 years? ]

    569:

    WHat haooens if Biden wins by a thread, but the R's retain control of the Senate?

    A re-run of the last 6 years of the Obama admin. For at least 2 years.

    570:

    The latter. Neither house can override the other. Which is why spending bills (as continuing resolutions) eventually do make it through as the fallout of not is bad for both sides most of the time when they don't.

    As to the NC vote the BOE has a page where you can see what happened state wide at all levels if one desires. And a link to download the data. Just don't forget those 113K outstanding mail in ballots which are expected to break hard D. At least the ones that show up.

    https://er.ncsbe.gov/

    571:

    Looking at a live map/results Biden wins Arizona, currently at 220/213 EC-votes. Still to declare ... ( may already be out of date as I type ) ... Pennslyvania / N Carolina / Georgia / Wisconsin / Michigan / Maine ??

    How few of those drag Biden over the win line? ( i.e. give him 51 more EC votes )

    572:

    Penn is likely to stay DT. Too far ahead unless the mail in count swings very very hard to Biden.

    NC - Nope. See my notes above.

    Georgia and Wisconsin They have very large un-reported counts (still in progress) from the large cities of each state. Areas which are expected to go 80-20 give or take to Biden. Which if true means that things will be very close.

    Michigan maybe so.

    Maine is too small to tell much about it. IMO.

    573:

    The most important result is already in: At least 40% of USA's population is ready for fascism.

    That is not going away, even if Biden wins with bonus senate majority.

    The republicans will have no choice but to field a fascist candidate in 2024, anything else will be electoral suicide.

    Who bet 2:5 on Nazis with Nukes by 2025 ?

    574:

    A purely hypothetical question for OGH, or anyone with insight.

    Suppose, just as a gedanken experiment, that this election was stolen --- that actually there was a Biden landslide in all of the marginals, but that (handwavium) something was done to change the results, before or after the votes were made.

    How would it / could it have been accomplished?

    (yes, I know that irl it was the people that were infected with malware, but ... )

    575:

    Four more years of Trump means that humans will certainly fail to do enough to deal with climate change. In the short term that doesn't mean that much. If we survive long enough for there to be a long term, it means very bad things indeed.

    How bad and when it gets bad is still fairly hard to predict I think – a model which runs a degree or two hot or a degree or two cold is fine for predicting warming trends, but not much use for predicting when an ice sheet gives up.

    It's not human extinction, probably: it is billions of deaths and the collapse of civilisation. Quite likely the process involves resource wars which become nuclear as nuclear states governed by fascists start to starve in due course.

    I will be dead by the time it bites – perhaps we all will – but we can live with the knowledge that we fucked up the future for thousands of years.

    576:

    I have a pair of true wireless earphones(a second generation Xiaomi model I got during a Labour Weekend sale) And I realised something. I am putting a pair of computers in my ear which talk to a tight formation of At least 4(Main CPU, baseband, SIM card, micro SD card) computers in my pocket At least 5(Left AND right earbud, Main CPU, baseband, SIM card AND OR micro SD card) of which have to chatter amongst themselves for me to hear what I'm playing/streaming. It has been 4 years since Apple popularized the idea And now you pick up fairly decent versions of it for $49.99 NZD(Do your own currency conversion) On sale.

    We really do live in interesting times

    577:

    I woke up at 1.30 EST and made the mistake of checking how things were going.

    At that time, DJT was ahead in the EC and I said to myself: America just rolled a critical failure. Again. Difficulty getting back to sleep and stress dreams for the rest of the night.

    Woke up this morning and Biden is up 238-213, however it looks like the Senate remains Republican. Even Lady G won reelection.

    What happened to the double-digit lead that the pollsters said Biden had? Will the mail-in vote really break so hard to the Democrats?

    This means gridlock. SCOTUS remains packed. Nothing changes.

    578:

    Going back to Puerto Rico for a minute, the referendum is breaking for statehood.

    According to https://www.elvocero.com

    Plebiscito Estadidad Sí o No:

    Sí: 592,242 (52.19%) No: 542,634 (47.81%)

    The population of PR is 3.2 million, so that's a pretty good sample. But just what, if anything, will come of this is very much TBD.

    579:

    Who DID bet or who WILL bet? Well, I did, and I don't think you will find many people to bet against it now. The same remarks apply to the UK, of course, as will become clear when Bozo's successor is chosen - though our 'nuclear deterrent' is just a sick joke and penile prosthetic.

    580:

    Biden in lead in Wisconsin with 4% left to count as the "off-site" votes are counted .... Current status: 238 /213 fror Biden He needs 43 more to win, but Trump needs 67. um, err ... will the Senate be 50:50 I wonder?

    PH-K Yes "40% ready for fascism" - truly scary, but then, Orban is in power in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey & the RC in Poland .... And there are creeps like Farage, here, too.

    581:

    (on what would 4 more years of Trump mean?)

    "What would it mean? Would we expect more of the same, or would we expect an escalation of the madness, maybe now we’re at ten and it will go one more, eleven and all that?"

    It would be massive escalation; the right in the USA would build on what it's already accomplished, and one of those things is tearing down limits on power.

    582:

    ""What would it mean? Would we expect more of the same"

    Nope, it would mean escalation: Anybody in USA who is reelected claims to have "a clear mandate" for anything they ever talked about.

    For Trump that means nazi-like racism and an end to democracy.

    Trump with a republican Senate will quite literally be the end of civilization, if not because they decide to nuke somebody, then because the greenhouse-gas pollution will ruin the habitability of the biosphere.

    583:

    "What happened to the double-digit lead that the pollsters said Biden had? Will the mail-in vote really break so hard to the Democrats?"

    This would be the second time the polls have been remarkably wrong. Why is another matter. I see three possibilities:

    Cheating. (By which I mean either getting rid of "unwanted" ballots or the creation of ballots which wold not otherwise exist.)

    Lying to pollsters.

    Voter suppression.

    If anyone wants to see how polls in California, particularly rural California, broke down vs. the polling, that would probably give a pretty good indicator.

    584:

    The polls haven't really been giving a double digit lead to Biden that I can see:

    https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/national/

    It went above 10pts briefly but has been in single digits for the whole campaign otherwise. Besides, these are all popular vote figures (I believe) which doesn't really give an accurate prediction of the EC results.

    As for the polls being remarkably wrong, the same site did a meta-analysis of polling for the last 20yrs and whilst 2016 wasn't great, it wasn't a million miles away from the average polling error. It just seemed much worse due to the closeness of the election.

    https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/national/

    FWIW their final prediction for Clinton : Trump was 71 : 29, so while Trump wasn't favoured, he certainly wasn't ruled out. This time around they were predicting 89 : 10, so let's hope that gives Biden enough of a buffer.

    585:

    The thing to remember is that Trump isn't organized - he could have done a lot more damage in his first term if he wasn't so driven by his short attention span.

    Thus while I wouldn't say he won't do a lot more damage, the question is whether he has the mental ability to concentrate long enough to achieve what he could (though the House remaining Democrat will limit things a bit).

    The bigger danger (both to Trump and the country) is that if he wins the Republicans no longer need him - he will have given them the White House and he can't run again - so at what point do they oust him and put Pence in charge and try and get some of the goals done using the Senate.

    As for the Senate, a 50:50 Senate is a Republican Senate as the VP votes tie breakers. The bigger question is does the Senate grind to a total gridlock (Republican advantage) or do they do away with the 60 seat vote to pass things.

    586:

    And a lesson for the Democrats and some of their supporters - the US isn't as left wing as some of them hope/believe.

    Solidly Democrat California passed proposition 22 by 58% - to take away the rights the California state government gave the workers of Uber/Lyft etc. and to return them to being independent contractors.

    587:

    Fourth possibility: the polling methodology/models are wrong because they are undercounting a significant number of voters.

    588:

    Prop 22 passed?

    Shit.

    On the plus side, the gigarich win again.

    589:

    @577:

    What happened to the double-digit lead that the pollsters said Biden had? Will the mail-in vote really break so hard to the Democrats?

    The double-digit lead was aggregated national polling, and as has already been pointed out, it's not so much a national race as 50-some separate ones, most of which were much tighter.

    Even so, the most likely outcome on 538's model was a 400+ EV blowout for Biden, and that was obviously very wrong.

    @584:

    It went above 10pts briefly but has been in single digits for the whole campaign otherwise.

    This. And that was over the last year as a whole. But nobody except nerds religiously follow the averages, and what the press talk about is the wild outliers that show huge margins. Because it's in their interest to make it a horserace.

    @587:

    Fourth possibility: the polling methodology/models are wrong because they are undercounting a significant number of voters.

    Again, this. Specifically,

  • Apparently there were significant numbers of never-previously-voted casting votes, and they skewed the outcome.

  • (hypothesis) Too many people have become too well-practiced at screening out attempts at unwanted communication, mainly from scammers and "legit" commercial enterprises. They leave their phones on DND all the time, with a whitelist of people who can make it ring. Anybody else who really wants to talk to them had better leave a voicemail, and if that starts with a machine talking it gets deleted after hearing a couple of words. This removes them from the population that can be polled.

  • 590:

    This.

    The US has a gigantic racial fault line, resulting in odd coalition politics.

    Minorities vote Democratic, but are mostly relatively conservative, particularly socially. (Which likely explains Clinton's loss.)

    My opinion is that progressive policies in the US will have more mileage when based on pure selfishness.

    IE, @#_ the environment, coal is too expensive, and it smells. (Close or already there, but soon anyways.)

    And, @#_ the sick, US medical is just too frocking expensive, look at how much we could save.

    Also, @@_ the vulnerable, prisons are expensive, same with our current police.

    It may be that my expectations of USains are a very low bar to clear. Sure, there are local bubbles (live in one, more or less, staying), but overall, eh.

    591:
    At the moment, it is recognised that BoZo is a liar, but is still regarded as "funny" ... but that is diminishing rapidly.

    Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, "I Hate You, kinda made for Boris Johnson:

    https://youtu.be/C1AYhumuoxM

    592:

    I have to disagree. Biden was ahead in individual states. You can still look at 538's model (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/) and look at individual state modeling, and they modeled a potential blowout by state based on all polls, not just in national aggregate.

    I'm personally wondering about vote rigging. The reason is the California results by County for the Presidential race (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-california.html). Obviously votes will still be counted for weeks, but only the most conservative counties in the state (the places in northeast California where they're trying to secede and form the state of Jefferson) went solidly for Trump. A number of very rural, normally red counties went for Biden, and the result was a double-digit blowout.

    The thing is, California votes by paper ballot, and we mark our selections in ink, and we get notified when our ballots are taken in and counted, so there's a big fat paper trail. Also, the people doing the count are not the elected officials in charge of making sure the count happens. Indeed, our local county registrar said he doesn't communicate with the counting team while ballots are being counted.

    One problem that's already in the news (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/02/us/trump-vs-biden) is that over 300,000 paper ballots were logged as having been deposited in the mail, but never logged as having been received by the ballot-counting sites, the logging being the internal USPS system. The USPS was ordered by a judge to immediately sweep facilities in 12 districts to find the ballots, but they didn't (or weren't able to) comply by the end of election day.

    It's the second issue, that elected or appointed officials in charge of the election are also handling the count, that worries me. Back in the 1990s/early 2000s, there was a report from a rural Wisconsin registrar that she handled the count on an Excel spreadsheet, with no password, with no one else watching (she showed a reporter how she did it). Now I'm not going to impugn the integrity of most of the people handling the vote, but there are over 3,000 counties and equivalents in the US, and it doesn't take many of these getting ratfucked for a lot of votes to get suppressed. And the ratfuckery may be as simple as losing ballots, hacking electronic voting machines, or fiddling numbers on a spreadsheet before the results are announced.

    593:

    They would be as left or liberal, or more... except for 40 years of massive propaganda, and almost all talk radio in the US is white wing extremist.

    594:

    No question it is a significant factor - but it will take 20 to 40 years of someone funding left wing think tanks and media experts to counter all the money that the billionaires have spent over the last 50 years to mould the US into what they want.

    Too many left wing people think the solution is to merely run left wing candidates, which only benefits the right wing opposition until such time as that groundwork is done and those candidates can actually win in the larger parts of the country.

    595:

    No, what we need to do, first, is restore "equal time", so that people on the left can respond to the white wingers.

    I'd have loved to have Rush Limburger followed by Al Franken (who wrote a book, "Rush is a big fat liar", and had been a stand-up comic).

    Then we need to shut down some. Faux News, with it's 95% bias, needs to either be shut down, or forced to offer equal time.

    The NYPost, who blasted the article about the alleged Biden laptops... I'm trying to decide if I should file a complaint with the FEC that they knew it was a fraud, and so was an illegal campaign contribution.

    596:

    Robert @ 555: My local polling place was the most crowded I’ve seen it in 20 years.
    Can’t stand the thought of watching the news so I’ll retreat to a more pleasant fantasy land ... I just downloaded Dead Lies Dreaming.

    There may have been 10-15 people in line when my polling place opened. The line stretched around the corner, so I could only see the first three or four, but I saw them walking down the driveway & a few cars came in and parked (out of my line of sight) while I was waiting for it to open. It's the first time I got up that early to be in line when the polling place opened.

    597:

    All is not lost yet.

    Las Vegas odds makers give Trump a 19.3% chance to win and Biden a 80.7% chance as of 11:10 am eastern time today.

    As of 13:05: 1:05 pm ET odds ---- Trump 18.3%, Biden 81.7%

    From a colleague of my recent ex. Notice Biden's going up, and the Hairball down.

    598:
    Biden was ahead in individual states. You can still look at 538's model (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/) and look at individual state modeling, and they modeled a potential blowout by state based on all polls, not just in national aggregate.

    I must not have been clear if you thought I was saying something else.

    Biden was ahead by 1-2% in a lot of States that were called for Trump, but 1-2% is ratfucking distance. In Florida, for example, we also mark paper ballots in ink, and generate audit trails. We also have the rule that ballots must be received no later than election day (postmarked is Not Good Enough) and there does seem to have been some extraordinary industrial-scale ratfucking going on with USPS. But the pattern that emerged (low D turnout in Miami-Dade, and relatively high R voting there) tracks with patterns elsewhere (and with pre-election crosstabs) suggesting that Trump was doing much better than expected with "hispanic"1 men.

    Basically Trump seems to have won in a lot of States that were polled at > +2% Biden, and it's not clear that even the USPS ratfucking should have been able to do that. On the principle of not attributing to malice that which can be explained by incompetance (or ignorance, really), I favor the explanation that the polls were wrong.

    There was really historically high turnout. A noticeable fraction of this was never-voters, many of whom apparently voted Trump.2 IDK if you have ever worked in an election or been associated with the workings of the D party, but I can attest that never-voters are invisible to D Party GOTV efforts in FL, and also that they get filtered out from the highest-quality rated polls because they don't vote. So of course they weren't included in the models!

    One of the weaknesses of the US electoral system for Presidents is exactly the fact that there are 1000s of counties each doing their own local thing, often with malice, but this same trait presents an enormous challenge to anybody trying to "rig" voting in an entire State. The issue with the 300K ballots that went into the Postal system and never came out is said, by people familiar with the failings of the Postal system, to be at least as likely a function of USPS's internal tracking as it is of political interference. IOW some fraction of those ballots were delivered, it's just that they were never scanned out of the system.

    In conclusion, the observed outcome is consistent with some combination of

  • Lots of really stupid people voted for the first time ever, in favor of even more chaos and dysfunction, and
  • The methods by which polling data are collected are obsolete: too many people are able to evade being contacted by pollsters, because the latter get stopped by the formers' spam filters.
  • 1 We really need to retire that word, which suggests that Cubans and Venezuelans have really anything in common politically with Mexicans or Guatemalans, or Puerto Ricans. What I mean here is "people with backgrounds in Spanish-speaking places where there is a strong machismo tradition."

    2 I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what kind of person looked at the last four years in America and said "I better get my ass out and vote for more of that!"

    599:

    David L @ 567: So why did so many split. Personally I think that Cunningham, running as the D against Tillis, getting caught with his zipper down cost the D's in NC a big win. He was leading by a lot until that happened 2 months ago.

    And that REALLY pisses me off. GODDAMN HYPOCRITES! What did he really do? He flirted with some woman by text message.

    They're ready to cast stones at Cunningham over that, but are just fine with "Grab 'em by the pussy", extramarital affairs (where Trumpolini used campaign funds to pay hush money to cover them up) and actual documented sexual assaults.

    They're all hypocrites at best and probably worse, lying NAZI SCUM!

    600:

    Then we need to shut down some. Faux News, with it's 95% bias, needs to either be shut down, or forced to offer equal time.

    I suspect Facebook could be a bigger factor than Fox. Apparently it has not been applying its "anti-fake-news" filters evenly — its 'third-party fact-checkers' have been downgrading the engagement for left-wing groups while bending over backwards to avoid catching flak from right-wingers. Given how many people get their information from Facebook nowadays, and given how they keep their algorithms secret so no one really knows who sees what…

    Face it, your country just got zucked.

    601:

    As I read it, Biden is likely to win the electoral college, possibly comfortably, but it will be all down to absentee votes counted after polling day. Well, obviously, Trump is going to scream fraud and play legal games, but will even the new Supreme Court be THAT partisan? And will he unleash his cronies in the executive and just plain thugs ("stand down and stand by") to nullify the result? It happens in plenty of countries, after all.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-biden-us-election-erdogan-illiberal-democracy-b1591328.html

    I can't find as much on the Senate, though it is equally important, but one page indicated a possible 50:50 split. Well, with Harris as VP, that would be, er, fun ....

    602:

    and almost all talk radio in the US is white wing extremist.

    Talk radio is really about advertising.

    Left leaning talk radio has never been able to build much of an audience. Lefties don't do talk radio. Lefties have better uses of their time. Lefties listen to FM classical radio and now pod casts. Whatever.

    Without an audience there is not advertising income and thus no lefty talk radio.

    603:

    He flirted with some woman by text message.

    Ah. Nope. There was more than that. Per Cunningham's own admission they got up close and personal.

    They're ready to cast stones at Cunningham over that,

    Doesn't matter what you think. Or what I think. What matters is what can get people to fill in the dot next to your name. And he blew it.

    604:

    will even the new Supreme Court be THAT partisan

    I wouldn't bet against it. Three are irredeemably hard right, three are left, two are mostly-right and one is expected to hew to the right to an as yet undetermined degree. Roberts and maybe Gorsuch could take some persuading to be blatantly partisan and they'd be enough to scotch a Trump appeal. Barrett -- unknown at the moment.

    Interesting times.

    605:

    Barrett

    My wife reminds me that this would be a very good time for Barrett to recuse herself, for obvious reasons.

    606:

    The right wing of the judiciary is much more libertarian and constitutionalist than Trumpist. In fact they generally detest Donald Trump. They also take their commitment to the law seriously. The Volokh Conspiracy is a good guide to their general attitudes.

    So I would not see the Supreme Court as Trump's poodle. When the Supreme Court is called on to make judgements on the Bill of Rights then they have to make judgements about the legitimate objectives of the government versus the constitutional freedoms. But where the constitution and law are clear they will follow the text rigorously.

    607:

    On another forum someone has posted that the whole problem is that too many people are so desperate for their group's goals to be achieved that they will do the most awful things to help that happen, even down to "putting a corrupt racist sex fiend with dementure in charge of the nuclear button" (the bit in italics is a direct C&P).

    I don't think there are many of us who would disagree with that, in the context-free form in which I have put it. But the guy who posted it is the forum's pet looney Trump supporter. By the bit in italics he is referring to Biden, and he is utterly blind to its much greater applicability to Trump.

    Pretty much everything he posts is like that. Any negative aspect of US politics which Trump especially favours/indulges in, he cites as something which is massively, overwhelmingly associated with the other side, and just completely ignores its genuinely massive association with Trump. He sometimes backs that up with a flood of references to obscure US nutter websites, but only if pushed; his default mode of thought is simply the schoolyard riposte of "I know you are but what am I?", elevated (in his mind) to the level of a respectable and conclusive argument.

    He's not even American, he's British. He is allowed to stay around (partly because he converses quite normally on non-political matters, and) partly so that everyone else can tell him to fuck off, and partly as an indicator of "how the other side thinks". Unfortunately, the indications are not really very useful. The schoolyard wankers who came back with "I know you are but what am I?" would just carry on being annoying wankers regardless of anything until you punched them, but that's not really a useful solution when it's half a bloody nation that's doing it.

    608:

    Nope.

    Evidence: Clarence Fucking Thomas, who did NOT recuse himself on Bush v. Gore, appointed by Bush, Sr., and HIS WIFE WAS WORKING ON THE BUSH TRANSITION TEAM THE WEEK HE SAT ON BUSH V. GORE.

    609:

    You miss what I was putting together: white-wing talk radio did not appear until after "Equal Time" was thrown out under Raygun. Equal time would kill the shock jocks.

    610:

    I think we can agree to disagree. What I saw on 538 was much greater than a 1-2% difference. If it was that, I'd agree with you. The problem is, I lived in Wisconsin and Ohio, and the problems there are far more systemic.

    On the other hand, we could be arguing about what the Resistance is calling the "Red Mirage," which is that Republicans tend to get counted first, because they're in small rural counties and voting in person, while the Democrats are in large urban centers, voted by mail, and are getting counted today.

    We'll see. I think my original assessment, that we're in for two months of crap even if Biden wins, still stands.

    611:

    OT: Server update - NOT HAPPY!

    I had it up and running. Everything was going fine. I shut it down using the menu. After it was shut down I turned off the power supply & removed the power cable so I could finish closing the case up & move it into its semi-permanent home. Observed anti-static precautions, etc.

    When I plugged it back in, NO POWER. Troubleshooting it, it appears the power supply bricked itself even though it was turned off & mains cable was removed. I've had power supplies fail before, but never a failure from doing a proper shutdown.

    On the bright side, I found memory modules that the motherboard can take that will give me the 8GB RAM that TrueNAS wants so I'll probably order them at the same time I order the new power supply.

    612:

    I know what you're saying. I disagree with the foundational concept.

    If people don't care (give a rats ass) about something enough to listen to it, forcing stations to put it on the air does nothing good. IMHO

    613:

    If we want Solutions To The American Problem From a Non-Expert, here's some I would suggest:

  • Non-partisan elections across the board, including at the federal level. California has the top two vote-getters in the primary, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the fall election. It's made things much more interesting. In party strongholds (Democratic or Republican), there are often two members of the same party running against each other, so either or both have to tack hard towards the center to try to win, and the coalitions get more complex. This also seems to mean fewer safe seats, since a democrat in a solidly democratic district can't just knock off the token Republican every year and do what they want (or vice versa).
  • B. Getting rid of the Electoral College, in favor of a straight popular vote. That would put California and New York in play, and since it's 10% of the US population right there, it get the national money aligned with the national politics, instead of candidates taking money in CA and NY and using it to saturate battleground states with ads.

    III. Establish uniform minimum voting standards across the country, to deal with hacking. I don't think California necessarily has the best method, but I do think that there should be a minimum national standard for paper ballots, a good evidentiary trail, guaranteed, on-time ballot transport, and non-partisan counting and total announcements, plus money to help everyone change over. This is simply a matter of getting everyone's vote treated approximately equally.

  • Revisit the size of the Congress, which was largely frozen in 1929 in a way that favored smaller rural states. The senate is where the rural states get their disproportionate power, while the Congress should be where the people get proportionally represented. Right now, cows in Wyoming have better political representation in the house and senate (on a reps/cow basis) than do humans in California. And the cows aren't paying taxes.
  • E. Redo the tax system (hah!) to keep more taxes in-state. Right now, the few big urban centers tend to be tax revenue exporters, while many rural areas are net importers of federal funds. While I agree that keeping the cities fed with cheap food is a political stability strategy that goes back to Rome's bread and circuses, it's massively distorting politics. Oddly enough, it's the "proudly individualistic" Republicans, especially the big farm and ranch owners in the west, who benefit the most from this, while the democrats pay for them to salt the fields with irrigation water from rapidly depleting aquifers.

    VI. Oh yeah, start seriously doing something about climate change. There's a tremendous amount of work that needs doing for our survival, and a tremendous number of people stuck in bullshit jobs they hate. Surely at least some of them can be retrained to rebuild civilization.

    614:

    Sadly, no, it looks very unlikely at this point that the Democrats can get higher than 49 in the Senate, and even that would require an unlikely win in a runoff in Georgia in January. Getting to 50 would require one of these along with the Georgia runoff and the extremely tight lead in Michigan holding up:

    • Collins loses in Maine at the end of the count despite her opponent having already conceded.
    • Cunningham in North Carolina overcomes a 2-point deficit with the count currently at an estimated 94%.
    • The incumbent in the other Georgia race drops below 50% and then loses the runoff.

    Now, this isn't the absolute end of the world, since there's an awful lot of cleanup that could be done before the 2022 elections in undoing executive orders and rebuilding the executive branch, and the map favors the Democrats again in '22, but it's less than ideal.

    615:

    it looks very unlikely at this point that the Democrats can get higher than 49 in the Senate, I'm still waiting for votes to be counted (or partisan judicial activism that attempts to stop vote counts; there will be consequences for all such attempts). But yeah. Note that if the Senate is 51R and Biden is President (and thus K. Harris VP; tiebreaker), every one of those 51 Rs has the power as an individual to flip the Senate. (McConnell isn't exactly loved, and he can't easily deliver pork without the House.) That will make McConnell's life more interesting. This has happened, recently[1]: How one man put Bush on the ropes - Senator Jeffords' defection has derailed the President's conservative agenda. (Edward Helmore, 27 May 2001) Also, McConnell has not been looking healthy lately. I haven't dug. (He had a bad fall in Aug 2019; oh so very close to a fatal injury.) And also, a lot of US Senators are very old and the Republican ones often proudly demonstrate a lack of mask discipline.[2]

    [1] Arlen Specter also switched, but that just resulted in a Dem supermajority IIRC. [2] It Finally Happened: Man Pointing Gun At His Crotch Shoots Himself In The Testicles (August 13th, 2020, Adam Downer) (I forget, perhaps somebody posted that here.)

    616:

    - Cunningham in North Carolina overcomes a 2-point deficit with the count currently at an estimated 94%.

    This one has me confused. I'm here in NC. All mail in received by Tuesday am plus early voting plus voting on election day have been counted. The state BOE web site shows under 120K outstanding mail in ballots. (They were sent out to people who requested them but have not returned.)

    So how do all the news sites get 94%. 120K/5.3mil is NOT 6%. And I expect only about 1/2 of that 120K to show up. To me that's less than 2% outstanding.

    Which means in NC Trump and Tillis (the brown nose) won.

    https://er.ncsbe.gov/?election_dt=11/03/2020&county_id=0&office=FED&contest=0

    617:

    @613:

    Yes these are definitely non-expert suggestions.

    1. Non-partisan elections across the board

    You observe that California does this for primaries, but do not learn the obvious lesson, which is namely that it leads to various perverse results. The continuation in office of the octogenarian below-replacement-level senior Senator plausibly being one. US Federal elections need many reforms but this is not one of them. If you want to dick around with election mechanics, ranked-choice voting schemes are much more fertile ground.

    B. Getting rid of the Electoral College

    This would require a Constitutional Amendment. If we could pass an Amendment we would not be in the position we are in. Why not just wish that all public servants be kind, just, compassionate, and committed to the pubic good? Write on the blackboard 100 times "Any plan for improving US politics that requires a Constitutional Amendment is just masturbating in public."

    III. Establish uniform minimum voting standards across the country, to deal with hacking.

    Now we're getting into the realm of the theoretically-possible. If the polls had been right, and Ds won the trifecta, this would be on the table (somewhere after Court reform, which would almost certainly be necessary to prevent it from being sabotaged). Uniform election procedures designed to elect candidates with majority popular support would be a Good Thing.

    4. Revisit the size of the Congress

    This is long overdue. It would require a level of self-sacrifice that does not seem consistent with the behavior of elected officials. Federal funding of elections first and you might get a crop of Congresspeople that would be willing to go for it.

    E. Redo the tax system (hah!) to keep more taxes in-state.

    No. This is a terrible idea. Do you favor limiting insurance benefits to not exceed the amount of premiums paid? If not, why would you think this is a good plan?

    As for the turnout/polling failure v. mastermind election-rigging disagreement, I was looking specifically at the Blue-leaner States out beyond PA in the snake diagram. I did incorrectly recall that FL was polling blue by ~2% when in fact it was around 2.5. PA is not yet lost... I believe most of the outstanding 14% of ballots there are from blue counties. The polling error appears to be around 5%.

    618:

    Elderly Cynic @ 601: As I read it, Biden is likely to win the electoral college, possibly comfortably, but it will be all down to absentee votes counted after polling day. Well, obviously, Trump is going to scream fraud and play legal games, but will even the new Supreme Court be THAT partisan? And will he unleash his cronies in the executive and just plain thugs ("stand down and stand by") to nullify the result? It happens in plenty of countries, after all.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-biden-us-election-erdogan-illiberal-democracy-b1591328.html

    I can't find as much on the Senate, though it is equally important, but one page indicated a possible 50:50 split. Well, with Harris as VP, that would be, er, fun ....

    The New York Times has the Electoral College currentlyat Biden 253, Trump 214, with 71 Electoral Votes not yet determined.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-president.html

    In the Senate, the NY Times is showing Democrats 47, Republicans 48 with 5 seats still to be determined. Susan Collins appears to have retained her seat in Maine.

    Georgia has two Senate races, the regular one has the Republican incumbent ahead by 50.5% to 47.2%, but the special election has the Democratic challenger ahead 32.2% to 26.3% & 20.3% - there are two Republican candidates in that race who split the republican vote and that's going to lead to a runoff election between the Republican incumbent and the Democratic challenger ... which probably means Loeffler will win the runoff if the Republican vote is NOT split.

    I really don't understand what's going on in Georgia because Loeffler - appointed in 2019 by Brian Kemp, who stole the governor's race in 2018 when as Georgia Secretary of State he instituted EXTREME voter suppression measures against non-white Georgia voters - is the QAnon candidate and the challenger Doug Collins is a right-wing extremist Trumpanista?

    I mean What the fuckin' fuck???

    It looks to me like the RICO Greedy Oligarch Predators might win 4 of the 5 outstanding races to retain their majority 52-48.

    Anyone know where I can find a priestess to make me some voodoo dolls?

    619:

    Elderly Cynic @ 601:

    PS: Yes, I think they are that extreme. The only thing holding them back is John Robert's concern about his "Legacy" and the Supreme Court's reputation. It's not like he actually has any kind of a conscience. He's just another right-wing sociopath governed only by what he perceives people are thinking about him. The other wingnuts just don't give a shit.

    620:

    Allen Thomson @ 605: > Barrett

    My wife reminds me that this would be a very good time for Barrett to recuse herself, for obvious reasons.

    She won't. Would Torquemada recuse himself?

    621:

    Redo the tax system (hah!) to keep more taxes in-state. Right now, the few big urban centers tend to be tax revenue exporters, while many rural areas are net importers of federal funds.

    This is a non-starter, but not for political reasons.

    There are simply more people in the cities. Too, almost all wealthy people and businesses are in cities.

    Yet rural residents need things that benefit everyone, such as expensive roads with which to bring agricultural products into cities.

    622:

    @617:

    Not any improvement requiring a constitutional amendment is masturbating in public.

    For instance, there is one improvement for which an outstanding amendment is already put before the states for ratification... one of the original 12 in the Bill of Rights. Back then, amendments weren't written with sunset clauses, and so have no expiration date.

    This one's even already pre-ratified by 11 or 12 states. It would drastically expand the number of reps in the House (up to about 6400, I think). This would seriously bog down party and lobbyist machinery for decades, they don't have the infrastructure or resources to field candidates in every race. Third parties would sneak in, at least in a few places. The existing DC social networks probably couldn't contain everyone, or herd them.

    Oh, and look at that, it also answers your 4th point.

    623:

    Heteromeles @ 613: If we want Solutions To The American Problem From a Non-Expert, here's some I would suggest:

    1. Non-partisan elections across the board, including at the federal level.

    I disagree strenuously. So called "non-partisan" elections allow extremists to run by stealth.

    624:

    So called "non-partisan" elections allow extremists to run by stealth.

    Can you elaborate, or provide examples? I don't really see the connection. (Or perhaps do not understand what "non-partisan elections" even means)

    625:

    Let's start out with the AP calling both Michigan and Wisconsin... leaving Joe needing 6 or 7. If we take Nevada, the game us over.

    626:

    You're not looking at how life works. A lot of folks will just turn on the radio while making dinner, or in the car, or whatever, for company. And they hear this crap day after day, year after year, with no backblow.

    627:

    Reform: 1. Yes, minimum voting standards, and they can't do anything about state... but they can mandate voter registration with drivers' license. 2. I. Don't. Care. If Biden wins, come January, I'm going to go personally see my Congresscritter, and hand him the text of a Constitutional Amendment abolishing the Electoral College, and make it by popular vote.

    628:

    The continuation in office of the octogenarian below-replacement-level senior Senator plausibly being one.

    Do you know much about California? Feinstein's an institution. She's been scoffed at since the 80s, when I heard her referred to as "10,000 jobs Feinstein" when she was the mayor of San Francisco. The idea was that whenever she said a project would bring in "10,000 jobs" she was lying, because she automatically cited that figure. But she stopped do that a long time ago. Yes, I agree that she's a pro-business democrat, like Pelosi and Newsom (all San Franciscans) who can be really annoying at times. But she does come through on a regular basis, and rather more than Pelosi or McConnell do.

    The environmentalists put up with her because she loves the Mojave desert, and has done more than just about anyone other politician to keep it from getting totally trashed.

    The other thing is that, even though she's not totally trustworthy on the Senate Intelligence Committee, she does have serious seniority. Given that the Senate runs on seniority, you don't give up someone like her unless there are truly serious problems. And, compared with McConnell in Kentucky, who has far more problems but will be kept in power until he dies, she's pretty worthwhile.

    629:

    2. I. Don't. Care. If Biden wins, come January, I'm going to go personally see my Congresscritter, and hand him the text of a Constitutional Amendment abolishing the Electoral College, and make it by popular vote.

    You're in luck. There's even a detailed Wikipedia page on attempts to abolish the Electoral College, so you can crib your talking points, unless you have better ones.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_amendment

    630:

    I'm not sure how familiar you are with California elections, so forgive me if this is overly detailed.

    In California, we've only had blanket, non-partisan primaries since 2010 (this is why blaming Feinstein's dominance on it is silly: she's been around much longer than that). It took about 10 years of court cases and multiple referendums before people bought into it, so this is a non-trivial change to make.

    The way it worked before 2010 is that there were two elections, the spring primary and the fall general election. In the spring (typically in June), California voters would head to the polls to vote for their party's candidates for the fall election. People who had no party affiliation would not get to vote on this part of the ballot. In the fall, the winner of each party's election would advance to the general election, where all voters, regardless of affiliation, would vote for the winner, and there could be many candidates, one from each party.

    The way it works now is that there is a non-partisan blanket primary in the spring and a general election in the fall. In the spring, everybody gets to vote on the candidates, and the top two candidates for each position advance to the fall general election, regardless of which party they belong to. This means, among other things, that the parties now have no control over who the official candidate for their party is, although they can endorse one candidate.

    The problem with the old system was that many districts are highly polarized, so the democrat or republican in power stayed there and sometimes passed the position onto their son when they retired (as was the case with Congresscritters Duncan Hunter Sr. and Duncan Hunter Jr.). There weren't enough people in the opposition to ever win the election, so even if they elected a candidate for the general election, it was a wasted vote.

    With the blanket primary, in partisan districts, there can easily be two candidates from the same party on the ballot, and things get interesting. For example, as just happened in the San Diego mayor's race, this means that the underdog democrat courted the NIMBYs, environmentalists, and independent Republicans, while the leading democrat (who probably won the election) courted business interests across the political spectrum, hispanics, and LBGTQ people (he's gay), and we had a downtown versus neighborhoods race, rather than a democrat versus republicans race.

    631:

    The issu with Prop.22 in California is less a matter of right or left wing, but a matter of there having been the biggest, most expensive propaganda effort against it ever. Uber and Lyft spent more than 200 millions of dollars in a blitz of publicity and less savory means to fight against it (and were rewarded by a 12% increase in stock price tonight, about 8 billion dollars, so it was worth every penny). And this publicity was certainly no truthful: there were (very pervasive) youtube ads stating that Prop.22 had to LOSE in order for drivers to HAVE health coverage: the exact opposite of truth

    632:

    Why? I'll just copy the 17th Amendment, which rewrote Article I, §3, Clauses 1 and 2 of the Constitution. Direct copy....

    633:

    Heteromeles --

    Thank you for the detailed response, and yes, I knew how California elections work. (Although I was not aware you are in California.) But I still do not see how such system enables "extremist candidates by stealth". My understanding has been that when a blanket primary has an extremist candidate, then members of the other party will flock to defeat him, and ensure that the primary is won by someone they can at least tolerate. If anything, California system ought to encourage the drift toward the middle.

    634:

    So, basically it could be (among other shapes) a 2km wide Rogallo wing

    Sorry Niala, didn't see this until now.

    Anyway, no. A Rogallo Wing is basically a hang-glider. The IMP was a deltoid thing with three inflated struts and webbing between them, and it was unpowered. That hit around Mach 6 at ground level (5000 mph). Escape velocity is around Mach 33, or 25,020 MPH, so about five times faster. The same shape won't work.

    The spoiler alert is that I was trying to design an orbital steampunk airship using GURPS rules, and that's how I tripped over JP Aerospace, so I played with a bunch of configurations. Now I'll readily admit that GURPS is not science. Nonetheless, the JP design actually makes an airship that will carry itself to orbit on solar power.

    Anyway, that's why I dived into hypersonic travel, because no matter how slow you accelerate, you have to hit escape velocity to reach orbit. JPA's orbital airship proposed to accelerate well towards escape velocity by flying through the upper atmosphere, before it hit the Karman line around 300 km, aerodynamics became useless, and it had to fly as a rocket.

    Hypersonic shapes tend to cluster into some variation on the theme of a bullet (e.g. a rocket nose) or some sort of waverider, which looks like a sharpened pencil, flattened on the underside to get what little lift it from the underbelly. The problem, IIRC, is that drag is a function of how wide the wing is (front to back) at those speeds, and since the "wing" on a waverider is basically a long, narrow triangle, paradoxically, it's also wide and quite draggy. The long, narrow triangular profile is to minimize drag from the shockwave. The shockwave happens (again IIRC) because the airflow peels off the waverider because it's not going fast enough, or something.

    Anyway, the orbital airship, as a long, narrow V with engines on the inside of the V, at least potentially does something very interesting: it's a narrow wing front to back, so there's less drag, and because of where the engines are blasting, the air on the back side of the wing gets accelerated right when it needs to move faster to avoid a shockwave. I don't do aerodynamics, but from my minimal reading, it looked like a long, narrow, V might be a really good hypersonic design.

    If it was a Rogallo wing, the V would instead be a long, thin triangle like any other waverider, with all the problems I just alluded to.

    The other thing about the orbital airship design is that it theoretically can support acres of thin-film solar panels. If the entire top of each 6,000 foot arm was covered entirely with solar panels, it would have something over 20 acres of PV to work with, at up to 4000 w/acre of incoming sunlight at the top of the atmosphere. That's not too shabby.

    635:

    It is.. not really enough power. So, to really make this thing properly punk, stick a dusty core power reactor in it. 10 tonnes, 2 gigawatt electric, 200 mw heat rejection (which makes this thing a hot-hydrogen air-ship, I guess?) and name the entire thing "Radioactive soapbubble for great space justice!"

    636:

    Remember that in many states the electoral college doesn't need to obey the election results - all it takes is 1 to throw things into disarray if Biden only take Nevada of the remaining states.

    637:

    The issu with Prop.22 in California is less a matter of right or left wing, but a matter of there having been the biggest, most expensive propaganda effort against it ever.

    Did the massive spending help?

    Yes.

    But it only worked because enough voters were either inclined to vote that way anyway, or to stupid to understand a very simple concept - employee good / contractor bad

    638:

    You miss what I was putting together: white-wing talk radio did not appear until after "Equal Time" was thrown out under Raygun. Equal time would kill the shock jocks.

    They are already dying as more and more people get their right wing nonsense from Facebook.

    But if equal time was brought back, they simply would leave the airwaves and either go satellite radio (who would love to have their audience paying monthly) and/or online (similarly, Facebook would likely love to host them).

    Thus effectively changing nothing.

    639:

    The spoiler alert is that I was trying to design an orbital steampunk airship using GURPS rules...

    Let me expand on that in case it confused anyone. The GURPS roleplaying game has a supplement called GURPS Vehicles which provides what it says on the tin: a modeling system to describe pretty much any rationally designed vehicle. As you'd think this involves some number crunching and high-level simplification, but not so much of either as one might guess. Creating a system that can provide plausible modeling of vehicles from dugout canoe to a modern jetliner is no small accomplishment.

    Yes, I play with it too. Not that I actually need to know the performance of imaginary vehicles but it's fun (for certain nerdy mindsets, anyway). The other night I was casually doodling notes for modeling the Barsoomian fliers of ERB's Mars, which satisfies no purpose other than my own amusement.

    I've modeled real world vehicles such as a VW Type II van and a Triumph 500cc motorcycle and the results I got were pretty close to the real world numbers.

    640:

    Entheogens for the Win in Washington DC! (76% of voters. Oregon did something similar (all drugs, and psilocybin for therapy) and 4 states legalized recreational marijuana, 2 legalized medical marijuana.) LIVE RESULTS: Washington, DC votes to decriminalize psychedelic plants and mushrooms (Madison Hall and Rob Price, Nov 3, 2020, 11:30 PM) Initiative 81 lowers the law enforcement priority for non-commercial cultivating, purchasing, distributing, or possessing psychedelic and hallucinogenic plants and fungi. These plants and fungus are known as "entheogens." The initiative also calls upon the DC attorney general and US attorney in DC to cease prosecuting activities related to entheogenic plants and fungi.

    Don't get caught by the Feds/DEA; some of those remain extremely illegal at the Federal level.

    Page 2 on this: https://www.dcboe.org/dcboe/media/PDFFiles/Wards1356-GE2020.pdf

    641:

    "But it only worked because enough voters were either inclined to vote that way anyway, or to stupid to understand a very simple concept - employee good / contractor bad"

    Seen from europe : it's been a looong time USA moto is no more "e pluribus unum", but rather "Fuck you, got mine".

    Old vs young, second generation immigrants vs recent entrants, etc.

    Everybody is more scared of loosing a little bit of status, than of wrecking the planet or making life difficult for the next generation.

    642:

    I like the idea of getting rid of the electoral college from a partisan stance. Requires a constitutional amendment, so, eh. I wonder a bit though - yes - removing it would improve representation, nominally. But, it seems to open up new avenues for cheating. I don't trust red states with trifectas to count votes properly - so electoral college at least removes the incentive for voter suppression in areas where one party is clearly dominant. (Oh, look 0% democratic votes.) It could easily result in shenanigans.

    As of right now, Nevada, knock on wood, looks to be going democratic. I'm going to keep telling myself that to sleep tonight.

    For optimism:

    Georgia would require a 69.5% Democratic fraction in remaining ballots, which seems high, but actually a bit lower than Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania would require a 62.9% Democratic fraction, which is also lower than the fraction observed so far. And, North Carolina would require 61.9% Democratic fraction, which is lower than that required in Pennsylvania.

    I mean, if I can do Excel on little sleep. Biggest error source is probably that the fraction uncounted is rounded to the nearest percent.

    643:

    On a somewhat different note, this lecture by Dr. Catherine Beauchemin on using physics models to analyze virology is interesting:

    https://insidetheperimeter.ca/physicists-adventures-virology-catherine-beauchemin-live-webcast/

    Skip to the 20 minute mark to see the talk (they haven't trimmed the countdown to the live session from this recording).

    I watched it this evening, and plan on looking at some of her analyses in more detail this weekend* as the data sources are downloadable.

    *Or whenever the weather turns bad — sunny and temperatures in the high teens means I'm spending time outside rather than in front of a computer!

    644:

    Anyone here remember when there were a lot of subtitled clips from the German mini series about Hitler? Most were from a scene near the end in the bunker.

    This one is about the election and how are fearless leader is handling things.

    https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1324020849230319616?s=21 3 1/2 minutes.

    645:

    Remember that in many states the electoral college doesn't need to obey the election results

    I'm fairly certain the SCOTUS just ruled that a faithless elector could be punished for not following the rules of the state. And I think at this time all states have rules that they follow the popular vote. With a couple of variations.

    646:

    They are already dying as more and more people get their right wing nonsense from Facebook.

    And literally as that group of people gets older.

    I'm just a year or few behind whitroth and in my family group of 6, my wife is the only one who listens to the radio with any regularity. And only in the car. The rest of us use our phones, Apple, Amazon, Siri, homepods, Alexa pucks, whatever accounts and play podcasts or music via them. Radio is used as last option. If at all. But when it is the request is mostly "How can I listen to NPR via my ...."

    And based on my clients' staff (and some owners older than me) radio just isn't done. The number one non quite work related question I deal with in supporting their computers is "Spotify isn't working. How do I fix it?"

    The market is shrinking fast. I'm surprised it exists at the level it does. I suspect the only thing making much money at all are the right wing talk folks.

    And whitroth and I totally disagree on this. I'll agree to that. So what's next?

    647:

    Well, orbital velocity... what orbital velocity?

    If you're solar powered and keep going, you only need to his about 1000 or so mph... at 25k mi up.

    648:

    You're right, escape velocity. Anyway, the real problem, when you've got an airship that will break on the ground if subjected to more than a 3 mph is (I'm guessing here) atmospheric turbulence acting on those 6000' long arms. They need to be that long to have a hope of lifting the craft plus 20 tonnes or so of cargo at 50 km.

    And if you think that's nuts, look at solar sails, magsails, beanstalks, and similar.

    649:

    They're all hypocrites at best and probably worse, lying NAZI SCUM!

    Well, they're only hypocrites if you believe everybody should play by the same rules. I have the impression that many people think that there are two kinds of rules: ones which apply to me and ones which apply to other people. For some reason, I also have the impression that many of these people seem to be right-leaning.

    650:

    When I get out of cell phone range, what I generally hear on the radio are:

    --Religious stations --Faux --Rock and roll, from classic to metal --Mexican music --The occasional oddity.

    Speaking of the last, I still remember driving across the Navajo Reservation on I-40, listening to an hour program on scuba diving, especially in caves. The cognitive dissonance kept me nicely awake for miles.

    Also, don't forget Sirius XM satellite radio. You can get all sorts of things, from NPR to K-pop*.

    *Or whatever you call Arirang Radio. It's really more Korea's version of VOA.

    651:

    Well, the other possibility is that 50 state legislatures enact laws that their electors will follow the popular vote as aggregated at the national level. That, combined with a rule against faithless electors, effectively makes the college irrelevant, aside from meeting to do the constitutionally mandated process.

    652:

    You don't need all 50 states; just enough to control a majority of the electoral votes.

    There's already an effort to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

    653:

    When I get out of cell phone range,

    What no music on your device? Plus podcasts? I did a month of Marketplace to and from Texas when moving my wife back home in July.

    --Religious stations

    Central PA. Penn State is in the middle of nowhere. Intentionally when founded. Can be a boring drive at night. Pretty during the day if coming in or out on the east. The river valley is a nice drive in the daytime.

    Also, don't forget Sirius XM satellite radio. You can get all sorts of things, from NPR to K-pop*.

    I only know of one person who kept the subscription past the trial period. I almost signed up for a year when my wife got emailed an offer for 3 years at $3/mo in her car but when they wouldn't let me have that rate in my car I passed. After the 4 to 12 month typical intro rate the price jumps to $13 to $22.

    And I have these memories of the 5 hour drive to and from college across western Kentucky where you hoped to get WLS out of Chicago but mostly could only get a clear channel station out of Louisiana with 1/3 country music and 2/3s truck stop ads. And that only maybe 1/2 the time. The rest where hit or miss. And I didn't own an 8 Track.

    654:

    Still wonder if it is actually a good idea. I can see red states engaging in really blatant voter suppression with that sort of incentive.

    Electoral college reduces advantage for that sort of thing.

    Now, increased size of House would dilute red state influence, from a partisan perspective and bring the presidency closer to majority rule.

    But, to get rid of the electoral college, really need to wait until Texas turns blue.

    655:

    2 tubes forming a V was the proposed shape of the Lockheed Star Clipper. It's in Wikipedia. The problem is that a V form airship is flimsy. It can't be assembled on the ground because it wouldn't get past the jet streams in the tropopause.

    656:

    H you have to hit escape velocity to reach orbit Err... no. All you have to do is keep going upwards, actually.

    OTOH an orbital steampunk airship GO FOR IT!

    "Radio" Oh shit. Here Radio 4 & Radio 3 are very much a thing, listened to by millions ( Which is why our creeping-towards-fascism-slowly-hoping-you-don't-notice so-called "government" are trying to trash the BBC. )

    Actual election Iv'e got 264/214 here, which may be part projection. But elsehwere in another page of the same paper, I have 253/214. Um. Really worrying report. Guilaini, otoh, is just a very bad joke.

    657:

    And whitroth and I totally disagree on this. I'll agree to that. So what's next?

    Reminder that the first amendment to the US constitution was a first attempt at balancing freedom of political speech with the public interest.

    It turns out that the 1A was too permissive, in light of communications (speech) technologies that the authors of the amendment never dreamed of, and their co-option/monopolization by corporate entities that the founders of the US never dreamed of.

    Times change, and while I used to be dubious about the loopholes in the right to free speech in the European Convention on Human Rights (based in turn on the UNCHR), the exception -- providing for limits on "speech contrary to public health" -- suddenly looks prescient. There's another exception for speech contrary to public morality that I'm a lot more dubious about, but even so, retarget it at "speech contrary to peaceful community co-existence" and I'd be 100% on board.

    Basically you need a very carefully drafted limit on the 1A that excludes deliberate deceptive lies and attempts to stir up inter-communal hatred (including incitement to stochastic terrorism or murder). And provision to regulate presses -- and define social platforms with over 10,000 users as part of the press -- to enforce those limits.

    658:

    Anyway, that's why I dived into hypersonic travel, because no matter how slow you accelerate, you have to hit escape velocity to reach orbit.

    No you don't: you have to hit orbital velocity, which is quite a bit lower (but still rather fast for anything trying to trade off lift against drag without glowing red hot at the edges and then melting).

    659:

    Greg, you missed out BBC Radio 5 Live which brings decent news to people who like sport.

    660:

    Iv'e got 264/214 here, which may be part projection. But elsehwere in another page of the same paper, I have 253/214.

    That's Arizona's 11 electoral votes. Some are calling it for Biden, some aren't. With AZ, that just leaves Nevada's 6 votes to go to bring Biden to 270, and that currently looks likely.

    661:

    You can punish a faithless elector AFTER the fact, but I am pretty sure you cannot ignore their vote.

    662:

    You can also require a pledge beforehand, but it's much harder to replace/invalidate a vote if they break said pledge.

    663:

    I'm getting diifernt numbers between the "Indy" the Beeb & the Grauniad. But 264 seems to bea popular number.

    664:

    @644: The Germans will have so much fun subtitling (in German, of course) the corresponding scene from the "Last Days Of Trump" movie - and there will be one.

    665:

    If I were an American person opining about 1A limits, one thing I would want to see would be criminalization of Confederate apologist speech. I was a 1A absolutist for most of my life, but after the last 10 years I would definitely be down with treating that like the Germans do Holocaust denialism.

    666:

    I'd want to be very careful about specific constraints on freedom of speech: for example, the 1950s UNCHR declaration provides a loophole for public health (conditional positive: it allows for suppression of malicious anti-vaxxers, for example) but also for public morality (which can be used for suppression of LGBT+ rights, non-mainstream religious faiths, civil rights demonstrations ... not good).

    The latter needs to be tightened and made specific to intentional lies: I'd like it to cover "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and possibly "Mein Kampf", plus direct incitement to violent acts against non-specific enemies, but not broad enough to criminalize fiction, satire, non-race-baiting conservative political opinion, and so on. The test should be "is this speech likely to lead to discrimination, violence, inter-ethnic oppression, or actual harm (mental or physical) to the target", something like that. Emphasis on "likely". So internet hate-dogpiles on specific named individuals would be potentially prosecutable insofar as they can inflict severe psychological damage: dogpiling on an abstract belief system is another matter, unless it's done in such a way as to encourage attacks on the followers of those beliefs.

    It's a very tricky area to negotiate.

    667:

    Charlie @ 666 (!) Yes, well, the Scottish government are currently doing their best ( or not ) to screw with that problem & appear to have their knickers in a real twist. The currently specific tangle is how does one allow satire ridicule & contempt, without also allowing actual "hatred" - especially as some specific religious believers ( more than one set, actually ) are going to use any possible avenue to shut down any criticism of their particular religion(s) As I've mentioned before the National Secular Society are rightly concerned with this difficult problem.

    668:

    The currently specific tangle is how does one allow satire ridicule & contempt, without also allowing actual "hatred"

    Not to mention the standard neo-Nazi trick of coming out with frothingly bigoted statements in a slightly ironic tone and then when challenged saying "I was only joking!" or claiming ironic intent.

    It's a hard problem.

    669:

    "It's a hard problem."

    This is really, important. This stuff is not easy, and approaching it with a mechanistic attitude will not work. Make it foolproof and nature invents a better fool/make the lock unpickable, and people learn to pick it.

    670:

    I'm fairly certain the SCOTUS just ruled that a faithless elector could be punished for not following the rules of the state. And I think at this time all states have rules that they follow the popular vote. With a couple of variations.

    Wiki says only 33 out of the 50 states have laws against faithless electors, and of those 33 only half have provision for a punishment - and given that it seems in some cases the punishment is merely a fine even that doesn't seem very relevant.

    671:

    In the meantime, for those in the UK bored while the US election counting grinds slowly forward, we have this new terror for you.

    Nigel's back, keen to exploit Boris and his problems being a Prime Minister to lurch the UK ever further right

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/05/lockdown-nigel-farage-new-enemy-us-election-covid-19

    672:

    to Heteromeles @464:

    Mindful of space launches, I've decided to do something terribly unusual. I took some Exel sheet, and made a kinematic model of a famous solution to the space-elevator problem, that is, smaller version of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)

    It is not an analytical model but iterative, and I've spend some time beating it into submission so it would look like something plausible. It does not contain complex things as mass and curvature of cable, just straight-flying spacecraft tethered to ground-launched package by straight cable. It does not even properly model curvature of Earth, just bits of physics here and there. But it was quite enjoying to study. I can maybe share it and explain what the numbers mean, if I get to it eventually.

    So these are my findings:

    First, I've had to instantly dismiss the classic form presented in the article. I mean, if you're a fan of crushing 20+ gee acceleration and hypersonic speeds in lower atmosphere, you are welcome to ride it, but if you look carefully at the rolling-ball, you must imagine that top of that ball is doing 16 km/s, and the height of the orbit is within 100s of km. My cable model was a bit flexible to soften the initial impact, but it wasn't nearly as effective as one can hope. So I've applied some switches to the model and got my own solution for the issue.

    To lower the acceleration, what is need to be done is veering the cable to slow down acceleration and give more space for a skyhook payload to pick up speed. It went well and interesting, so here's the safety mode I've found after tuning it a bit: 1. Skyhook length of about 500 km (flies at the same altitude, too), with maximum extension of 1200+ km. 2. The skyhook spacecraft sends it in front of it into the atmosphere so it dips all the way to the ground forward of fly path to be connected to payload (pretty fast, within seconds). 3. The skyhook yanks the payload up and out of atmosphere and starts dragging it along, faster and faster. 4. There's no winching involved - the cable extends, bearing the payload, accelerating it at rather gentle 3-5 gee speed, all the way up, reaching Mach 1 at several km, and Mach 3-4 closer to a stratosphere. 5. After reaching orbital speed, cable disconnects and folds, since the orbits are somewhat misaligned after that maneuver. 6. If we'd increase the length of the cable, it is possible to lift payloads even from much heavier planets - like Neptune. Probably - that depends on the following issues.

    What are downsides: 1. Turns out, the speed you need to veer the cable to keep the acceleration down is short of shocking and can reach up to half of the orbital one - 3-4 km/s. You will need to extend it gradually along the whole axis to be able to handle that. And as mentioned, you will need to extend up to +200% and then fold it again. 2. The orbits are misaligned initially because of the dragging vector and fast acceleration in the beginning. In classic model above this is compensated by dragging it down from the orbit afterwards, with predictable results. Maybe if one would extend cable even more, it would be more comfortable, but see p.1. 3. There's still no solution how cable is going to fair at hypersonic speeds in the upper atmosphere. Maybe it can, maybe it cannot, and it is not clear how it will also bear load at the same time. But 1200 km cable is still better than 40 000 km one.

    673:

    Nigel's back, keen to exploit Boris and his problems being a Prime Minister to lurch the UK ever further right

    Of course. Since Boris is having so much trouble getting Brexit done it must be because he's not XXXXX enough.

    Standard play book for both ends of the spectrum. "Well if they would only be true to the core beliefs they claimed to have then this would just get done."

    674:

    Thanks!

    Did you model the effect of different air pressures over the length of the cable? Even if the line hooks into the top of the stratosphere, that's something like 1% of atmospheric pressure at sea level. That seems to imply that the lower arm of the cable is going to have to deal with much more resistance than the upper end of the cable. If it's the difference is substantial, the line might act more as a two-weight bolas than as a wheel.

    675:

    That's Arizona's 11 electoral votes. Some are calling it for Biden, some aren't.

    For those who can access it, the WP has an informative article on why that is titled

    "Who won Arizona? Why the call differs by media organization."

    676:

    Nigel is a grifter. He had the supreme misfortune for his main breadwinner grift to succeed in 2016, which cost him his meal ticket. So he's looking for a new grift, and anti-masking seems like a good way to climb back into the saddle and take aim at his end goal of annexing Wingnut County.

    677:

    Not to mention the standard neo-Nazi trick of coming out with frothingly bigoted statements in a slightly ironic tone and then when challenged saying "I was only joking!" or claiming ironic intent.

    It's a hard problem.

    Exactly. What started this sub thread involved forced equal time. And how it was suggested that Al Franken would do great. He might. But in general people don't tune in to the left the way they do to the right.

    We had an alternative and it couldn't make money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(radio_network)

    And it had a rep for saying really despicable things about the right and saying "oh, it's just satire". Of course the true believers say "but it's true". Both of these are what some of my family members say about CNN, MSNBC, etc.. only in the other direction.

    Government "making it fair" from what I've seen just means the ones in power beat down the others.

    And I remember the mind numbing local TV shows that resulted from the equal time doctrine. Maybe NYC, Chicago, Phili, etc... could put on interesting shows but in smaller markets it was just talking turds.

    Plus the local reasonable politician who typically would get 70% of the vote having to put up with the nut job running against them as no one reputable from the other side wanted to stand up and be handed a sure loss.

    678:

    2 tubes forming a V was the proposed shape of the Lockheed Star Clipper. It's in Wikipedia. The problem is that a V form airship is flimsy. It can't be assembled on the ground because it wouldn't get past the jet streams in the tropopause

    Thanks for the information on the Star Clipper. I'll admit I looked it up, and what they had was a lifting body shuttle, with a V-shaped fuel tank around the leading edge. That's not quite the same beast. However, I wouldn't be surprised if John Powell (the JP in JP Aeronautics) lifted the design from somewhere. He's self-taught, not a degreed engineer.

    As for the orbital airship, you're absolutely right. It can't be assembled on the ground. It has to be built/assembled at the Dark Sky Station, 140,000' up. How I don't know, but I do know that JPA has launched balloons that are rolled up on rollers, with an inflation tube near the top, and they unroll as they gain altitude. The plan is to use these unit in the Dark Sky Station (and probably all airships) to make cartridge replacements for gas bags, so that if a gas bag fails, they remove it, rapidly install the next one, and inflate it. He compared it with changing the ink cartridge on a printer.

    Something like that might be possible with the orbital airship, especially if major structural members are inflatable, rather than carbon fiber trusses. Since the Dark Sky Station is basically a starfish with 5 arms, each a mile long, it has enough room to hang the orbital airship beneath it. If the airship arms can be inflated, and then have the stiff internal structure installed inside sequentially, it might work.

    I agree that building an airship near the top of the stratosphere qualifies as a neat trick, both physically and logistically. I further agree that if the idea is to build, service, and launch multiple spaceships, then you need a flock of DSS's, not just one. And finally, I'm wondering where they're going to get that much helium for all the giant airships they want to loft into the stratosphere (the Ascenders, DSS's, and smaller utility airships). My bet is that the whole enterprise would eventually have to run on hydrogen, "Oh the humanity" be damned.

    There are a bunch of other problems: life support and thermal management (not necessarily keeping the wing from melting, but keeping it from shattering at the liquid-nitrogen temperatures of the mesosphere), and especially vortices. I dealt just enough with air modeling in my environmental science classes to have a healthy respect for vortices in air. The problem for a big airship is if a whirling body of air exerts enough torque on an arm to warp or break it. When the arm is 6000' long and vortices happen at all scales, that could be a big problem. I don't think we know enough about the top of the atmosphere to know how turbulent it is, and that's one of the questions that really needs to be answered.

    679:

    I think we're saying different versions of similar things.

    I keep thinking of "Let Trump be Trump".

    My opinion of Trump has not changed since I started noticing him in the 80s on business cable while he was negotiating (Corleone style) with banks about his bankruptcy of the moment. Maybe it was his first big one.

    Anyway, my opinion of him as a con man, thief, and all around arsehole hasn't changed.

    Does Nigel fit this description?

    680:

    Well, there's equal access, and there's political coverage. My (least) favorite example is why I stopped funding NPR in the fall of 2016. They covered Trump talking for ten whole minutes. Then they had a brief report on Clinton announcing a new policy point. The sound clip they chose: Trump responding to it. They didn't carry her voice or her message at all. Merely insisting that the media give equal air time to all the major presidential campaigns would stop such BS.

    Of course, overturning Citizen's United, capping campaign funding costs, and limiting the time for each campaign would do a whole lot more.

    As for free speech in America, parts of it are already criminalized, as with the famous example of "Crying fire in a crowded theater." Hate speech is criminalized, as is anything that involves a crime. The "I'm only joking" defense only goes so far. For example, if I posted something like "I'd like to kidnap [insert name], douse them with honey, stake them out over a fire ant nest and watch them until they stop moving," I'd undoubtedly attract the attention of the NSA and law enforcement authorities, which is why I have to surround this with real disclaimers that I have no intention whatsoever of even buying that much honey. This is simply an example of borderline speech that could get me in real legal trouble, First Amendment notwithstanding.

    681:

    Con man and arsehole, certainly. He is almost certainly going to get nowhere this time, despite Wingnut County being a synonym for Englandshire in terms of politics, because he was merely the blow-hard for Brexit. The real work in pushing that through was done by non-UK multinationals and oligarchs, and their jackals.

    682:

    Does Nigel fit this description?

    Yes. Except he started with less money and is better known for politics than business.

    683:

    David L Nugent Farrago is a liar & a borderline fascist & a "con man" in the political sense, certainly a part-time arshole. But not (afaik) a theif. See also EC: The real work in pushing that through was done by non-UK multinationals and oligarchs, and their jackals. This ... going on & ON & ON about "British soveriegnty", whilst grovelling to US & offshore greedy oligarchs.

    Talking of "crazy" as in the header for this thread: 1: Trump considering running again in 2024 if he loses this time - - NOT going to happen - if he does lose this time, he's going to jail. Which is why he's so desperate, of course. 2: Unbelievable human stupidity in having large numbers of caged animals that have a MUTATED coronavirus. Let's hope this puts an end to that particular insanity ...

    BBC ( more cautious ) are saying 253/214, the Indy thinks 264/214 ( Arizona, presumably ) We could know before midnight GMT tonight?

    684:

    Con man and arsehole, certainly. He is almost certainly going to get nowhere this time, despite Wingnut County being a synonym for Englandshire in terms of politics, because he was merely the blow-hard for Brexit. The real work in pushing that through was done by non-UK multinationals and oligarchs, and their jackals.

    I think the danger here (though I would be delighted to be wrong) is to dismiss Nigel.

    Yes, he was merely the front man for Brexit - for which he was very successful for those behind the scenes doing the "real work"

    But he has spent time in the US lately, and while the media coverage has been his stumping for Trump it is likely a reasonable guess there was a lot of closed door meetings happening as the non-UK people plotted their next moves to be made in the UK.

    The weakness of Boris after mere months in office, the unrest caused both by Covid and by feeble government response, and existing issues are all creating fertile ground for his renamed Reform Party - and he (and his backers) are basing it on the success seen in Canada 30 years ago.

    Pay attention to the lessons of Canada, where the Canadian Reform Party founded in 1987 was instrumental in taking the Progressive Conservative Party (which despite name changes could trace itself back to the founding of Canada and the first government) from a majority government of 169 seats to a mere 2 seats, a defeat they never recovered from(*). Note also that defeat and shift was helped along by a regional separatist party (the Bloc Quebecois), which in the UK that part is played by the SNP.

    That upstart western Reform Party fundamentally changed Canadian politics, creating a party that despite name changes to this day is more like the US Republican Party with its social conservative core than what Canada had prior.

    If Nigel can repeat his performance as Brexit front man for whatever the people with money want this time, then things could be very different in the UK in 5 years.

    • in 2003 what remained of the PC Party voted to merge with the re-named Reform Party, but it really wasn't a merger.
    685:

    That upstart western Reform Party fundamentally changed Canadian politics, creating a party that despite name changes to this day is more like the US Republican Party with its social conservative core than what Canada had prior.

    The scary thing is that Preston Manning now looks like the voice of reason compared to the ideologues of the CPC.

    686:

    Interesting (Brexit) Brit update ... A comment from an ( ex-tory ) indpendant politician, Rory Stewart: Away from Brexit, Boris Johnson also came under fire from former cabinet minister Rory Stewart, who branded the prime minister an “amoral character” and “the most accomplished liar in public life”. Perfectly correct ... now then how long before the rest of "Englandshire" - i.e. the rural counties - wake up to this fact?

    mdive Yes - another reason I dislike the SNP It's the "We've go ours, fuck you" attitude to the huge numbers of us - like very cloe to 50% of the population - who have already been left in the lurch by Brexit.

    687:

    BBC ( more cautious ) are saying 253/214, the Indy thinks 264/214 ( Arizona, presumably ) We could know before midnight GMT tonight?

    Many of the media (including Fox News) have already declared Arizona for Biden (though the count there is getting closer) which gets us the 264/214 number.

    The expectation is that Biden will take Arizona (for those who haven't called it yet), and Nevada, which takes Biden to 270 (just a majority).

    Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia are currently leaning Trump though at least Pennsylvania and Georgia are close.

    The problem, and thus why we likely won't know with a certainty tonight, is that the vote differences are really small so there will very likely be recounts and fights over which ballots are good/bad and which should qualify (most of the states are separating ballots based on how/when they were cast/delivered in case a court rules certain ballots are void).

    This could in turn re-flip Michigan and Wisconsin, which with (possibly) Arizona are the only states to flip from Trump to Biden.

    688:

    oh no... you shouldnt ban 'mein kampf' it should be picked apart in school, as an example of dunning krueger, hate and poor education being the most dangerous mixture of anything. worse than FOOF and dimethyl mercury

    689:

    Wanna bet Trump calls the result "fake news"?

    690:

    It's more than name changes. In 2003 it merged with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.

    691:

    On the good news front, it appears the Europeans have found a way to allow the problematic governments of Poland and Hungary to be punished with a new procedure to deny EU funding that can't be blocked by one country.

    692:

    ilya187 @ 624:

    So called "non-partisan" elections allow extremists to run by stealth.

    Can you elaborate, or provide examples? I don't really see the connection. (Or perhaps do not understand what "non-partisan elections" even means)

    I'm not sure I can (words fail me), but perhaps look at the history of Partisan/Non-Partisan election of judges in North Carolina.

    693:

    Germany recently permitted it to be published again -- but annotated, with same-page footnotes taking a pick-axe to Hitler's lies. And no, he and his heirs don't earn a single euro-cent in royalties from it.

    694:

    Merged in much the same manner as Germany merged with Austria in 1938 :-/

    To non-Canadians, when the Reform Party merged with the provincial Conservatives it became the Alliance Party, then Alliance and the federal Progressive Conservatives disbanded and reformed as the Conservative Party of Canada*. The politics of the new Conservative Party resembled the further-right Alliance Party's far more than they did the centre-right Progressive Conservative's.

    And now the Conservative Party is to the right of the old Reform Party, which used to be the furthest-right party in Canadian politics.

    *CPC, not to be confused with the Communist Party of Canada, also CPC.

    695:

    Exactly. It wasn't a merger, it was a takeover/surrender when both parties realized that as long as they split the vote neither would gain power, and the weaker Progressive Conservative Party essentially decided to close up and go out of business but wrapped it up in a deception called merger.

    696:

    Erwin @ 642: I like the idea of getting rid of the electoral college from a partisan stance. Requires a constitutional amendment, so, eh. I wonder a bit though - yes - removing it would improve representation, nominally. But, it seems to open up new avenues for cheating. I don't trust red states with trifectas to count votes properly - so electoral college at least removes the incentive for voter suppression in areas where one party is clearly dominant. (Oh, look 0% democratic votes.) It could easily result in shenanigans.

    For a short while on Tuesday night (just before I went to bed) it looked like Trump had a slight lead in the popular vote (5.7 million to Biden's 5.6 million), but Biden had a very strong Electoral vote lead (203 to 118). If that trend had continued & Biden had won the Electoral College (which he might do), but "lost" the popular vote (which now seems highly unlikely), I expect Republicans would have been all in on a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate the Electoral College.

    In fact, Republicans almost passed such an Amendment during Nixon's first term. It failed by only a few votes in the Senate, primarily "Dixiecrat" Senators.

    Georgia's Special Senate election was already headed towards a runoff, but now it looks like the regular Georgia Senate race may be headed that way as well. The Republican incumbent's share is slipping & if it gets below 50% + 1 vote that will trigger a runoff. When I looked just now the NY Times is saying he's at exactly 50.0% (49.98% by my calculation).

    The New York Times is showing the Senate 48-48 with 4 races not yet decided - Alaska, Georgia, Georgia Special & North Carolina. I'm pretty sure the incumbent Republicans in Alaska & North Carolina will both win reelection, but I just don't know about Georgia.

    697:

    My point is that ol' toad-face was never as prestigious as a front-man - he was just a convenient blow-hard and wing-nut magnet. His parties had absolutely no effect on Westminster elections except to frighten the Conservative party into adopting more extreme policies. He is vanishingly unlikely to achieve anything like that on a no-lockdown platform, because it takes a long time for a propaganda campaign to make people believe nonsense that they don't start off half-believing; Brexit took 40 years. In addition, he doesn't have the media backing that he did then. Even with Brexit, if he hadn't existed, it would have been unnecessary to invent him.

    698:

    It was like a mad minnow swallowing a decrepit old whale. It was not pretty.

    699:

    David L @ 645:

    Remember that in many states the electoral college doesn't need to obey the election results

    I'm fairly certain the SCOTUS just ruled that a faithless elector could be punished for not following the rules of the state. And I think at this time all states have rules that they follow the popular vote. With a couple of variations.

    Not "punished", just replaced.

    Forty-eight states have "Winner take all" rules for their Electors. Maine (4) & Nebraska (5) have a district system - the popular vote winner in a Congressional District gets that district's Electoral vote with the overall popular vote winner in the state getting the two Electoral votes for the Senators.

    Maine split 3-1 for Biden, and Nebraska split 4-1 for Trump.

    If the Electoral College cannot be abolished, I think it might be possible (i.e. "Constitutional") for Congress to pass a law requiring all of the states to adopt district system rules abolishing "winner take all", leaving it to the State Legislatures to determine how to implement it.

    700:

    PrivateIron @ 661: You can punish a faithless elector AFTER the fact, but I am pretty sure you cannot ignore their vote.

    I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court ruling said that states can remove a faithless elector & replace him/her with a substitute.

    Just went and looked it up. Faithless electors can be both punished ($1,000 fine as in the Washington case & replaced as in the Colorado case that was combined with the Washington case).

    701:

    mdlve @ 687: The expectation is that Biden will take Arizona (for those who haven't called it yet), and Nevada, which takes Biden to 270 (just a majority).

    The situation in Arizona appears to be that Biden's lead is greater than the number of outstanding un-counted votes. Even if the remaining votes were 100% for Trump it would still not be enough to overcome Biden's lead.

    Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia are currently leaning Trump though at least Pennsylvania and Georgia are close.

    In North Carolina, the pre-existing law gives absentee ballots postmarked by election day until November 12 to arrive & be counted. The Supreme Court chose to NOT change North Carolina's existing law just before the election. That's the same rationale they chose for overturning Pennsylvania's extension deadline - it changed the rules just before the election.

    If the yet to be counted absentee ballots in North Carolina break in the same ratio as the already counted ones, Trump will just barely win with something like 50.02% of the vote.

    In Pennsylvania, if the yet to be counted absentee votes break with the same ratio as the already counted absentee votes, Biden will overtake Trump to win.

    Georgia is turning into a nail biter. Trump has a 12,835 vote lead over Biden (49.5% to 49.2%) with 47,277 absentee ballots still to be counted. Absentee ballots have been breaking 51.2% Biden to 46.9% Trump. If this ratio holds Biden could just barely win Georgia.

    702:

    Charlie Stross @ 693: Germany recently permitted it to be published again -- but annotated, with same-page footnotes taking a pick-axe to Hitler's lies. And no, he and his heirs don't earn a single euro-cent in royalties from it.

    Who would be his heirs? I think there may still be 3 grand-nephews living in New York, but they don't seem to be interested in claiming any of his legacy.

    703:

    AP is reporting the the largest county in Nevada (Clark) won't be finished counting ballots until Saturday or Sunday.

    704:

    For those of you with an interest in how professional historians view current events in the USA, I can recommend two who post on Facebook with cogent and timely commentary:

    Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught at MIT and the University of Massachusetts.

    She does a live stream on Thursdays on Facebook, and nightly digests with analysis and commentary on the previous day's events. Very readable and informative. Her book "How the South Won the Civil War" is also fascinating.

    Clay Jenkinson is an American humanities scholar, author and educator. He is currently the director of The Dakota Institute, where he co-hosts public radio's The Thomas Jefferson Hour, and creates documentary films, symposia, and literary projects. He lectures at Dickinson State University and Bismarck State College.

    Clay, as part of the legacy of the Chataqua Movement, frequently portrays Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt in small public venues (I saw him twice while we lived in Colorado), speaking as if somehow transported from their time to the present and commenting on current events; he then breaks character and speaks of their historic impact.

    705:

    So...after living and working in the USA for twenty five years I've got some personal observations to make: 1) Republican voters are living in and believing a world of lies (and many of the lies come from a time before Trump): Lie example one: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction Lie example two: Obama is a muslim Lie example three: Obamacare is hurting millions of Americans

    2) Item #1 makes it VERY DIFFICULT for a normal person to converse with a Republican * So the US population is divided into two groups. Group One comprises normal folk who look at the facts and apply reasonable rules of logic when they consider the world. Group Two are Republicans who live in a fantasy world made up of straight out lies supplied by people like Trump, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and Fox (sorry Faux) News. * So.....it's a real pity that so many people are deluded.....but there it is....half of the US population is deluded. Pity...but there it is!

    706:

    QUOTE Pennsylvania: Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is expected to give a news conference at 17:15 (22:15 GMT). Earlier, she told CNN that a winner “definitely could” be determined by the close of business on Thursday. ENDQUOTE Well, that's right now ..... ( Except it seems to be a progress report - no result now expected until tomorrow some time )

    Meanwhile: A Warning from history

    707:

    Greg @706: Nice article, thanks. Seems applicable beyond the USA, as well.

    708:

    Seems applicable beyond the USA, as well.

    Very much so.

    The US may be the most obvious, and the furthest along, but there are lots of signs in other countries.

    Announcements no longer made in Parliament but in other public places to "bring it to the people" while conveniently removing the ability for the opposition to respond.

    Elected officials, or candidates in elections, refusing to take questions from the media.

    Elected governments bypassing the media and creating their own "news channels"

    etc.

    709:

    My prediction for Trump if he looses is that he will get no real help from the Republican party or the Supreme Court. Oh, there'll be a lot of sturm and drang about how he was robbed. A sense of grievance will be whipped up, and he will be turned into a martyr, but the Republican party has got what they want out of him: three Supreme Court justices, a massive tax cut for the really rich and it looks like they still hold the Senate so the Democrats will be impotent.

    He was never one of the club, and it's widely known that most Republican members of congress hate him. There's a basic rule of human behavior that if you are an outsider, particularly one who muscled his way in like Trump did, that no matter how much you contribute to an organization, once things turn against you, you find no loyalty. Trump is going to be quietly nudged under the proverbial bus.

    Ideally, the Republicans would like Trump prosecuted and put in jail under the Democrats where he'd make a wonderful martyr and wouldn't interfere with their 2024 plans.

    710:

    OK, serious question:

    Suppose you are born into a large country where half the population believes lies concocted by a handful of immoral politicians who are using them to hold onto power.

    As a child, you believe the same things as everyone else in your local community (duh). But when you grow up, you start wondering how you can be sure that you had the good fortune to be born into the accurate half. After all, the children born into the other half mostly believe the other half.

    What procedure do you follow to figure out which half is lies?

    Hard Mode: Instead of assuming that exactly one side has accurate information, assume that AT MOST one side has accurate information, but it's possible that BOTH are lies.

    .

    The first thing that occurs to me is that you should try to verify your information first-hand. But for many political lies, this is wildly impractical for most people. (Your examples: Saddam Hussein has WMDs--can you visit him personally and check? Obama is a muslim--can you read his mind, or somehow force him to tell the truth? Obamacare is hurting millions--are you in a position to survey the whole country?)

    You could try to get information from neutral sources. Problem: How do you know which sources are neutral? (And what does "neutral" even mean if one side is lies? What you really want is trustworthy sources--but that's just a restatement of the original problem of figuring out who's telling the truth.)

    You could look for examples where one side or the other makes FORMAL errors (as opposed to factual errors), such as logical fallacies or violating the established rules of a debate, and assume that the side committing formal errors is unprincipled and therefore untrustworthy. Problem: Both sides contain huge numbers of mere humans, who make these sorts of errors all the time even when they are well-meaning, so individual examples are easy to find on both sides. Additionally, since you were raised on one side or the other, you personally suffer from cognitive biases that make it easier for you to notice formal errors on the other side than on your native side, so any strategy based on personally quantifying these errors is probably doomed.

    711:

    Read Altemyer's The Authoritarians (it's free online). There are a couple of routes:

  • If you're an authoritarian right-wing follower (the majority who voted for Trump), then group identity is paramount, and being seen to live a good life also matters. Therefore, conflicts, contradictions, lies, etc. get concealed. However, there may be an avenue for rapid change. Once you find out that everyone else feels the same way you do, whether it's right wing bigotry or disgust with a current president, then you can rapidly, and safely change your opinion.
  • B. If you belong to an evangelical household, something as simple as reading the Bible can do the trick. The point is that Evangelicals often don't read it, except for the verses assigned in church services. Their kids more often read the book as a book, notice the stark contradictions between what's in the Bible and what their Christian parents believe, and that starts the wedge process going.

    III. Going to a less-sectarian college and living in the dorms. While teachers like to think they change their pupils' minds, Altemeyer's evidence suggested that equally important was rubbing shoulders with people who came from a different background than you did. Dealing with people from different countries, different races, different genders can help change peoples' discriminatory attitudes about race and gender, presumably the dorms are about living with people, not stereotypes.

    712:

    My point is that ol' toad-face was never as prestigious as a front-man - he was just a convenient blow-hard and wing-nut magnet.

    I could see several people dismissing him that way, saying the referendum will put him in his place...

    His parties had absolutely no effect on Westminster elections except to frighten the Conservative party into adopting more extreme policies.

    Which is of course the ultimate goal - the people behind the scenes don't care if Nigel delivers the wanted result directly or indirectly as long as they get there.

    He is vanishingly unlikely to achieve anything like that on a no-lockdown platform, because it takes a long time for a propaganda campaign to make people believe nonsense that they don't start off half-believing; Brexit took 40 years. In addition, he doesn't have the media backing that he did then.

    The signs are already around that the anti-lockdown forces are gaining influence.

    Whether it be the Manchester University students tearing down the fence around their dorm, the fake science Great Barrington Declaration, Boris being hesitant to start the second lock down, or any number of other things in countries around the world the indications are that the right wing "business is all that matters" forces are gaining influence.

    Here in Ontario the Premiere is re-defining things so he can either avoid taking action or end things early - the local right wing press has been vicious in attacking any attempts to control Covid by putting new/further restrictions on business.

    So, while I hope I am wrong, I suspect things might well be set up for Nigel to cause more mischief.

    713:

    I suspect you are right, with the added bonus that Biden and the Democrats will take all the blame for the resulting economic problems Covid has brought for the next 4 years making a Republican win in 2024 that much easier.

    714:

    Georgia is turning into a nail biter. Trump has a 12,835 vote lead over Biden...

    That's an understatement. I went to the Fox News page, on the theory that they'd be least likely to spin anything in favor of a Democrat, and as I type they have Biden behind by 3,486 votes (2,443,364 to 2,446,850). They don't say how many ballots are still outstanding but it can't be many.

    With the margin below 0.2% we're can expect calls for a re-count.

    715:

    Unfortunately, yes. But this is after a serious 40 years of brainwashing by the ultrawealthy.

    But it really isn't half. Ut's under 40%, and true believers are probalby under 30%.

    716:

    There are a lot of answers - including mct to the previous, that it's < 40%, and true believers < 30%.

    You don't have to be on site to look for facts: you can find pics, for example, of Obama in church. Ask for ONE non-fake of him at Muslim prayers.

    WMD - right, my late ex, who was also ex-Navy, would point out that a) Reagan sold him WMD, to fight Iran, and b) gas, etc weapons have a shelf life, and are useless after that.

    Check the real world.

    717:

    Here in Ontario the Premiere is re-defining things so he can either avoid taking action or end things early

    For those not following local news, the new public health guidelines essentially say that the lockdown was a mistake, by defining the infection levels necessary to reach it in an area as those that were reached by only two public health units in the province at the height of the spring surge.

    Also, the provincial science panels apparently weren't consulted, at least according to members who have gone public to express surprise and dismay.

    Buried in the Covid omnibus bill is support for an evangelical Christian 'college', overturning of environmental regulations, and raising the standards necessary to sue long-term care home operators from negligence to gross negligence*.

    Meanwhile R is still above 1 and more restrictions are coming off — and holiday season is just around the corner…

    *Almost impossible to meet, according to a lawyer friend of mine.

    718:

    Despite everything, including some Republicans actively running ads against Trump, he has increased his vote count by 6.5 million and counting (he got just under 63m votes in 2016, he's at 69.5m with counting still happening now).

    Given everything that has happened, not the least of which around Covid, for Trump to be increasing his voter base says to me that the true believers are more numerous than many are willing to admit.

    719:

    And to put things a bit into perspective, Trump's 69.5m just barely beats what Obama got in the 2008 election, and is 3m more than Hillary had in 2016.

    (Biden is currently at 73.3m, a new record).

    720:

    as I type they have Biden behind by 3,486 votes

    In Georgia it is the Atlanta area where it is taking a while to process all the mail in ballots. And Biden seems to be winning those 2 to 1. Which if the trend holds he will pass Trump a bit before the sun comes up EST (UTC-500). But that trend also indicated the final margin will likely be under 10K. Maybe around 2K.

    But at the same time Arizona is going the other way. And the question there is will Trump be ahead when they get all the ballot processed.

    Georgia has 13 votes to Arizona 11 votes. Either plus Nevada puts Biden over the top.

    721:

    GA is now 1902 votes up for Trumpolini - it could flip at 23:00 or midnight.

    PA is T by under 41k, and with over 700k balots to go, and places like Philly weighing in, it could flip between midnight and 02:00.

    If PA goes blue, it's game over for the Hairball - 20 electoral votes.

    722:

    I am looking for a general, principled strategy for deciding which side deserves your support. Something that I could use if I was raised a Democrat but I want to do my due diligence, or if I'm a world-walker visiting an alternate earth where the yellow party and the purple party are fighting out a vicious battle based on totally alien politics.

    Strategies like "spend several years living in a social context where the group norms favor politics X" might do a good job of changing someone's politics, but they work both directions. I wouldn't have any assurance that I'm changing from the wrong side to the right side and not vice versa. How do I know that "go to college" is better advice than "go to church"?

    You are listing partisan strategies for converting Republicans to Democrats.

    (Though I have read Altemeyer, based on a previous reference on this blog, and found it a very interesting read.)

    723:

    You don't have to be on site to look for facts: you can find pics, for example, of Obama in church. Ask for ONE non-fake of him at Muslim prayers.

    That might be generalized as "look for evidence that is difficult to fake". That's a good point.

    Unfortunately, we're entering a technological era where photographs and video can be faked pretty easily and very convincingly, so the relevance of this strategy seems to be on the wane.

    724:

    The primaries in CA are partisan. But the top two candidates go to the general election, regardless of party. (I didn't support that change.)

    725:

    Guy Fawkes Night

    So was this ignored this year?

    726:

    You never do have that assurance, unfortunately. For example, if the deepest problem with the planet is overpopulation and you wrongly support something that ends up with 90% of humans dying but the extinction crisis and climate change stop, is that good or bad? It's both, depending on what your values are.

    Another way of saying it is that you have to act with inadequate information and inadequate processing power. While it's worth seeking better methods, ultimately you've got to work with what you have.

    I've personally found that James Carse's Finite versus infinite games is generally useful: treat life as an infinite game where the goal is not to win, but to keep the game going with as many players as possible. It's not foolproof, but it works more often than not.

    In the current imbroglio, that guidance would suggest: --Get Covid19 deaths down by public health measures --Deal with climate change --Black Lives Matter (as do all others, but you help those in the most trouble first) --Inequalities need to be lessened.

    In each case, more people and more non-human players are kept in the game of life by following these movements.

    Compare with: --Covid19 is a hoax --Climate change is a hoax --White men rule the world --Inequalities are a symbol of success. The rich earned it and can make the best use of resources.

    727:

    Nah, they've been popping and banging away all week. Often the major celebrations end up happening at the weekend if the 5th is a weekday; I don't know what the status of the public events is this year, but I expect the people in their back gardens will be still at it over the weekend.

    728:

    I think you may be conflating questions of value with questions of fact. Whether or not it is worth killing 90% of humans to stop other animals from going extinct is a question of values. Whether or not covid19 is a hoax is a question of facts.

    HYPOTHETICALLY, if covid19 WERE a hoax, then all the lockdowns and vaccines and so forth would be very bad things, because they sap a lot of our collective resources and very likely increase inequality and almost certainly kill some people of privation. Your "keep the game going with as many players as possible" heuristic would say we should end most of the measures we're taking to fight the disease, because the benefits would be illusory (again, hypothetically).

    There might also be a few people who believe covid19 is real but who oppose public health measures because they have different values. But if someone thinks it's a hoax, then your key problem with them isn't a difference of values, it's a difference of factual beliefs.

    You can't tell that covid19 is or isn't a hoax by arguing from your armchair (with or without recourse to your values). It's an empirical question.

    I really want to stress this, because I think that the world currently has a serious problem involving people who try to resolve factual questions by recourse to their values instead of to empirical observations.

    729:

    Antistone Very good question-set. Applies in spades redoubled to religion, of course, even more than politics.

    ... later Maybe NEITHER side deserves your support - this is certainly the case in religion (!) This road leads to Rome / This road leads to Geneva ... Step off the road.

    mdive the Manchester University students tearing down the fence around their dorm, Well, I was an original inhabitant of Fallowfield Village, when it opened, a long time ago ..... And I'm glad to see that the spirit of rebellion is not dead yet. The current students were quite right to tear down this prison fence that was put in without consultation or explanation, actually. It's to do with authoritarianism, as mentioned above. Because, very unfortunately, "government" is using C-19 as a cover for more control - the give-away is their utter incompetence at actually doing anything useful to control the spread of C-19. AIUI, if you are contacted by "Track & Trace" they won't tell you where or when you supposedly were in contact with a case or suspected case ... & are stupid enough to wonder why people are taking no notice of them....

    730:

    whitroth @ 715: Unfortunately, yes. But this is after a serious 40 years of brainwashing by the ultrawealthy.

    This is one of those irregular verbs:

    • I know the facts.
    • You have opinions.
    • He's biased.
    • They've been brainwashed.
    731:

    Guy Fawkes Night:

    No, it was not ignored; we've had a lot of bangs and whistles around our area. Large scale organised firework displays are off. Private parties with friends, relatives and neigbours are also off. That leaves Dad in the back garden letting off a few Roman Candles and sparklers for the kids.

    732:

    So some what ifs.

    Biden wins electoral college with a win in Georgia.

    Both of Georgia's Senate races go to a runoff in early January.

    With all other Senate races decided it is D48 - R50

  • Just how many gazillion $$ will go into that race to try and get the Senate to at least a 50-50 tie with Harris as the tie breaker?

  • If the residency requirements for Georgia voters is 30 days, how many "work from home" and/or "college school from home" will move to Georgia in the 3nd half of November so they can vote in the runoff? Or do you have to be registered to vote in the original election to vote in the runoff?

  • The "get out the vote" campaigns will be almost at the level of a driver for every possible voter.

  • 733:

    "This is one of those irregular verbs:

    I know the facts. You have opinions. He's biased. They've been brainwashed."

    Sorry, but when it comes to USA, the word is indeed "brainwashed" because most USAnians literally suffer from a variant of Stockholm-syndrome when it comes to their ultra-rich owners.

    The constant propaganda of "The Worlds Greatest Nation" has been drilled in so long and so utterly inescapable, that it takes a serious effort of education to even make USAnians contemplate that there could be specialized areas where other countries do a better job than The Worlds Greatest Nation.

    If you pay careful attention, you will find that everytime somebody dare indicate that some other country might be better at something, they are branded as "unpatriotic", and if they manage to stand against that, people will call them liars, because what they say cannot possibly be true.

    I have litereally had supposedly highly educated and well informed friends in USA tell me, that "If social medicine was a better solution, USA would have done it long time ago", not based on any actual knowledge about that one which they are pontificating, but as a matter of principle.

    A large fraction of my US friends and acquaintances literally do not believe I'm telling the truth, when I tell them, that Denmark does not have HMOs: "How can you not, it would be utter chaos if everybody can just go to the doctor at all times?!"

    And dont even get me started on the "confiscatory taxes" people pay in other countries: Most people in USA pay higher taxes than I do here in Denmark, but they pay them two-hundred different small ways, so they never add them up.

    And the problem is certainly not limited to "right wing media", even so-called "progressive" or "left-wing" media outlets are as introspective and navel-gazing as the rest of them.

    734:

    "Given everything that has happened, not the least of which around Covid, for Trump to be increasing his voter base says to me that the true believers are more numerous than many are willing to admit."

    Being from France, where we had 2 authoritarian candidates last election (out of 4 serious contenders), one on the right (Le Pen), one on the left (Mélanchon [*]), I have absolutely no doubt that people are craving for strongmen, even against their own interest.

    People do not want to think for themselves, it's tiring. They want to be entertained in 2 minutes of hate increments.

    On a side note, the current French president is also turning more and more authoritarian, because whenever he tried to explain or negociate / amend anything, he was attacked by pundits "not enough leadership! Not enough principles!".

    [*] : the platform is less authoritarian at face value, but the party is clearly run as a personality cult.

    735:

    Biden is now ahead in Georgia by around 800 points. Nobody has called it yet, but Georgia's results are currently 99 percent counted and will probably be official sometime tomorrow. If Biden continues his lead that game over for Trump.

    736:

    From the U.S., our current medical system is terrible. We pay (nationally) twice as much as France or Germany, and get half the service.

    737:

    And the problem is certainly not limited to "right wing media", even so-called "progressive" or "left-wing" media outlets are as introspective and navel-gazing as the rest of them

    There's a different way of looking at the phenomenon we call the Overton Window. It's that classical sitcoms cannot tolerate story arcs, because the writers can be variable in quality and interest: status quo ante is a hard rule that can't be broken. Sure this has changed over time, but even with something as recent as The Simpsons, there is a strong commitment to status quo ante. Classical sitcoms colonised news media, first in the USA then much of the rest of the West. There is a fixed general Weltanshauung, and to deliver a message that relies on knowing things that it doesn't cover means providing a significant amount of story building, sometimes this is too much to carry off in one "episode". Sure you can tolerate 2 or more episode stories, but at the end of each story it is still status quo ante. You need at least 2 episodes to explain Denmark to Americans in a way they have a fighting chance of understanding. At least that's one way to unravel it: there will be plenty for whom the background "story" is well enough known, but that's not the way the studio sees the audience.

    738:

    Over 1000 now. As I see it, if Biden wins Georgia and either Nevada or Arizona, he doesn't need Pennsylvania. If he gets all 4 it is a significant unambiguous victory for the Democrats, not the hoped-for landslide but nonetheless demonstrative.

    739:

    "From the U.S., our current medical system is terrible. We pay (nationally) twice as much as France or Germany, and get half the service."

    What most people, US or abroad, do not realize about this situation, is that the money is not the important thing in health-care-context, peace of mind is.

    In USA, whenever anything happens that involves health-care, the sheer dysfunction of the entire system adds a level of stress on top of whatever health-condition we might be talking about.

    In civilized countries, you go to the doctor or you call an ambulance and the right thing will generally happen, and everybody involved will try to do their best to help you.

    When my son was born in USA, I had to argue with staff, who then had to wake a laywer in the middle of the night, to find out if I, as the father, were allowed to hold the baby without a nurse being present in the room.

    The fear of ruin-by-health-care is so deeply ingrained in USAnians, that they cannot fathom what life is like without it.

    So not only do USAnians pay through the nose for generally crappy and deficient health-care, they also have a pile of stress heaped on them on top.

    740:

    So was this ignored this year?

    Nope -- it's a sufficiently general excuse for fireworks that my cat, who is generally unperturbed by thunderstorms, was a wee bit tense (even with the window shutters closed).

    741:

    Looking at the numbers in Arizona, I can't see how Trump can possible win it. I think Faux News' early declaration of Arizona for Biden stands. It's over 99% counted and the margin is around 47k votes, which is 50% more than 1% of the total votes counted so far.

    742:

    Sigh. You are responding to someone who has known Brexit was coming, and dismally tracking its progress, FOR THREE DECADES. I accept that toadface is more than a symptom, but he was not a cause - more like covariate that is an intermediate in a causal chain. Furthermore, whether or not the anti-lockdown 'movement' gains traction, it DOES NOT HAVE TIME to make a significant difference to the body politic before a vaccine is introduced and the rules change again. Toadface has demonstrated, several times, that he he incapable of creating a political movement that is any more than a congealed scream of rage. He is an irrelevance.

    This is nothing like what happened in Canada. The FAR more disturbing and long-term important aspects are the way that TPTB are using the current situation (i.e. the majority, Starmer (ugh), and COVID) to accelerate moves to fascism and not even bother to veil their looting.

    743:

    "The fear of ruin-by-health-care is so deeply ingrained in USAnians, that they cannot fathom what life is like without it."

    It's so much worse than most Europeans can conceive of, IMHO. They will practice things which would be fraudulent in other situations.

    For example, your insurance probably has an agreement with a set of hospitals and doctors to provide care at a discount. This is called 'in-network'. If you get out of network care, it's usually not covered by insurance, and the hospital/doctor's office are free to bill you at deliberately inflated retail rates.

    Now, you might reasonably think that if your hospital is in-network, then everybody there is, but you'd be wrong.

    Hospitals frequently deliberately use 'independent contractors' to practice medicine, which means that they aren't covered. There were a number of incidents where a patient had surgery, but the anesthesiologist was an 'independent contractor', and billed the patient separately and steeply.

    744:

    Someone said yesterday: "maybe the problem isn't that we underestimated Trump, may its that we overestimated Americans"

    745:

    That was assuredly so in the UK, but there has been a four-decade campaign by the government to dumb down the British electorate.

    746:

    It is one of the ways the Mammonites worship. The blessed of Mammon feel more so when they can observe those that do not share that blessing. Freedom of worship seems generally a good thing, within limits, and the service of Mammon could use some.

    747:

    US Newspapers are now calling it for Biden, awarding him Georgia and Pennsylvania.

    748:

    Correction: New York Times and Washington Post are showing Biden with leads there; nobody is actually calling it.

    749:

    Damian & others It looks as though Biden will get both Pennsylvania & Georgia, at the moment - at which Its going to get interesting, watching DJT: (a) wrecking the place in a jealous fit (b) trying to avoid the inevitable jail for tax & business fraud(s)

    An after though on that article on Julius Ceasar I linked to. It did not mention that JC was the 3rd attempt ... which finally succeeded. Before him there was Lucius Cornelius Sulla & before him, Giaus Marius & their civil wars.

    EC @ 745 "40 year campaign" - puts it at 1980 - no it started earlier than that, about 1970.

    750:

    If ever they make a film of "Star Drek" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtU_FZAcCZo

    "Captain Jerk" could be the role that "Drumph!" was born to play, he could be utterly believable, hopping into a red convertible with a bleach blond at the end of the movie.

    751:

    Er, no. Before Thatcher, there was no concerted (let alone deliberate) campaign by the government to dumb down Britain. In particular, the edict for schools to drop education in favour of training dates from then. Yes, there was incompetence before 1980, but that goes back a LONG way before 1970.

    752:

    "Someone said yesterday: "maybe the problem isn't that we underestimated Trump, may its that we overestimated Americans""

    Yes. There are ~40-odd percent of the actually voting voters who still like Trump. After four years of him living down to what his critics said about him, they voted to keep him, and to continue on his trend line.

    Now, they'll say 'but Biden would be worse!', but four years ago they said 'but Hillary would be worse!"; IMHO they'd say that about anybody.

    753:

    It now looks like Charlie will be able to go to cons in America again.

    When we have cons again.

    754:

    In that 40% you also have those who do not want to vote because voting is for the naive. All government is obscure and organized by elites behind the scene.

    755:

    I think you may be conflating questions of value with questions of fact. Whether or not it is worth killing 90% of humans to stop other animals from going extinct is a question of values. Whether or not covid19 is a hoax is a question of facts.

    And you're distorting what I said. Badly.

    The first point is that you're making the dangerously assumption false that, by having sufficient information and logic, that you can therefore make the best decision. That's a recipe for either inaction or chaos, because you never will have sufficient information, or sufficient processing power, to make the logical decision. Nature is chaotic. New stuff happens, and logic system based on analyses of the past fail to deal with them. This is the whole basis of black swan theory. Worse than that, you never have access to all the data of the past, so even if you use that as your system of facts, it's inadequate. Worse still, in trying to get adequate data or better methods, you fail to make timely decisions.

    To get back to your original question,the answer is this: you don't have sufficient resources of knowledge, time, or processing power to figure out unambiguous ways of getting a sufficiently accurate set of facts to act from. And since reality is under no obligation to make sense to you or any of us, you also lack the time, resources, and processing power to assemble a sufficiently accurate predictive model from which to act.

    The solution is what humans have done for the last 300,000 years: copy the behavior that worked for others, especially for their elders who have lived through a lot of crap, get on with life, plan for the worst, hope for the best, and pray that this will work.

    756:

    Well, I did think of a perfectly miserable way for Trump to spend the rest of his life in court.

    It's obvious that he's going to pardon himself for all his crimes, and we'll get to find out whether that sticks, with his particular Supreme court. He'll also pardon all his people, so that they can walk away from what they did to the federal government.

    So it's up to the states to charge all those officials with the damage they caused to each state while in office. And that's not going to be fun. Especially for them.

    For example (and ritually: I am Not a Lawyer): Attorneys general and district attorneys throughout the US could indict Trump for negligent homicide in his handling of Covid19, based on the deaths that occurred in their jurisdictions due to his inaction. I don't know how many convictions it would get, but there are 3000 counties and 50 states. Cut that about in half, assume each trial takes a month, and that's 127 years dealing with each case right there.

    Now involuntary manslaughter is a low felony/high misdemeanor, but when hundreds of thousands have died, it gets to be an interesting time for him.

    And then there's the tax fraud cases and everything else. Fraud cases last much longer than do manslaughter, because the evidence is so tricky.

    So spending the rest of his life in court? He'll probably say that's cruel and unusual punishment, but legally it's not. It's only determining whether he deserves to be punished.

    And since he's a classic flight risk, there's no way his passport will be honored, even if Covid19-related restrictions on travel out of the US ease.

    757:

    On the 20th of january, it is customary that Airforce One flies the outgoing president "where-ever they want to go, one-way."

    Trump is not stupid, he's going to get the hell out of dodge and USA, before anybody gets a chance to serve him any summons to court or worse.

    Precisely which country he wants to go to is anyones guess, but he has enough properties to claim "I just want to go golfing at my place in _, havn't been there for four years...".

    Until he's seen where the chips land, he's not coming back.

    758:

    My bet is that he'll fly to Switzerland in his own private 757, long before courts make up a warrant.

    759:

    His 757 is sort of parked. For him to get on it a lot of people would know something is up as they get it flight ready. Plus all kinds of Secret Service machinations about him flying on that before noon January 20.

    760:

    Well, it's worth looking at the visa restrictions on American movement to other countries, e.g.: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/us-international-travel-covid-19/index.html

    For example, he can't go to Russia or Saudi Arabia, although he can go to the UK. In many places, he'd need to be quarantined. Unfortunately for everybody, it is possible to get reinfected with a different strain of Covid19, and since he has been documented not taking basic precautions, I suspect the quarantine will apply to him.

    The other thing I suspect will happen is that various state attorneys general (California and New York come to mind) will, on January 20 (or whenever he leaves office before that) immediately seek to bar him from leaving the country until his case(s) have been heard in their state courts. Since he fits the classic profile of a flight risk, they may well get their injunctions.

    Actually, I'm starting to wonder if his best strategy going forward is to get them to use the 25th Amendment on him, so that he can try a strategy of not being fit to stand trial...

    761:

    It now looks like Charlie will be able to go to cons in America again.

    Almost certainly not in 2021: while vaccines should appear then, it's going to take some time to get the mess under control -- and we've got the extended earthquake temblors from Brexit coming up (hopefully with a minimal exit deal with the EU, if Biden crosses the finish line), then a Scottish election in May and who-the-fuck-knows what else.

    I expect Sterling to drop like a stone at the end of December, although who-the-fuck-knows, again. While I mostly get paid in dollars, I get to pay my income tax in sterling -- with a 41% rate that kicks in on income over £43K, and 46% on income over £150,000 (which I have never come within spitting distance of, even in my best year). Anyway, thing is, I pay a higher level of tax than anyone in the USA on anything over £25K a year, and although I get free healthcare as a not-inconsiderable bonus, it makes international traipsing-around feel a bit painful at times.

    (To be serious: once there's a vaccine I expect to make at least one US trip within 6-12 months, subject to pandemic status: I like to have a face-to-face with my agent and each of my editors in NYC at least once a year, but I've only managed to do that once since February 2016. For formal business stuff we've been using Zoom, but there's the wholly intangible and unquantifiable impact of in-person social contact -- doing lunch with the marketing department, brainstorming possible future projects or career directions over a beer after work. And there is no such thing as an unplanned informal after-work Zoom chat with a business contact.)

    762:

    The other day someone took a photo of a heavy duty rental truck next to the white house. This means that Trump as an individual is moving his private things. He would use a government truck for presidential stuff. I think he's leaving the U.S. a long, long, long time before january 20th.

    763:

    In that 40% you also have those who do not want to vote because voting is for the naive. All government is obscure and organized by elites behind the scene.

    I'm not sure how correct that is. You can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections

    The people who are proportionally under-represented are Hispanic, Asian, uneducated, young, and low income. Yes, they tend to vote democratic, but if they're working two or three menial jobs, or if they struggle to read anything, or if they're concerned about job retaliation if they vote...they're not likely to vote.

    Contrary to what you might expect, wealthy whites are the highest voting population, and about 80% of them vote. That's one problem with our politics actually, since libertarianism is a lifestyle disease of the wealthy.

    764:

    I gather a Hatch Act investigation is already getting off the ground.

    • Mail-orders a popcorn-maker and 250kg of popping corn *
    765:

    My suspicion is, while he would not be welcomed, he would be let into Russia - and immediately put into quarantine (without Internet or SMS) for an indefinite period while Putin decided what to do with him. Putin would probably be tempted to escort him to the Afghan border and give him walking directions to Kabul :-)

    766:

    Almost certainly not in 2021: while vaccines should appear then, it's going to take some time to get the mess under control

    My wife and I have been trying to spend a week in London for over 2 years now. Weather and unexpected work situations got in the way. I suspect that Marriott will not extend our 7 night upper level free hotel stay certificate again. Which is worth about $4K. Expires mid March.

    Oh, well.

    767:

    There appears to be yet another fuck-up w.r.t. vaccines (in this case, the Astrazeneca one). While the September date for large-scale roll-out always was polemic fantasy, a few million doses by the end of the year and the rest not until June (with Astrazeneca claiming ample production capacity) sounds like incompetence. Particularly "'Actually we’re going to have more vaccines than we’re able to deploy,' she said. 'I don’t think vaccine supply is going to be the limiting factor.'" A vulture capitalist always was a ghastly choice for someone who had to actually make a major project work.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-astrazenec/delivery-timetable-of-oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine-has-slipped-uk-official-says-idUSKBN27K2GQ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/11/04/covid-19-vaccine-shortage-fears-britain-misses-production-targets/

    I am not happy at the prospect of being locked up (or down, as you will) next year as well, and would be tempted to try the Russian vaccine (risks and all) were it available for me.

    768:

    Here in the US and from what I read in other places a vaccine that's 50% effective will get approved. Not sure I want to play those odds at my age. But I wonder if an 80%+ vaccine is possible in the next year or two.

    Or if it is possible to take 2 or 3 different versions.

    769:

    Thanks. Here's the Snopes link:https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/moving-truck-cspan/

    The question is what's getting moved in or out, of course*. While getting Agent Orange out is the goal, sudden-President Renfield may not be a good thing either, what with McConnell coming back into town soon.

    *A shoggoth?

    770:

    I don't know that Trump will leave the US, he could well be arrogant enough to think all the legal action will amount to nothing.

    But a big consideration may well be the loss of the Secret Service. Yes, he disliked them at the beginning, but on the whole you don't need to question their loyalty which may be a consideration as all his debts come due.

    If he does decide to flee, the normal rules wouldn't apply to him (and given I would guess the Republicans would be quite happy to see him leave and not have his court cases constantly reminding the public in the run up to 2024, it would be easy enough for the powerful to arrange people to look the other way regardless of any court orders - and even powerful Democrats may like the idea as it would make it easy to cut him off from Twitter).

    But the question becomes who takes him in.

    If he flees, the Trump empire collapses, and that is going to make a lot of people outside of the US who have used him very unhappy.

    That is likely going to rule out many of the obvious places, like Russia.

    771:

    "There appears to be yet another fuck-up w.r.t. vaccines (in this case, the Astrazeneca one). "

    Never mind that, what happened to the free seasonal-flu vaccine for the over-50's we in England were promised not long ago? Far from being made more available than usual, it doesn't appear to be available at all, free or paid.

    772:

    Here's a new question:

    Suppose Trump goes down in ignominy and bankruptcy as Deutsche Bank call in his notes and the vultures close in and the prosecutors build their cases.

    Where does this leave Don Jr, Javanka, et al, in terms of having a political career?

    My gut sense is that if Don the elder hangs then the rest of the crime family hang with him, which means we don't have to worry about Donald Jr running for POTUS in 2024.

    Am I missing something?

    773:

    Never mind that, what happened to the free seasonal-flu vaccine for the over-50's we in England were promised not long ago? Far from being made more available than usual, it doesn't appear to be available at all, free or paid.

    In Scotland it's free for over-55s and those with serious health conditions; I got mine a month ago. (Didn't bother with the official drive-through centre, which was inaccessible except by car -- I crossed the road to my local pharmacy and was in and out in ten minutes.)

    774:

    Yes, Trump brings the family along with him to Zurich next week. I bet he has enough Krugerrands to buy suitable property over there. There's room enough in a 757 anyway. It's in Wikipedia under Trump Force One.

    775:

    On the prospect of Trump fleeing the country:

    Its probably not that simple. Ex-presidents get 10 years of Secret Service protection. If Trump is to flee justice then he also has to flee his government-paid body guards. Aside from leaving him unprotected, he isn't going to be able to get away without them noticing.

    What I don't know is the extent to which they will take orders from him, especially if those orders contradict standing orders to keep him protected. Even if he gets to an airport, he's still got an hour or three in US airspace, plus an unknown period of time in other airspace that will be friendly to the USA. If the US Justice Department wants to detain him, its going to be pretty simple to do.

    776:

    Does anyone know what Trump can do between now and 20th January, when he will (almost certainly) cease to be President? Between now and then he still wields the Presidential pen, so my guess is he's going to start signing an incoherent flood of executive orders to try to reverse the election, arrest people he doesn't like, finish the Wall, and generally try to preserve his legacy.

    Any predictions?

    777:

    My understanding is that they lack even the redneck appeal of his father, and piss off the Republican establishment even more, too. It would still have been a danger following a successful Trump presidency, but now? That doesn't negate your point, because there will be plenty of shit to be flung in all directions even if the court cases come to nothing.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/donald-trump-jr https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-ivanka-don-jr-run-for-president-2024-us-election-b1452024.html

    However, never say never, and significant problems in the next 4 years might change the situation - EVEN if Trump senior crashes and burns. There is never a shortage of people putting on rose-tinted glasses to view history in such circumstances.

    778:

    On the subject of where DJT might choose to go if his post-presidential prospects in the US were looking iffy:

    Assuming his new host would like a little quid for the quo, what does Trump have to offer? Some money, I suppose, but not all that many gigabucks from what's been reported. Branding rights on a new hotel and other properties? Just the opportunity to embarrass the US?

    I initially thought that US Top Secrets might interest Russia, China, Iran and the like -- after all he's been POTUS four years with access to all the secrets -- but then I realized that Trump, personally, probably has had no interest in such things and retains close to nothing of them in his head. To make that a credible inducement, he'd have to load up a briefcase/SD card with tasty documents and take it with him. I doubt that he's capable of doing that himself and would need a bit of help from an associate, who'd probably need to defect also.

    779:

    Here's an interesting complication:

    Even the Senate republicans seem to be going cold on Trump right now -- it's all coming apart really fast.

    The prospect of him resigning on the 19th in return for Pence pardoning him? That all depends on whether Pence is willing to pardon the ungodly corrupt womanizer. Pence might calculate that once he's POTUS-for-a-day it'll play better with his evangelical base to stick his nose in the air and say that repentance is a matter for the Lord, not the temporal powers. It all depends if Pence himself is interested in going for the White House in 2024, and thinks Trump would be a liability with the Screaming Jesus People once they have time to calm down and listen to the news about the string of rape investigations that will follow him out of office.

    Are the republican base in it for Trump and Trump alone, or for Jesus'n'guns? If the latter, then throwing Trump under the bus properly might be a winning strategy ...

    780:

    Quote from the New York Times about the Presidential vote count in Georgia at 13:09 Eastern Standard Time:

    Biden is currently up by 1,561 votes. 5m ago

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-georgia.html

    782:

    EC The quite deliberate trashing of "grammar schools", done out of pure spite, which might have worked, except that NOTHING was put in their place, with the then-fashionable "mixed ability teaching" applied across the board screwed with it, utterly. My paternal grandfather died when my father was 13/14, leaving his mother a single mother with two teenage sons in 1924 - not easy. Because of good education, he became a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chemistry - something that would have been impossible later.

    H @ 756 He cannot pardon himself, & even if Pence crawls & does that - it's ONLY for "Federal" crimes that have already been listed ... ( Yes? ) The various tax fraud cases & the Federal tax fraud case, which won't be presented until after 20th jan 2021 will stil stick, messily.

    Ph-K @ 757 Don't think that's going to happen. [ Note below ] - Niala @ 758 That assumes that air traffic control will accept the flight, or order it to land ... H @ 760 Unfortunately true - he resigns on 19th Jan, Pence/Renfield is Pres-for-a-day & facilitates DJT's departure ... maybe.

    Charlie @ 761 BoZo is now desperately trying to fiddle SOME sort of deal, now it's obvious that Trumpolini is toast Here Vaccine - You will be in tier/tranche 3 - I will be in 2, as I will be 75 in early January. Tier 1 will, of course be the health workers. Everybody vaccinated by end of July? ... @ 773 I was offered mine a week back ....

    David L IF you make it to Londinium in time, please let me know - I'm a fairly competent "Native Guide" & I DO know where all the good pubs are ...

    Paul Yes. That's the worry. The "Countdown to Crazy" is actually the count to whenever Pennsylvania declares for Biden - until 20th January. It's going to be a very rough ride, esp with the senior Trumplet basically calling for civil war. [ Why hasn't he been arrested? ]

    [ Note There IS another way out for DJT, as seen in "Downfall/ Der Untergang" - especially given the various versions of Bruno Ganz' perfect repro of Adolf's rage with Trump's words, alredy circulating. ]

    783:

    It will be 100% Russia. There is no other place to flee to.

    Putin gets something out of this too... propaganda. The propaganda value alone of a US president in Moscow shouldn't be dismissed, but when Trump declares himself the "United States government-in-exile", it will be multiplied a hundredfold.

    This can be used to keep the rednecks and Trump diehards riled up for years. Even at the level of insurgency. You'll have militia men skirmishing with police and the feds every few weeks or every few months. Of course, keeping Trump on message will be difficult, but Russian intelligence is quite used to working with difficult assets. Don't want him using the N-word in his weekly podcast, but most everything else will be within bounds. He'll be able to cheerlead for the "freedom fighters", and give general direction to them (Biden's planning on more covid restrictions, go show them why masks are a bad idea)

    And why wouldn't Putin want all of that? It's not even really plausibly deniable, but the tools the United States has to deal with Russia pulling stunts like that are really dull. More sanctions for oligarchs?

    As for getting there, he's the president. All he has to do is get to Eastern Europe on some pretext. There will be a secret service detail on him, but they aren't going to arrest him or stop him. They have no authority to do that. They might be forced to tag along and even protect him despite him being a traitor, there's no precedent for such a thing after all. He'll declare some impromptu summit with Putin or someone else, and get to defect on Air Force One itself.

    The thing to remember is that Pence can't pardon him. Presidential pardons are only for federal crimes, but New York state is about to indict him. And there's no strategy to avoid that but fleeing some place that the US can't extradite from. The defection suitcase has already been packed.

    784:

    Nonsense. I accept that it was fucked-up, but it was NOT done primarily out of spite, let alone out of pure spite. It was done to avoid classifying the majority of children as dimwits at age 11 - I have personal knowledge of that because, due to my erratic schooling up to that age, I was within a whisker of failing. Furthermore, the changes had sod-all to do with the context, which was the education necessary to handle politics, NOT the academic side. It was Thatcher and her successors who deliberately cut the former down, and even tried to exclude it.

    785:

    Suppose Trump goes down in ignominy and bankruptcy as Deutsche Bank call in his notes and the vultures close in and the prosecutors build their cases.

    Where does this leave Don Jr, Javanka, et al, in terms of having a political career?

    I think a lot of it depends on whether they stay in the US, or flee elsewhere with trunks of cash and valuables.

    Despite Javanka being in the White House they really don't seem to have been doing anything (so far) to build a brand for 2024 - really, their goal appears to the not really following it to use the White House to shore up Jared's property empire and perhaps an attempt to control daddy at least a bit.

    Don Jr. seems to have been the one with more obvious political ambitions, but he doesn't have the connection to the public of daddy.

    My gut sense is that if Don the elder hangs then the rest of the crime family hang with him, which means we don't have to worry about Donald Jr running for POTUS in 2024.

    Am I missing something?

    The American public?

    I mean, we really are in an era where the norms of political life have been thrown out the window leaving us with anything is possible.

    But it also can be as simple as the Republicans failing to find anyone else who is better - the 2015/2016 Republican primary wasn't exactly a list of stellar choices.

    786:

    He cannot pardon himself, & even if Pence crawls & does that - it's ONLY for "Federal" crimes that have already been listed ... ( Yes? )

    He can issue a blanket pardon like Ford did for Nixon.

    But as to whether or not he can do it for himself is an argument that is moving from theory to serious debate amongst the legal scholars who specialize in such.

    787:

    Why hasn't he been arrested?

    He's basically the chief of police.

    His boss is the Senate. At least in such matters.

    788:

    Part of the issue of Trump fleeing is the issue of extradition, and any other pressure the US could (at least theoretically) put on the country in question.

    That would seem to rule Switzerland out, as they have an extradition treaty and they really don't want the US government looking into their banking system again.

    789:

    What are the odds of some of the votes being challenged on January 6th? Quite high, I would have thought, and the objections might well be upheld by the Senate, which would change nothing unless either Democrats in the House failed to get their act together or Pence chose to flagrantly abuse his position. But it wouldn't exactly calm the situation down ....

    https://history.house.gov/Institution/Electoral-College/Electoral-College/

    790:

    Here's an interesting complication:

    Even the Senate republicans seem to be going cold on Trump right now -- it's all coming apart really fast.

    I note Kudlow is now saying Trump will leave peacefully if he loses, so add the White House advisors to the list of people going cold on Trump.

    It has become apparent that the Republicans have abandoned Trump - I think it is significant that other than the tweets from Trump nothing big is really being done about attempting to stop counts or disqualify ballots (so far at least).

    The prospect of him resigning on the 19th in return for Pence pardoning him? That all depends on whether Pence is willing to pardon the ungodly corrupt womanizer.

    Pence has had a front row seat to how Trump treats those under him - so unless Pence is stupid he won't be in any hurry to make a deal with Trump that could cause him problems down the road - and that pretty much means any deal with Trump.

    Pence might calculate that once he's POTUS-for-a-day it'll play better with his evangelical base to stick his nose in the air and say that repentance is a matter for the Lord, not the temporal powers. It all depends if Pence himself is interested in going for the White House in 2024

    My guess - much like the Democrats and Hillary there is a deal in place to hand 2024 to Pence. There is no other reason for him to have been willing to subject himself to a second term under Trump given how Trump represents everything Pence claims to stand for.

    The bigger question (not that it would fully stop Trump) is whether the resignation of Trump giving Pence a brief time as President benefits Pence or the Republicans - and my feeling is that answer is that it is a liability. They don't have the House so they can't suddenly pass a bunch of legislation, but while Trump currently takes all the Covid etc. blame that would partially transfer onto Pence if he was President until late January.

    My guess would be that some sort of deal will be made with Trump, but it will rely on him serving out his time as President even if he no longer actually physically stays in the White House or does anything other than golf and Tweet (which, all things considered, might be the best option for the US and world).

    Are the republican base in it for Trump and Trump alone, or for Jesus'n'guns? If the latter, then throwing Trump under the bus properly might be a winning strategy ...

    As long as Trump is around, they are for Trump - but just like the Tea Party before Trump most of that base will go for the next candidate that promises the right sort of things.

    And thanks to AOC the Republicans have a ready made reason to get the religious right in line - to protect the Supreme Court.

    791:

    "Part of the issue of Trump fleeing is the issue of extradition, and any other pressure the US could (at least theoretically) put on the country in question."

    To make it even more complicated: He would be fleeing on a dimplomatic passport, almost $200k/y pension and Secret Service protection for the rest of his life.

    See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_Presidents_Act

    792:

    "Where does this leave Don Jr, Javanka, et al, in terms of having a political career?"

    Ivanka and Jarred are guaranteed a safe haven in Israel: They moved the embassy to Jerusalem and they killed the two-party solution cold.

    793:

    Perhaps the other side of the question, does Pence want to run for President in 2024?

    If Pence has decided that being President for 4 years is really not for him, then perhaps a day to a couple of months might be appealing just so he can be called President Pence.

    But I still suspect he and the Republicans would be leery of any deal with Trump.

    794:

    That would also get him lifetime Secret Service protection, which might be useful if things get nastier.

    795:

    "I crossed the road to my local pharmacy and was in and out in ten minutes."

    That's what I was intending to do. With a decent chance of there being nobody else in there and if not I just hang around outside until it becomes true.

    Only they didn't have any. "Very short of supply this year", she said, and added "Not our fault", sounding pretty pissed off about it.

    And I really don't want to go near the doctor's surgery at the moment. In any case, I can't. They're not letting anyone in without an appointment, even to book an appointment. And they have changed their internet contact facility to use some horrendous new shit which I can't even create a login for because the website does not work as a result of being written by a fucking idiot: there is no content on the page whatsoever. It uses the fucking idiot method of having javascript fetch the content separately; the javascript, naturally, does not work, and several of the scripts are blocked from loading in any case because they fail the global "does this script have evil shit in it" scan. Why the steaming fuck these bastard morons can't get it through their concrete crania that HTML always works while javascript quite likely does not is beyond me.

    I can't even find a description of how the signup process is supposed to go to help me decide whether it's worth all the grief of trying to hack the stupid thing into functionality, or whether I should just wait and hope I don't get ill until the surgery starts letting people in again. But the vague references I have managed to locate seem to imply that at some point it is going to try and send me a text message, which would mean I can't sign up for it at all even if it did bloody work.

    I can, however, find absolute wads of documentation and advice describing to parasites all the ways they can use the system as a vector. It seems that that is the system's actual primary design aim, with anything like actually being useful or usable to patients barely an afterthought. Which makes the whole privacy of patient information aspect a distinctly non-funny joke.

    796:

    Remember that the Presidential pardon allows pardons against indictments, as well as past crimes.

    No president has tried a self-pardon, let alone a self-pardon against future indictment, so there are only scholarly opinions on it. And three justices of the court that he appointed.

    I'll bet he at least tries it. I also bet he'll use the carrot of a universal pardon as a lever to keep his henchcritters in line.

    The one likely surprise is that the Senate and especially the SCOTUS are likely to block any crazy pardons, especially Presidential self-pardoning. Thing is, the first president to use any expanded pardon power in a real way will be Biden, not Trump. It's possible that the Senate and SCOTUS will look at this possibility and throw the Trump administration into the legal wood chipper, in a way that further limits Biden's ability to mess with the Republicans during his term.

    797:

    Flu vaccine in the UK: Mine is due on Saturday 14th, via my GP surgery as usual. Running late. but not by all that much (which is a minor miracle, under the circumstances).

    798:

    Antistone @ 710: What procedure do you follow to figure out which half is lies?

    I primarily extrapolate from the evidence of my own senses; my own experience. If someone lies to me about things I know from personal observation & experience, I think it's likely they're also lying about things where I don't have experience to guide me.

    If I know someone has lied to me before, it's a good bet they'll lie to me again. The veracity of anything they say becomes questionable.

    799:

    Off-Topic Interesting build about to start ... Energy storage using liquid Air, utilising off-peak wind power to compress ...

    JBS BoZo the clown!

    Pardons, etc ... See what I mean about The Crazy just starting now?

    800:

    mdlve @ 718: Despite everything, including some Republicans actively running ads against Trump, he has increased his vote count by 6.5 million and counting (he got just under 63m votes in 2016, he's at 69.5m with counting still happening now).

    Given everything that has happened, not the least of which around Covid, for Trump to be increasing his voter base says to me that the true believers are more numerous than many are willing to admit.

    That number alone doesn't really tell you anything. Yeah there are more votes for Trump, but Biden got more votes than Clinton. There are more voters in 2020 than there were in 2016.
    How do the increased numbers compare to the increase in registered voters just due to population growth?
    Has his percentage of total votes cast gone up or gone down?

    801:

    Interesting factoid about the US Sercret Service. So far as I can tell, the agents protecting the Presidents and others are sworn law enforcement agents. They've sworn that ol' oath to uphold the constitution and the laws of the US.

    So what happens when a retired president defects? My first guess is that they try to stop him from doing so, if they take that oath at all seriously.

    This could get interesting.

    802:

    ‘ Where does this leave Don Jr, Javanka, et al, in terms of having a political career? “

    Awesomely placed to FIGHT BACK against the EVIL DEEP STATE and the CORRUPT DEMOCRATS that have PERSECUTED their dad!

    YOU ARE NOT SAFE! If the can do this to DONALD TRUMP, they could do it to YOU!

    Blah-blah-blah, YOUR LIBERTY IS AT STAKE, blah-blah-blah, SAVE YOUR FAMILY, blah-blah-blah ARE YOU A PATRIOT? etc, etc. The political ad just writes itself.

    Trumpism isn’t going away. Chances are he will be the Republican candidate in 2024. If he’s in jail (literally in jail) then it is possible he might still be their candidate - though I think some other trumpist is more likely.

    803:
    Ivanka and Jarred are guaranteed a safe haven in Israel: They moved the embassy to Jerusalem and they killed the two-party solution cold.

    I'm not 100% convinced by that; certainly there will be some in Israel (and the USA) who see it that way, but last I saw Israel was still getting billions of dollars a year in military supplies and other "aid" from the US. I can imagine some gentle pressure of the "we'll hand over the missiles when you hand over the wanted criminals" kind being applied. (I'm sure Israeli intelligence are capable of finding or manufacturing a scandal about something Javanka have done since arriving in the country if that's required.)

    804:

    Paul @ 731:

    Guy Fawkes Night:

    No, it was not ignored; we've had a lot of bangs and whistles around our area. Large scale organised firework displays are off. Private parties with friends, relatives and neigbours are also off. That leaves Dad in the back garden letting off a few Roman Candles and sparklers for the kids.

    I was in Glasgow for Guy Fawkes Night in 2004 and some of the "Dad in the back garden" fireworks displays were bigger than the government organized 4th of July fireworks we have here in Raleigh.

    It was a lot more than "a few Roman Candles and sparklers for the kids", and rivaled the public display on Glasgow Green.

    I had my tripod set up between the James Watt statue & the People's Palace, and I was just like Wow!.

    805:

    Heteromeles @ 801:

    Defecting isn't a crime by itself. You could go to Russia today (supposing they'd have you), and you'd be committing no crime.

    And this also discounts the possibility of ditching them. There have been times when there was no one in the room with him other than the Russians (just Putin?).

    Additionally, him or someone who is close to him have the ability to be somewhat choosy which agents are scheduled and when. Seems likely there are at least a few that'd be loyal to him, and then it's just a matter of them being scheduled for the "impromptu summit".

    If he declares himself the "government in exile", this is even more problematic because he wouldn't surrender the nuclear football, and they couldn't make him surrender it. While it's mostly useless at that point (the people who launch the missiles would refuse to authenticate, I think), it'd likely scare the crap out of most people.

    I doubt that there's any way to stop him, unless he's stupid and just fails to run away before the end of January. The people who would want to detain him or put a stop to it will not be in a position to do so until he is well beyond their grasp.

    806:

    Is defection a legal term or just a general conversational term?

    807:

    He'll declare some impromptu summit with Putin or someone else, and get to defect on Air Force One itself.

    That was what I had in mind, or something similar. Foreign Minister Lavrov calls his good friend and counterpart Secretary Pompeo and says that President Putin feels it terribly important to reach agreements with his even better friend President Trump soonest. Grave matters of national security will be discussed and agreements signed. Accommodations will provided in Sochi(*) and a festive New Years celebration to entertain the delegation provided.

    (*) Yalta is a tempting alternative.

    808:

    Stop it. I can point just as well to software, including trained AI, that can spot deep fakes.

    At some point, you shit, or get off the pot. And if new evidence comes along, you consider that, or go off into the blue.

    809:

    Nope. I even sent a happy to my former manager, the British ex-pat, who had a Guy Fawkes day party (on the nearest Sat), except not this year.

    From someone on the fark election watching thread (#13!)

    Remember, remember the 3rd of November Contagions, militias, and tweets I see no reason the merchants of treason Should face such slim defeats

    810:

    Trump can enter Canada as a visiting president. His diplomatic status would help him bypass the current border closure. Once inside Canada he could ask for asylum as a political refugee. Canada has a long tradition of giving asylum to political refugees. Also, the country has 2,400 of golf courses.

    Mind you, I'm still betting Trump will end up in Zurich next week.

    811:

    David L @ 732: So some what ifs.

    Biden wins electoral college with a win in Georgia.

    Both of Georgia's Senate races go to a runoff in early January.

    With all other Senate races decided it is D48 - R50

    1. Just how many gazillion $$ will go into that race to try and get the Senate to at least a 50-50 tie with Harris as the tie breaker?

    2. If the residency requirements for Georgia voters is 30 days, how many "work from home" and/or "college school from home" will move to Georgia in the 3nd half of November so they can vote in the runoff? Or do you have to be registered to vote in the original election to vote in the runoff?

    3. The "get out the vote" campaigns will be almost at the level of a driver for every possible voter.

    Loeffler is almost certainly going to win the runoff in the Georgia Special. The only reason she came in second is other right-wing Republican wingnuts split the vote. Loeffler got 26% of the votes and Doug Collins (right-wingnut) got 20%

    20 candidates on the ballot - 8 Democrats (48.4%), 6 Republicans (49.4%), 4 Independents (1.3%), 1 Libertarian (0.7%), 1 Green (0.3%) plus 637 write in votes (< 0.1%)

    For the Democratic challenger to win he has to pick up all of the voters who went for the other Democrats, all of the voters who voted for the Independents, all of the Green candidate's voters plus all of the write ins. I don't see him picking up the Libertarian votes & I don't really think he's going to get all of those other votes he'd need

    I won't say stranger things have happened.

    Right now the Democrats best hope for the Senate is that whatever happened Moscow Mitch's hand last week will prove to be not only fatal, but contagious & he won't die before passing it on to a substantial number of his Senate Caucus.

    812:

    So what happens when a retired president defects? My first guess is that they try to stop him from doing so

    My guess is that they look at each other, ask WTF, and phone home for instructions.

    Interesting question. I don't know any former Secret Service people, but a good friend is a former FBI SSA. I'll ask her to see if she has any insights.

    813:

    He could ask for asylum anywhere, but would he get it? He would have to show that he has a legitimate fear of persecution or bodily harm. That is not demonstrable. At the same time, many governments have laws that allow fugitives to be extradited. These include Canada, Israel, Turkey, and Switzerland, but not Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradition_treaties). And somehow, I don't think China would be interested in him.

    Again, if he's claiming political persecution, is it believable?

    Anyway, I'm betting he stays until the bitter end, pardons himself and all his loyal cronies for all present and future crimes, does nothing about coronavirus, nothing about any other crisis, and nothing to aid the incoming Biden team. That would be simplest.

    Then the Biden administration would have to deal with the mess of getting its officers through a recalcitrant senate, as well as getting the pardons overturned if possible, as well as the pandemic and everything else, before they can even investigate him.

    Meanwhile, as noted above, I suspect AGs in New York, California, and other states will rapidly file criminal charges to attempt to keep Trump in country. Those who live outside the US forget that he can't pardon himself from state crimes. And sitting through years of fraud trials is about what he deserves right now. And then in 2024, if he can't pay back his creditors, his loses either $440 million or a billion, depending on who you believe, as well as his last semi-legitimate creditor. Fun times for him.

    814:

    Fine. You want to know if C-19's a hoax? Go volunteer at any hospital whose folks are exhausted.

    Do it, or shut up.

    Does that answer the question?

    815:

    The good news is BoJo is screwed, with Biden coming in.

    I'm looking forward to the "trade wars are easy to win" being ended, and the price of the Balvenie Doublewood dropping by $15 a bottle (about a quarter of the price). And maybe I can get the good Teeling for my SO....

    816:

    Nope. It looks like about 145M USans voted. That means another, I think the number I saw meant 75M or 80M DID NOT VOTE.

    817:

    Damian @ 741: Looking at the numbers in Arizona, I can't see how Trump can possible win it. I think Faux News' early declaration of Arizona for Biden stands. It's over 99% counted and the margin is around 47k votes, which is 50% more than 1% of the total votes counted so far.

    It looks like most of the remaining uncounted votes are in Maricopa County where Joe Arpaio was Sheriff & the networks are reluctant to call it because they're worried about the ongoing possibility of rat-fucking. Arizona is one of those places where the GOP might yet successfully steal the election.

    The NY Times says 94% complete with 142,000 early, provisional & "other" ballots still to process and Biden's lead is currently 39,769 votes.

    818:

    Or be found, one morning, "unresponsive".

    819:

    True. I edged into six figures the last few years at work, and I've bee in the 38% bracket for a long time. But, of course, this is why we can't tax higher for actual higher brackets, I mean, think of all the "job creators"....

    820:

    And if he does, consider how that's going to play out... given how his base feels about Edward Snowdon. And all the base that never understood that the USSR ain't there no more, and isn't Communist....

    And if Putin steps down (I've seen rumors of Parkinson's), he loses his main protection.

    821:

    Fireworks: Guy Fawkes night might be big, but you haven't seen anything until you've seen the Hogmanay firework display in Edinburgh at midnight on December 31st. They (the city) typically fire off 10-25 tonnes of fireworks ...

    822:

    An extradition treaty doesn't make extradition automatic. For starters the alleged criminal conduct has to be recognized as criminal by both parties. Then the whole process is subject to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These are not the same laws as in the U.S.

    823:

    Unlikely. Esp. if the total for Biden is 304? 306? Someone on a blog mentioned one, SCOTUS might overturn. Three or four, nope.

    824:

    Oh, and every single person that gets put on air in the swing states are jumping up and down about "getting it right is better than faster", and they're dotting all the "i"s and crossing all the "t"s.

    Consider that the Hairball and (paid) friends are throwing the GOP states (like GA) Sec. of States, in charge of the voting, under the bus with their claims.

    825:

    Agreed: Here's 538's take on the outstanding polls, as of a few minutes ago:

    Pennsylvania: Biden has overtaken Trump in the state and now leads by 13,371 votes — and most of the remaining 100,000+ ballots should be very good for Democrats, given that they are either mail-in or provisional votes. Of particular note, a cache of about 29,000 mail-in ballots in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) that a court had ordered to be segregated and double-checked will be counted starting at 5 p.m. Eastern. Nevada: After some updates this morning, Biden expanded his lead here to 20,137 votes. Although about 150,000 late-arriving mail ballots or provisional ballots have yet to be counted, these ballots are expected to lean Democratic. Clark County (home of Las Vegas), where most percent of the outstanding ballots are, will release its next update at 7 p.m. Eastern and should have the bulk of the counting done this weekend. Arizona: Biden currently leads here by 43,779 votes, but there are somewhere around 220,000 left to count. Trump needs to win about 60 percent of those (or more) to pull into the lead, but he’s been falling short of that so far. We expect to get more results from Maricopa County (where most of the outstanding ballots are) at 9 p.m. Eastern. It’s unclear whether that will be enough to cause the networks to project the state. (Some outlets, such as Fox News, have already projected Arizona for Biden, but most media outlets have not, including our colleagues at ABC News.)

    Heading to a recount:

    Georgia: Biden currently leads here by a razor-thin margin (1,561 votes) with about 8,200 regular absentee ballots, up to 8,900 overseas ballots and at least 5,500 provisional ballots left to count (plus 2,000 rejected absentee ballots that could be “cured” by their voters). The secretary of state has already said that the race will go to a recount.

    No updates until next week:

    North Carolina: North Carolina has counted every ballot it had in its possession as of Tuesday, and Trump leads by 76,737 votes among them. However, the state has announced that about 117,000 mail-in ballots and 40,766 provisional ballots are potentially outstanding, although not all of them will count. Mail-in ballots have until Nov. 12 to arrive, and only at that point will more results be released.
    826:

    Barry @ 743:

    "The fear of ruin-by-health-care is so deeply ingrained in USAnians, that they cannot fathom what life is like without it."

    It's so much worse than most Europeans can conceive of, IMHO. They will practice things which would be fraudulent in other situations.

    For example, your insurance probably has an agreement with a set of hospitals and doctors to provide care at a discount. This is called 'in-network'. If you get out of network care, it's usually not covered by insurance, and the hospital/doctor's office are free to bill you at deliberately inflated retail rates.

    For example, your insurance probably has an agreement with a set of hospitals and doctors to provide care at a discount. This is called 'in-network'. If you get out of network care, it's usually not covered by insurance, and the hospital/doctor's office are free to bill you at deliberately inflated retail rates.

    Now, you might reasonably think that if your hospital is in-network, then everybody there is, but you'd be wrong.

    Hospitals frequently deliberately use 'independent contractors' to practice medicine, which means that they aren't covered. There were a number of incidents where a patient had surgery, but the anesthesiologist was an 'independent contractor', and billed the patient separately and steeply.

    If you get your health insurance through your employer, your network changes if you change jobs. Your doctor, the hospital you have to use, which pharmacy will fill your prescriptions ALL change.

    The cost of medical care in the U.S. is driven primarily by insurance company profits and secondarily by for profit hospital profits. The Affordable Care Act did not change that, nor did it change the penalty associated with having to change your network if you change jobs.

    Barely anything has changed since Time Magazine published the Steven Brill article in April 2013:

    Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us
    827:

    Tim H. @ 750: If ever they make a film of "Star Drek"
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtU_FZAcCZo

    "Captain Jerk" could be the role that "Drumph!" was born to play, he could be utterly believable, hopping into a red convertible with a bleach blond at the end of the movie.

    Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning
    828:

    You know, if you're that certain kind of, erm, L. Ron-ian creative type, it's not too early to start mythmaking. Have El Cheeto join the ranks of the eternal protectors, like King Arthur and El Cid, who were defeated in their last battles. He obviously retreated underground*, and will return riding a giant pussy...cat... to aid his faithful followers and Make America Great Again one day.

    Heck, if it worked for other violent authoritarians, why not?

    *To commune with his personal deity Pepe, the avatar of Tsathoggua?

    829:

    Off-Topic Interesting build about to start ... Energy storage using liquid Air, utilising off-peak wind power to compress ...

    JBS BoZo the clown!

    Pardons, etc ... See what I mean about The Crazy just starting now?

    JBS If you want a PROPER "Guy Fawkes Night" go to Lewes in Sussex. They close the town, completely ... torchlit processions round the town by the 5 bonfire societies, 17 burning crosses ( For the 17 Protestant Martyrs ) thrown off Cliffe Bridge into the river. HUGE bonfores at each society, late-night processions. Torches thrown into road-junction(s) at midnight, followed by walking thorugh the fire itself. A combinbation of All-Hallows/Remebrance day & actual 5th November & pretty thoroughly pagan. ( Yes, I have walked through the fire at midnight )

    Charlie @ 821 ... naaah. Lewes Bonfire! You Tube The black-&-White striped smugglers shirts are "The Cliffe", the oldest of the societies, of whom I am a lapsed member.

    830:

    The problem with flu vaccine is that demand is much higher this year. I had mine a couple of weeks ago. Our local health centre has clinics on Saturdays. I've had flu vaccine for decades as NHS staff. But in the last hospital I worked in takeup of flu vaccine for staff was in the low forties percent. Its much higher this year. So everything has been delayed. Flu outbreaks in the southern hemisphere in their last winter showed than anti Covid precautions also work for flu. So it's belt and braces.

    831:

    David L @ 768: Here in the US and from what I read in other places a vaccine that's 50% effective will get approved. Not sure I want to play those odds at my age. But I wonder if an 80%+ vaccine is possible in the next year or two.

    Or if it is possible to take 2 or 3 different versions.

    I'd take a 50% effective vaccine. I just wouldn't stop wearing my mask & doing social distancing. I do think it's possible to take more than one different version.

    832:

    As of 18:20 EST: per the Guardian:

    State Votes left to count (est.)Current margin Current leader % votes
    GA 1% <50,000 4,155 Biden NC 1% <50,000 76,656 Trump PA 2% <150,000 15,044 Biden NV 13% <200,000 20,137 Biden Alaska 50% <200,000 54,610 Trump

    And starting at 17:00 EST, the county that Pittsburgh is in, which had 29k votes sequestered, have begun to be counted. Philly brought down the hammer, and Pittsburgh's bringing down the other end. And PA, with 20 electoral votes, pushes him over by itself. With the others, Biden's over 300 electoral votes (270 to win).

    833:

    Charlie Stross @ 772: Here's a new question:

    Suppose Trump goes down in ignominy and bankruptcy as Deutsche Bank call in his notes and the vultures close in and the prosecutors build their cases.

    Where does this leave Don Jr, Javanka, et al, in terms of having a political career?

    My gut sense is that if Don the elder hangs then the rest of the crime family hang with him, which means we don't have to worry about Donald Jr running for POTUS in 2024.

    Am I missing something?

    Trump will almost certainly pardon himself & the kids. But that will only cover federal crimes committed before & during his term in office.

    Jared will almost certainly go down with Senior plus he has his own financial/legal liabilities aside from Trump. Ivanka might manage to skate.

    Trump's financial "empire" is a house of cards. AFAIK, Don Jr & Eric have no assets separate from the Trump brand. So even if they're not prosecuted, I think they're going to have a hard time carrying on after daddy falls. Who's going to be willing to back them financially?

    834:

    There was some acronymic fun when the newly merged Conservative Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties chose the unfortunate 'Conservative Reform Alliance Party (CRAP)' for their name at the convention.

    835:

    I don't think covid-19 is a hoax. I said "hypothetically" twice, once in ALL CAPS. What the heck kind of disclaimer do you want?

    I voted for Biden. I socialize almost exclusively with liberals. I suspect I broadly agree with you on most policy issues. And I would like to work with you on the development of better valid arguments to convert more people to the better side.

    And you are being aggressively antagonistic towards me for the sin of...being willing to analyze the situation from an alternative perspective, to see what arguments would or wouldn't make sense from that perspective? Of pointing out an obvious logical fallacy in an argument that happens to (invalidly) support your (our) side?

    That's some malignant tribalism, there.

    If you can't manage a civil conversation with me, how do you possibly hope to persuade anyone who's actually on the other side? Or have you given up on winning and decided to descend into introspective self-consolation?

    836:

    Heteromeles @ 796: Remember that the Presidential pardon allows pardons against indictments, as well as past crimes.

    Presidential pardons, even Presidential self-pardons, can only apply to Federal Crimes committed before the pardon is granted. They are not a "Get out of jail free" card to excuse crimes that have not yet been committed. And you know damn well Trump will commit crimes in the future. It's just a matter of time & the career DoJ people are going to be keeping a close watch waiting to catch him out.

    I'll bet he at least tries it. I also bet he'll use the carrot of a universal pardon as a lever to keep his henchcritters in line.

    Someone might argue that in granting himself a self-pardon, he is acting with corrupt purpose and therefore committing an obstruction of justice that is not covered by the pardon even if the pardon itself is upheld. And I don't know if he will pardon his "henchcritters". He might promise pardons, but not follow through. It wouldn't be the first time he cheated on a "deal" by not paying.

    The one likely surprise is that the Senate and especially the SCOTUS are likely to block any crazy pardons, especially Presidential self-pardoning. Thing is, the first president to use any expanded pardon power in a real way will be Biden, not Trump. It's possible that the Senate and SCOTUS will look at this possibility and throw the Trump administration into the legal wood chipper, in a way that further limits Biden's ability to mess with the Republicans during his term.

    I don't think a future Biden administration will have an interest in pardoning any of Trump's adherents. Restricting Presidential pardons will be moot.

    837:

    David L @ 806: Is defection a legal term or just a general conversational term?

    Depending on context it might be either or both.

    838:

    And you're distorting what I said. Badly.

    You were the one you started talking about values (which I notice do not figure at all in your revised explanation).

    The solution is what humans have done for the last 300,000 years: copy the behavior that worked for others, especially for their elders who have lived through a lot of crap, get on with life, plan for the worst, hope for the best, and pray that this will work.

    So it is your considered opinion that if your parents were Republicans, then your best bet is to copy them and hope that they were right?

    .

    I agree that we can't get perfect information and need to act anyway. But there are still better and worse strategies for how to act on the information we have (including, possibly, allocating some resources to obtaining more information).

    I am not expecting perfection. I am expecting something better than a coin flip.

    839:

    Charlie Stross @ 821: Fireworks: Guy Fawkes night might be big, but you haven't seen anything until you've seen the Hogmanay firework display in Edinburgh at midnight on December 31st. They (the city) typically fire off 10-25 tonnes of fireworks ...

    Cool. I hope I'll get to see it some day.

    840:

    I don't know how many convictions it would get, but there are 3000 counties and 50 states. Cut that about in half, assume each trial takes a month, and that's 127 years dealing with each case right there.

    You are fantasizing about using a broken legal system to inflict unbounded punishment on someone without convicting them.

    Imagine if a pandemic occurred during a Democratic presidency, and afterwards his political enemies (knowing they couldn't convict him of anything) did something like this to him. I'm pretty sure you would be outraged. You'd probably say that was an obvious and deliberate abuse of the system and they should be ashamed for even considering it.

    But you want to hand them a precedent that would allow them to do it?

    BE BETTER THAN THAT. Fantasize about convicting Trump of something that you can prove. Not about tying him up in bad-faith legal proceedings forever.

    841:

    "Is defection a legal term or just a general conversational term?"

    Maybe he should practise refection.

    842:

    I don't think so.

    The point is that: a) Trump is likely to pardon himself against any indictment over his actions while president (or possibly before), making prosecution in federal court unlikely, unless the SCOTUS rules such actions illegal. b) People have died due to his negligence in basically every county in the country. Cut that in half for the number that support him (actually it's less than half). But county prosecutor can claim, legitimately, that his actions around the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the needless death of a citizen of their municipality. The cases can't be aggregated above the state level due to his pardon, so he's going to have to deal with them on a state-by-state basis.

    And there are also the civil wrongful death suits, again on the same basis, but with looser requirements for a judgement against him.

    The point is that there's a huge evidence trail showing he knew the threat of covid19 and not just did nothing, but actively stopped people from protecting themselves and others. That is criminal.

    Personally, I'd like to see him prosecuted on a federal level. But given that is unlikely happen, it's up to the states and counties. And ironically, if this happens, it will be worse for him than if he hadn't pardoned himself.

    843:

    My parents were both republicans, and they ended up copying me and converting to the democratic party in the 1990s.

    I'm going to insult you some more: a few minutes ago, the tomcat I adopted swatted at me, because he was grumpy that I hadn't fed him an hour early. And he desperately wanted to win the fight he thought he was having with me. It took him a little while to realize that I wasn't fighting him, just giving him a pet and telling him I was going to get his dinner ten minutes early.

    Something similar is going on here. If I seem to be nasty and trollish about bursting your balloon, it's because I'm arrogant enough to think it's more humane to do that to urge you to do the stupid thing I did of spending years trying to find the same answer, before I realized that I was on the wrong quest.

    By all means keep looking and lashing out. But don't assume I'm an enemy if I try to tell you it's not worth looking for.

    844:

    For those worried about what the military might do, a tranche of ballots in PA came down a while ago: PA Military ballots: 4134 Biden 1076 Trump

    845:

    Trump can enter Canada as a visiting president. His diplomatic status would help him bypass the current border closure. Once inside Canada he could ask for asylum as a political refugee. Canada has a long tradition of giving asylum to political refugees. Also, the country has 2,400 of golf courses.

    He can certainly try, but there is no way Canada would grant it.

    Trump is hated in Canada, both by the population at large and by almost every politician.

    He has repeatedly hit us with tariffs, and dragged us into his China mess with the request to detain Meng Wanzhou (Huawei executive) that has resulted in China arbitrarily arresting 2 Canadians in retaliation.

    846:

    I'm getting really tired of watching CNNs coverage of that dog's dinner of a vote count. There are less than 13 million people living in Pennsylvania and it takes them 5 days to count votes? I've seen some election officials from PA on TV and they seemed quite pleased with their performance. WTF?

    847:

    And starting at 17:00 EST, the county that Pittsburgh is in, which had 29k votes sequestered, have begun to be counted. Philly brought down the hammer, and Pittsburgh's bringing down the other end.

    Philadelphia residents and expats have been having fun on the net today.

    Some Reich wing rabble rousers were talking about sending people to Philadelphia to stir up trouble, apparently unaware that in sports Phily is represented by the Phantatic and Gritty, basically giant angry muppets. (Go see the links; my description does not do them justice.) Phily residents responded with various messages to the effect that they've got the class of New Jersey, the gang network of Detroit, and the sensible judgement of Florida Man. Bluff called.

    848:

    There are less than 13 million people living in Pennsylvania and it takes them 5 days to count votes?

    There are only three million people in Nevada. But as people are pointing out, Nevadans only practice counting to 21. grin

    More seriously, Clark county (Las Vegas and environs) is one administrative division but two thirds of all the people. That produces a big pile of votes that take a while to digest.

    About half of all Nevadans not in Clark are in Washoe county (Reno and environs); outside those two cities humans are few and far between. There's miles and miles of empty nothingness for as far as the eye can see.

    Although if you're in the area, you're welcome to attend the Tonopah Westercon in 2022, which will have miles of nothing right outside town. I'll be there.

    849:

    A Democrat would have followed the playbook, done testing and tracing, used the defense act to order companies to make masks, respirators, and hand-sanitizers, closed ports and airports, and made sure that testing was widely available. Most importantly, the hypothetical Democractic president wouldn't have made masks and social distancing into matters of tribal affiliation. So I think a charge of "depraved indifference" murder, or whatever the appropriate charge might be, is quite appropriate for Trump. The dude let 200,000 people die unnecessarily so try him for murder.

    850:

    Antistone,

    May I chime in, and I hope not make matters worse?

    It is not entirely clear to me which of two distinct questions you are asking.

    a. How do I, as a member of one faction, assure myself that my faction is in fact at the very least the less bad faction, or else I should change faction?

    b. How do I, having satisfied myself that I am in the right faction, persuade members of the other faction that they should change?

    I would say that any answer to b must start by getting them to consider a.

    JHomes.
    851:

    Re, what would the secret service do if Trump decided to....:

    Nothing. I think they'd do nothing at all.

    I think Americans are hypnotised by the "Office of the President".

    I was watching some free to air yesterday and they had someone on. I missed her name and exact title, but it was something to do with "Domestic Counterterrorism". She was former head of this division or some such.

    She was discussing how DT's actions on talking up violence were supporting domestic terror and something about how it was her job to stop that sort of thing.

    So her choice of action was to... Resign.

    It appeared to have never actually occurred to her that doing something about it was on the table.

    If someone who's job is actually to stop people in general doing something, can't take any action to stop the president in particular, from doing exactly as he wishes, then there's no way that a security agent who's job is to protect the president is going to suddenly switch off that function and switch over to stopping the president from leaving the country, which isn't even a crime. (that's a terrible sentence, sorry)

    852:

    Re, what would the secret service do if Trump decided to....:

    Nothing. I think they'd do nothing at all.

    My ex-FBI friend has replied, and that's her opinion also. Just deciding to relocate to another country isn't a crime, and they'd have no basis for action.

    853:

    PS. This is her, but not the interview I saw. The opinions she expressed in this article are broadly similar to the ones I remember.

    "... We have the president not only pretty much refusing to condemn, but throwing fuel on the fire, creating opportunities for more recruitment through his rhetoric."

    https://www.npr.org/2020/09/02/908347989/former-dhs-official-white-house-failed-to-take-far-right-extremism-seriously

    854:

    Both. It's not easy. I think Mitchell and Webb said it best.

    https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU

    855:

    There are less than 13 million people living in Pennsylvania and it takes them 5 days to count votes?

    Counting votes is easy. Just put paper into the slot.

    But getting the ballots ready for the slot is physically time consuming. Open up the envelopes. Verify correct envelope was used. Flatten out the ballot. Verify the signature. Dates. Witness sig (PA?). Etc... Document what came in by who and that they have now voted.

    This takes time and I'm thinking all verification steps must be done by 2 people.

    856:

    But getting the ballots ready for the slot is physically time consuming. Open up the envelopes. Verify correct envelope was used. Flatten out the ballot. Verify the signature. Dates. Witness sig (PA?). Etc... Document what came in by who and that they have now voted.

    This takes time and I'm thinking all verification steps must be done by 2 people.

    Now consider that it is also possible that you are having to demonstrate some of the above steps to a Republican and Democrat observer, which slows things down even further.

    857:

    The key word missing from your explanation is "former" in front of the word "president."

    Former presidents have lifetime secret service protection, but they are no longer law enforcement officers. It's an interesting question if a secret service officer guarding a former president acts more as a loyal bodyguard or more as a law enforcement officer, but I suspect if the FP's crime was serious enough, they would act to enforce the law first, since their oath is to the constitution, not to the man. Unfortunately, the constitution essentially says that the president is the head of national law enforcement, and IIRC SCOTUS has ruled that sitting presidents cannot be legally charged for their actions while in office, so it is hard to prosecute a sitting president for abetting terrorists.

    858:

    Note that California is still counting ballots. While the 2:1 Biden:Trump margin leaves little doubt about who won that race, there are several propositions and candidates who are still too close to call.

    859:

    Here's a different take on something akin to your question: https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-spot-whos-trustworthy-and-whos-not-on-what-matters . Not sure it will help, but I haven't been much help either.

    860:

    JBS, #702: Who would be his heirs?

    Hitler's last registered address was in Munich. After the war first the American military government confiscated his property; then the State of Bavaria became Hitler's heir. Owning Mein Kampf was never forbidden in Germany but the State of Bavaria used its ownership of its copyright to forbid new publications of the book. But of course copyright runs out 70 years after the death of the author. So now the new commented edition.

    861:

    Well, yes, Trump is certainly to the right of any Canadian Prime Minister or leader of the opposition that ever lived, including the not-regretted Stephen Harper. On the other hand there is such a thing as realpolitik and it would be neat to have a "caged" Trump at hand to remind people just how much better Canada is.

    But in the end don't forget I'm still betting Trump will end up practicing his strokes on a Swiss alp.

    862:

    Well, yes, Trump is certainly to the right of any Canadian Prime Minister or leader of the opposition that ever lived, including the not-regretted Stephen Harper.

    Trump is neither right not left. He just assumes the position that works best for the moment. For decades in NYC he was a liberal Democrat as that worked best to move up in the NYC "high class" society.

    863:

    Vote Counting It's utterly pathetic. I realise that the USA is big & some areas are remote ... but Here, the cities & developed areas count first. In a General Election, our polls close at 22.00 By 08.00 the next morning, most counts are in, done & dusted. Even in the most remote areas, with scattered populations & lots of small islands ( So votes have to be transported by boat & helicopter ... ) counting is finished, done & declared by Saturday morning, usually - our main elections are always on Thursdays. Completely bonkers & incompetent on the part of the USA.

    IF you have separate propositions, then USE SEPARATE PAPERS, idiots. ONE paper for the "president" A SECOND paper for congresscritters A THIRD paper for Senator(s) A FOURTH paper for everything else ... all printed on different colours of paper.

    "Hitlers "heirs" Try this link in an incognito window ( from the NY Times ) - for more information Worth a read.

    864:

    Greg

    I know you THINK you know how to solve our vote counting issues but you really don't get the problem.

    As to colored ballots, No freaking way. I had 37 different choices to make. And in my county we had over 100 different ballots. And state wide likely 5000. And to fix this requires re-doing the way government is structured at the state and local level. Just isn't going to happen.

    As to why it is taking so long? In general all the votes cast on Nov 3 are counted. Most across the country by the morning. But it's the mail in ballots that are taking so long. Open it up, check the various "it's me for real" plus make sure they didn't vote in person, unfold it so it can go in a machine, then put it into the machine. The last step is easy. It's the manual steps that is hard to go faster. And for each manual step you have at least 2 people per ballot to make sure folks aren't gaming the system. With maybe a couple of observers to watch the 2 workers. All with their PPE and social distancing.

    Now in NC we allow mail in ballots which show up early to be counted ahead of time. Most counties did it once or twice a week in the prior month. Just that the results were sealed. Plus we had just over 2 weeks of "early" voting. (My wife worked a polling place.) So by dawn on Nov 4 the results from all 2662 voting locations in NC, all early votes, and all received mail in ballots (by Nov 1) were processed and the results known. But we still, as of Nov 7, have 99,000 possible mail in ballots that might show up between Nov 4 and Nov 12. I doubt most will show but they might. And add in an additional 41K provisional ballots. (Someone showed up and something was odd so their ballot got set in the special box to be hand processed later.)

    Now in NC a lot of these late arriving mail in and provisional ballots are likely processed but for reasons I don't know, the results must be released all at once after the mail in deadline. (Deadline is longer than normal they year due to, well, everything.)

    Now in the states with the hassles, they in general don't allow mail in ballots to be TOUCHED until after Nov 3. So all of the things we in North Carolina do before the election they can't start till after then vote is over. And this year mail in ballot counts are over the top. So places like Pennsylvania are dealing with the manual process of "checking in" over a million paper ballots before they can stuff them into a machine.

    And Georgia has it's own issues with what I and many others consider a dumb (and stupid from a security point of view) process for ballots. This just adds to the time.

    Your separate pieces of color paper would only make things worse.

    Anyway back in NC, for all the normal ballots and states that can process things ahead of time they/we were done except for late arriving/provisional ballots by the next morning. The rest of the states need to change their rules and most of this can then go away.

    This year things got interesting (interpret the term as you wish) as many of the battleground states also had the "can't touch until" rules for mail in ballots.

    865:

    "cannot be legally charged for their actions while in office, so it is hard to prosecute a sitting president for abetting terrorists."

    Oh, America has started charging terrorists and having a court with evidence and a burden of proof with all the trimmings?

    Brilliant. Nice change from just bombing their house from 45000 ft.

    866:

    David L Ah ... the "Can't touch it until afterwards" rules ( In some places ) seems to be the real bugger where you are. Hadn't appreciated that. We had a weirdo, about 3-5 years back, where we had three (?) elections at once ... They solved that with colour-coding the papers & separate ballot boxes, of course.

    867:

    My GP's website (which does work) says

    "It has been reported in the media that surgeries will be providing free Flu Vaccines for all over 50's. We have not as yet received any guidance from the CCG/NHSE and until we do we are unable to provide any information. We ask respectfully that you do not contact the surgery, we will let you know when the vaccines become available."

    Tesco pharmacy says "we are only taking bookings for over-65s" (and from talking to an actual pharmacist, those bookings are probably for a month ahead.)

    Boots aren't taking bookings at all.

    Haven't tried any of the other pharmacy chains but I expect the response will be similar.

    868:

    Only once you have seen an actual ballot in a US election, does the lack of speed make sense.

    Try looking for images of "sample ballot" and you will see why elections are slow in USA, both in terms of time to cast and count votes.

    It is not uncommon for ballots to have upwards of 50 distinct questions for the voters to decide, everything from top-of-the-ballot presidental elections to dog-catcher and city-council initiatives to raise money for a new roof for the school.

    In California there were 12 state-wide "ballot measures" this time, if you lived in San Francisco, the city added measures A-L and so on. The San Francisco official "Voter Guide" were 233 pages in total.

    869:

    A friend who has been following the numbers in detail sent this this morning, FWIW

    As of 11/6 6:42 PM PST [2020-11-07T02:42Z]

    Arizona - 97% of expected vote reporting Biden needs 35% of uncounted vote to win state

    Nevada - 93% of expected vote reporting Biden needs 38% of uncounted vote to win state

    Pennsylvania - 96% of expected vote reporting Biden needs 45.1% of uncounted vote to win state

    Georgia - if 99% of expected vote reporting Biden needs 46% of uncounted vote to win state

    North Carolina - 98% of expected vote reporting Biden needs 85% of uncounted vote to win state

    870:

    What happened to the colour-blind people?

    871:

    "What happened to the colour-blind people?"

    The colour coding is only used to ensure that each paper goes in the correct box. So long as someone in the processing chain can distinguish them, it doesn't matter if the voter can't.

    872:

    Right now the Democrats best hope for the Senate is that whatever happened Moscow Mitch's hand last week will prove to be not only fatal, but contagious & he won't die before passing it on to a substantial number of his Senate Caucus.

    Assume the Senate is 52-48 Republican and that McConnell (or his replacement) goes full scorched earth -- no legislation passes, no appointments are considered. At that point the Dems' best hope is to buy off Collins and Murkowski to change their affiliation to independent and caucus with the Dems. That makes it 50-50 and Harris is the tiebreaker. This would be easier if the Dems could pick up one of the Georgia seats in the runoff election.

    873:

    AT On/from those numbers ( @ 12.14 ) one would reasonably expect: Arizona - Biden Nevada - Biden Pennsylvania - Biden ( given trend of previous voting ) Georgia - going for a recount, isn't it? N Carolina - Trump

    Micheal Cain That is incredibly depressing The US needs to address not only voter suppression & gerrymandering but that something like 20% of the population have 55-60 of the votes in the Senate, yes?

    Meanwhile - I've mentioned it before. If you really want stupid & arrogant by humanity TRY THIS

    874:

    I managed to get my flu vaccine last week when I went into Lloyds Pharmacy despite the website not having any appointments.

    We'd gone into town on Wednesday to do some emergency pre-lockdown shopping (good coffee beans and cake), so as I'd ordered my repeat prescription on Monday, I dropped in to see if it was possible to book an appointment as I'm NHS eligible - under 65 but diabetic and an essential worker (I work in a local authority Public Health team). The pharmacist, sure we can jab you now - and my prescription had arrived too. The annoying thing was that I'd cancelled my retinopathy screen because I'd not had the vaccine. Hopefully when they rebook it, they will be screening in town not 6 miles away requiring an hour on the bus.

    My surgery is using the new NHS app as well - they were previously using systmonline. It was a right pain to sign up to it as well - I needed to scan my driver's licence and take a pic as I am now, and then wait for a week for someone to check I'm the same person. I was supposed to have my annual diabetic review last month, but haven't been called for it, so I've no idea what's happening.

    875:

    If the Republican backers stick with Trump then my guess is that they'll use the court cases as a diversion (hey, one of them might work) while applying all the pressure they can on those members of the electoral college who may be sympathetic to the argument that "you don't need to follow a fraudulent vote". OTOH, if they dont stick with Trump and they have a bad time in the mid-term elections then expect the return of Trump and/or Trump Jnr.

    876:

    ...something like 20% of the population have 55-60 of the votes in the Senate, yes?

    Rounding somewhat and using July, 2020 population estimates, the 20 smallest states (40 Senators) have 10% of the total population. The 30 smallest states (60 Senators) have 24% of the population.

    For political purposes, it's more complicated than that. The Senators from the ten smallest states are split pretty evenly between the parties. The Senators from the ten largest states are split pretty evenly. The Republican's Senate edge comes from states in the 2-6 million range. There are a bunch of those in the large Mississippi River drainage. Those all have the same settlement pattern and no particularly large cities. It isn't really surprising that their political stances have converged.

    877:

    Antistone @ 710: What procedure do you follow to figure out which half is lies?

    It’s actually nowhere near as hard as you make out with regards to the examples you cited

    In America we actually don’t live in a world with two very carefully crafted political narratives that disagree. That would indeed be hard to navigate

    However one of the narratives is extremely poorly crafted, It is not internally logically consistent in the slightest. It does not hold up to even casual inspection. When submitted to peer review the entire rest of the world laughs at it. It failed A/B tests constantly

    Your mistake is thinking that we are divided because of a hard intellectual problem. We are divided because of a hard emotional problem . The only reason people believe in the right wing drivel is cognitive dissonance.

    Many of their long held cherished beliefs are linked and as reality proves them wrong they are in danger of their whole self identity crumbling away. This is why they are so so rabid and senseless

    But to answer the theoretical question (because such does arise occasionally in reality)

    1; understand for yourself the data not just how both sides interpret it 2: understand the motivations that people have when interpreting the data and how it biases them 3: see if there is anything happening that can be viewed as an experiment or A/B test. Have both approaches been tried ? How did they work ? If there isn’t why not and which side of the argument is preventing it (this is an especially telling clue) 4: understand your own emotional bias and which side of an argument you want to be true. Study hard the opposite side

    At that point 95% if the time you will know

    The other 5%, look at the CHARACTER of the people making the arguments. Side with the highest character (not the one closest to your values).

    At that point you are at least future proofed of you are on the wrong side because people of high character will admit mistakes

    878:

    On/from those numbers ( @ 12.14 ) one would reasonably expect: Arizona - Biden Nevada - Biden Pennsylvania - Biden ( given trend of previous voting ) Georgia - going for a recount, isn't it? N Carolina - Trump

    Yes, AZ and NV look pretty solid for Biden, NC for Trump. GA has already said they'll recount and, AIUI, PA will recount if the final margin is less than 0.5%

    879:

    It's the end of the beginning: Pennsylvania went for Biden, who is now well past the 270 electoral college vote threshold to win.

    880:

    IT'S REAL. CNN, NBC, AND FOX JUST CALLED THE RACE FOR BIDEN.

    I'm tearing up right now. It's real. Oh God, it's real.

    882:

    Charlie All too true ... NOW the crazy truly starts. The one to watch, of course is Kamala Harris - I wish her the best of luck, she will need it.

    883:

    Oops ... And, of course, the odds of some sort of Brexit actual deal will have gone up a huge amount ( Doubtless supposedly-masked by vast amounts of bullshit, as BoZo prepares to "Betray" the extreme Brexshiteers )

    884:

    And Biden's lead just keeps growing. Nevada got called too.

    So the current situation: America to abusive partner: Bitch, it's over.

    Soon to be Ex:....well, that's the fucked up part of the next three months.

    I haven't checked it out yet, but one of my FacePlant friends pointed out that 93% of the US counties with the highest Covid19 positive rates went for El Cheeto. I suspect most of them don't have great hospitals either.

    885:

    H We discussed this earlier ... how completely brainwashed USAians cannot even comprehend that someone else can do it as well, never mind BETTER than USAians ... Healthcare being the ultimate example. The mere idea that one can simply: GO TO THE DOCTOR & NOT HAVE TO PAY ... passes them by, coupled with lies about death panels & other shit.

    886:

    Celebration is in order! But there's still a lot of scope for shenanigans, and I don't think anyone will bet against Trump and his cronies trying every trick in the book and some ones they have just invented.

    https://history.house.gov/Institution/Electoral-College/Electoral-College/ https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11641

    887:

    Ah, but we have to show our cards. The "carte d'assurance maladie". Don't leave home without it.

    888:

    Talking of brexit, someone showed me a frothing rant in (I think) the express that seemed to blame trumps problems on british remainers.

    Never knew I had it in me but I'm always happy to help.

    889:

    (to the tune of Danny Boy, ideally off-key)

    Oh Donny Boy, the prosecutors will call you From court to court, across the USA Once convicted, what will you be doing then? Oh Donny Boy, it's time for you to go.

    Oh Mister Flight Risk, what are we to do with you? A man of your morals and your needs? Oh Donny Boy (!!!), America just fired you Just shut up, man, pack your things and go.

    890:

    Since I've got a lot of friends who work in hospitals, what I'm thinking about is people suffering and dying when they can't get any care, nurses, doctors, and other staffers getting overwhelmed, although hopefully (!) they will have enough PPE that we won't see a repeat of the spring, where nurses were getting sick and dying because they couldn't keep themselves safe.

    I happen to agree with you that American health care is a fucked up mess, but Trump's followers and the people they live with may well have an extremely bad winter.

    891:

    It's been interesting (so far), though frankly I could have used this week doing other things; the states that deliberately deferred counting until on/after election day caused a lot of stress (and boosted the bottom line for a lot of media outlets :-). Not over by any stretch, and rather dangerous especially if D.J. Trump and his henchpeople and allies continue deliberate stochastic creation of right-wing terrorist cells.

    The Trump Team's strategy was to create a Red Mirage and then use it to create a national wave of unrest and uncertainty and steal the election. They succeeded in creating a Red Mirage[1], and Trump believed that he won, and now he's seeing the Red Mirage bleed out and turn Blue. The effort to creating mass unrest is (one of) their work(s) in progress and can be helped to fall flat.

    Trump Won[2] (in his own mind), and is miserable.

    [1] Massive voter suppression, some well-done influence-op plays (Florida, Texas Spanish-language), a door-knocking ground game that didn't care about COVID-19, perhaps some vote rigging at scale (explain why polling in e.g. NJ, MN, CO was accurate, but wildly inaccurate in neighboring states), etc. (Some of the etc is that Americans suck more than we thought.) [2]

    I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!

    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2020

    892:

    ...the states that deliberately deferred counting until on/after election day caused a lot of stress...

    These are basically states where the legislature has no interest in conducting elections by mail. During the next legislative season, they are as likely to do away with no-excuse mail ballots as they are to add the rest of the changes to make vote by mail practical.

    893:

    And as I posted to a popular blog, and facepalm, 1. People have been noting that men who can't run a mile are ready for a civil war? 2. Right. Bunch of guys who play war games in the woods, and shoot at ranges, are going to "invade" Philly (pop over 1.4M) and "intimidate" them. Vs. the cops, and armed inner city gangs, whose whole lifestyle is urban warfare.

    Yup....

    894:

    But he won't be the President. And a lot actually believe in the Oath.

    895:

    Really, the only thing that keeps a sitting President from being charged are guidelines from the DOJ - there is nothing in the Constitution or law that prevents it.

    And for those wondering why it takes so long, in addition to crossing the "i"s and dotting the "t"s... normally, something like 10% vote absentee or early. This year... a week or so ago, more than 3/4s of all the votes cast in '16 were voted early or mail in/drop off.

    And the people doing the counting know they could be in court, and so they're going to do it by the numbers.

    And they did.

    896:

    Newspaper quote: So what happens next? What will happen to the Republican cronies who drank the Kool Aid and enabled Trump’s controversial behavior during his presidency? And, with pending investigations looming, what will happen to Trump? And ... McConnell plans to stonewall Biden from appointing progressive Cabinet secretaries. In a Senate majority, we might also see Senate Republicans block Biden's legislative agenda and try to bog Biden down with investigations of Trump's conspiracy theories. They'll need to be careful, though, because 2022 has a very favorable Senate map for Democrats. And ... The GOP’s disinformation machine is the broadest challenge Democrats will face in electoral politics moving forward. 2020 proves almost half the voting public bought into it.

    Yes, the crazy is starting now, oh dear.

    It's also been noted that even if ( as seems likely ) that McConnel reverts to brick-wall opposition, the 2022 Senate race is probably tipped against whatever the R's have become by then ...

    897:

    "So what happens next?"

    A campaign from, or depending on your view of the place: to, Hell in Georgia.

    Nobody is going to say anything useful or trustworthy, until that yak is shaved and the fur washed & sold.

    Re-run elections that can tip the balance are by definition powder-kegs.

    Shots will be fired at "the people who dont belong here", and there will be a LOT of those, everybody who can will trek to Georgia to campaign.

    Deep pocket are already busy buying cheap real-estate for straw-man voters.

    It's a tough row to hoe for the democrats, buy they know the price if they fail.

    I hope you were not tired of electioneering yet ? :-)

    898:

    That's why I'm not celebrating much.

    It's also time to ramp up the criminal investigations against various republican senators and congresscritters...

    899:

    Not admitting defeat and lots of fanatics followers (with guns). Hope this goes down well, but it really doesn't look good...

    900:

    Will probably keep holding my breath, looking over my shoulder, etc. until Biden's sworn in on Wednesday, January 20, 2021 ... 75 days to go.

    901:

    P H-K Maybe we want to revive William Tecumseh Sherman for a campaign to free the people of that state?

    902:

    Re: 'Really, the only thing that keeps a sitting President from being charged are guidelines from the DOJ - there is nothing in the Constitution or law that prevents it.'

    According to various Pols in both Parties, the USofA subscribes to the 'rule of law', including the principle that: No one is above the Law. Time to see whether this is actually true.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law#United_States

    Even Brett said this ... we'll see.

    https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/05/politics/supreme-court-nomination-hearing-brett-kavanaugh/index.html

    903:

    to Poul-Henning Kamp @733:

    The constant propaganda of "The Worlds Greatest Nation" has been drilled in so long and so utterly inescapable, that it takes a serious effort of education to even make USAnians contemplate that there could be specialized areas where other countries do a better job than The Worlds Greatest Nation.

    I cannot avoid to highlight this issue again in a very ironic manner. Because this is how I see it from my position, and this is how my unfortunately neo-lib compatriots look at this. It is physically impossible for them to say that voting in the US can be unfair, or they system may be flawed or falsified. Or there was any significant procedure violation in voting, even. That is to be expected from them. However, since today it has gone to next level.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/trump-tv.html “We have to interrupt here, because the president made a number of false statements, including the notion that there has been fraudulent voting,” said Lester Holt, the “NBC Nightly News” anchor. He added, “There has been no evidence of that.”

    I am in no way supporter of Trump's decision or escapades, but I am rather indifferent since I am so removed from his cabinet that it makes no difference if a parrot would stay in his place all this time. But I do recognize his politics at least remotely sane in the view of position he is occupying. I cannot say the same about his opponents.

    These people are not going to suggest that it is possible to control the thought process of the entire world via information technology, diversion and censorship - they are going for it, starting from now. My country has already started to pay more attention of censorship on american-owned social platforms, and especially notable when it comes to our internal public issues - I can only imagine how far it is progressing in the more "civilized" countries. I do believe that at some point it will be impossible for me to write anything in this blog, for the same reason. And then I, too, will have no regrets nor regards.

    to Charlie Stross @879: It's the end of the beginning: I solemnly but humbly recognize it as the end of the end. It is a straight downhill from this point.

    Last time I was talking here about the topic, couple of years ago, I suggested that it is possible that last president of US will be undetermined/unknown. Not just because votes are counted wrong, but because people wouldn't even known the names of the candidates. And it wasn't about 2020 election, it is about next election, because obviously, this is just the trial.

    904:

    OK. Something I've been wanting to ask.

    When did Denmark start raising 40% of the world mind population? For export to China and nearby parts for furs.

    Where do they stack them all.

    And all are to be destroyed to prevent a possible Mink -> humans Covid-19 variation.

    14 or 17 million of them.

    And I suspect it will be too late.

    905:

    I solemnly but humbly recognize it as the end of the end. It is a straight downhill from this point.

    I disagree.

    I'm in the UK.

    The outcome today -- that Trump is not going to continue as US president -- has a huge benefit for me: Biden is strongly pro-Irish, and his election means that the current bunch of neoliberal lunatics running the UK will be far more likely to end up sitting down and doing a limited trade deal with the EU next month.

    This means less chance of food shortages and riots in my personal very near future. Which is all I care about right now.

    (Behind that, Biden seems to be serious about tackling COVID19, which is a clear and immediate danger that doesn't give a shit about national borders. To a virus, we aren't Americans or Brits or Russians -- we're just tasty piles of cells waiting to be invaded and turned into more viruses. Prioritizing national pride over epidemiology is dangerous lunacy, and Trump in particular allowed his personal pride to lead him to ignore all scientific evidence and advice.)

    Dismantling neoliberal capitalism and figuring out how to save our food chain from climate-change-induced destruction can come next.

    (If you want to assert that Trump marked the end of the American Century, then sure: it's all downhill for them from here. But there's a gentle decline, and there's jumping off a cliff, and I hope for their sake -- I have a lot of American friends -- that they pick the former.)

    906:

    Hint: Denmark is destroying roughly 10-20 million mink.

    Turns out global demand for mink coats is relatively tiny. They're small critters: assuming 1000/coat (ball park) and 10 weeks/generation, then they probably only export 50-100,000 coats' worth of mink per year.

    907:

    to Heteromeles @674: Did you model the effect of different air pressures over the length of the cable? Even if the line hooks into the top of the stratosphere, that's something like 1% of atmospheric pressure at sea level. I might just get to it next time I get to that project, but I will have to calculate the air resistance to the cable in the first place, of which I know much less. It might take some time.

    908:

    Yes, but the scary bits (which I assume you know, though clearly others here don't) are (a) that transmission via an intermediate species often causes increased infectiveness (and occasionally severity) and (b) mink are closely related to polecats, stoats and weasels, so it could become established in the wild. While humans do not have direct contact with those much, we do via rodents, dogs and cats (which can already catch it, if rarely).

    Despite having no regard for PETA, I do not regret the absence of new mink coats. It's about time they were consigned to history.

    909:

    The outcome today -- that Trump is not going to continue as US president -- has a huge benefit for me: Biden is strongly pro-Irish, and his election means that the current bunch of neoliberal lunatics running the UK will be far more likely to end up sitting down and doing a limited trade deal with the EU next month.

    It's one of those things where Biden's win means both everything and nothing.

    There is no difference in the odds of the UK getting a US trade deal today than there was a week ago.

    Yes, Biden is pro-Irish, but so in general is the Democrat Party. Pelosi and others have repeatedly made it clear the Good Friday Agreement had to be honoured, and any trade agreement needs both parts of Congress.

    The difference of course is that those in charge, and the Brexit public, can no longer pretend Pelosi and the Democrats in the House don't matter, and that Biden can be a convenient scapegoat (if they so desire) to blame it all on.

    This means less chance of food shortages and riots in my personal very near future. Which is all I care about right now.

    Certainly a valid concern, and I hope that Biden forces Boris and the Conservatives to accept some reality.

    But my guess is that if Boris is forced to cave to the EU and accept the reality, the Brexit wing of the Conservative Party won't accept reality - and perhaps helped along with the reappearance of Nigel this won't be a settled issue.

    So while I hope everyone in the UK gets some sort of deal that avoids the catastrophe that many of us fear a no-deal exit would be, I don't think a deal will settle the issue for the longer term.

    (Behind that, Biden seems to be serious about tackling COVID19, which is a clear and immediate danger that doesn't give a shit about national borders. To a virus, we aren't Americans or Brits or Russians -- we're just tasty piles of cells waiting to be invaded and turned into more viruses. Prioritizing national pride over epidemiology is dangerous lunacy, and Trump in particular allowed his personal pride to lead him to ignore all scientific evidence and advice.)

    Yes, Biden will help change the Covid situation. But without the Senate his options might be limited - he won't be able to get much money to deal with Covid being the most obvious problem, and helping out hurting Americans and their families financially is something Mitch & Co. have made clear will not happen again going forward.

    Dismantling neoliberal capitalism and figuring out how to save our food chain from climate-change-induced destruction can come next.

    Will not happen for at least 2 years. Without the Senate Biden won't get much done, and the Republican Supreme Court will be a long term problem.

    The biggest problem though is that this wasn't a blowout, and the Democrats didn't decisively take the Senate. The American public remains bitterly divided.

    This means the Republicans are still in good shape for 2024.

    Thus all the non-US countries should view this as a ceasefire and use the 4 years to build up economies and alliances for some sort of Trump 2.0 style presidency in 2024 bringing a return to the madness of the last 4 years.

    910:

    Denmark has a large dairy and agriculture sector in general. This makes it a cheap place to raise mink, because they can be fed on waste from the dairy, ect, sector. This would, of course, be very bad for their long term health, except the mink does not have a long term - they get killed for their fur before they can fall to pieces from malnourishment. Though said malnourishment is likely why they came down with covid in such numbers

    911:

    About those minks.

    https://www.who.int/csr/don/06-november-2020-mink-associated-sars-cov2-denmark/en/ SARS-CoV-2 mink-associated variant strain – Denmark Disease Outbreak News 6 November 2020 Initial observations suggest that the clinical presentation, severity and transmission among those infected are similar to that of other circulating SARS-CoV-2 viruses. However, this variant, referred to as the "cluster 5" variant, had a combination of mutations, or changes that have not been previously observed. The implications of the identified changes in this variant are not yet well understood. Preliminary findings indicate that this particular mink-associated variant identified in both minks and the 12 human cases has moderately decreased sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies.
    912:

    neoliberal lunatics running the UK will be far more likely to end up sitting down and doing a limited trade deal with the EU next month I would be worried since neoliberal lunatism is not represented in US as a separate party (barring 1% threshold). It is inherent to both of them, just in different forms. In fact, I am very much worried now that there will be no Trump in the cabinet to stop or disperse the dogs of war. And I am particularly worried since there's at least two of the major nationalist buffoons (nearby) they can get behind as soon as possible - just because the time has come.

    Behind that, Biden seems to be serious about tackling COVID19, which is a clear and immediate danger that doesn't give a shit about national borders. To a virus, we aren't Americans or Brits or Russians -- we're just tasty piles of cells waiting to be invaded and turned into more viruses. Prioritizing national pride over epidemiology is dangerous lunacy, and Trump in particular allowed his personal pride to lead him to ignore all scientific evidence and advice. I think it is a good sign that it takes so much time to produce, test and QA new vaccine. If that was a clear cut, I imagine, that would lead to direct discrimination and further polarization. Why, would the "reasonable man" think, should we save Trump's voters with free vaccines, if they are not wanting to save themselves. IIRC, I have seen shades of this before the voting rollercoaster, and there's absolutely no reason to not expect things to return to the same slippery road.

    Dismantling neoliberal capitalism and figuring out how to save our food chain from climate-change-induced destruction can come next. Even if most people would hope for the better, I do believe it is impossible to dismantle capitalism without wasting absolute destruction to the most achievement people consider essential to civilization - abundance of resources, freedom of speech and movement, promise of future. Contrary to them, I am less than hesitant, since I have been barred from them. All of my life. And now they will come to me and my people ask for more, again. More accusation, more sanctions, more fraud, more demands. I am currently at my limit with all the bullshit that flew past me these several months. I am positive that the next year a big war is going to happen.

    913:

    hus all the non-US countries should view this as a ceasefire and use the 4 years

    Two years. Biden has to show his plans make sense to a lot of people in the next 2 years. Or they loose more in the House and Senate.

    And no matter how much the left side of the US political system wants things to move, too much movement past just doing triage that everyone can agree with can make 2022 a repeat of 2010.

    914:

    For a very much-needed laugh This Scottish local newspaer article is a Must-Read - nearly wet meself when I saw the headline ...

    sleepingroutine @ 903 You are getting as bad as the Seagull & talking utter tosh. SEE ALSO Charlie @ 905 - where I agree 150% - especially as regards Brexit & "virus". @ 912 Even more rabid bollocks, I'm afraid

    Mink - actually 50-60 per coat. Even so .....

    David L Yes, or alternativey, the opposite - if Mitch goes brick wall, it could backfire on him in 2022 - we simply do not know. If DT behaves as expected & claims to be the president-in-exile, it will only, in the "long" run hurt him & the fascists even more, surely?

    915:

    Yeah, the problem with the atmosphere is that it's layered, so its characteristics don't change in a perfectly smooth and monotonic way. And as all the fun with that 2000 meter long "inflatable airplane" going hypersonic suggests, people like me don't have good intuitions about what will and will not work up there.

    Good luck, and let me know what comes of it.

    916:

    I'd also point out for our more paranoid friends that the whole fracking petroleum industry got hammered in the last year. At least three companies I know of declared bankruptcy. The reason was that their economic models required that there be a market for expensive oil, and the pandemic killed that market. Meanwhile solar and wind kept growing unabated.

    This is fairly stark, because a lot of US military might runs on oil at whatever price, and we're in the process of downsizing our own oil industry. Meanwhile, whatever passes for post-oil warfare is growing apace, and that probably will have different dominant players, given America's apparent reluctance to embrace that future.

    There's also the real issue that I think every military recognizes that climate change is a major threat multiplier, so simply retreating from petro-warfare actually (and perversely) helps them do their jobs. And as we've learned in these last few months, huge-scale psyops using the internet are a bit unpleasant, even if no blood gets shed.

    917:

    Meanwhile solar and wind kept growing unabated. Are (Chinese) solar panels and wind towers still subject to stiff (US) Trump Tariffs? That would change (quickly) late January 2021 in a Biden administration.

    Chinese solar panel, wind tower importers sue Trump administration over tariffs (Jeffrey Ryser, 16 Oct 2020)

    918:

    This is fairly stark, because a lot of US military might runs on oil at whatever price, and we're in the process of downsizing our own oil industry. Meanwhile, whatever passes for post-oil warfare is growing apace, and that probably will have different dominant players, given America's apparent reluctance to embrace that future.

    I don't follow the US military, but the few articles I have read indicate that unlike the US Government the military is heavily reality based - they acknowledged and started planning for climate change and post-oil decades ago.

    As such, combined with their size and R&D budgets, I suspect we will have a dominant US military for a while yet.

    919:

    Ok, first of all, I'm picking you up by your damn lapels, and slamming you against the wall.

    There is no "Democrat" party, any more than there's a "Rep[ublic" party. The ONLY people who say "Democrat party" are Trumpists. So either pretend you actually speak English, or I'll assume that you are a Trumpist.

    Is that clear?

    The Biden win means real change - I mean, given an incompetent, untrusted ruler compared to somebody that's a functioning adult, they will know where they stand... and I have grave doubts that the crashout Brexiteers will be anywhere but the back of the line for deals....

    920:

    I haven't checked it out yet, but one of my FacePlant friends pointed out that 93% of the US counties with the highest Covid19 positive rates went for El Cheeto. I suspect most of them don't have great hospitals either.

    It isn't exactly what you asked for but this timed chart of Covid Cases By State and Political Partisanship is consistent with that claim. Go ahead and look at that if you haven't seen it before; if anything the human cost of denying science is greater than we would imagine.

    921:

    Unless the Orange Loser starts one, I deeply disbelieve it will happen. Among other reasons, the US military is vastly overstretched - like our so-called healthcare system - we vastly overspend, and get very little. Afghanistan, like the Soviet Union before, and Iraq, have drastically sapped our ability to do anything other than via air - boots on the ground, not a chance. On top of that, Biden has always demonstrated, for real, that he is aware of his son's military service, and what it did to him.

    He's got far too much on his plate, including the Trumpists, to have any desire to start a war. On top of which, the entire coalition that got him elected will come down like an avalanche on that idea.

    The GOP loves to start wars....

    922:

    Several years ago, I read of a DoD report on climate change, and they have been planning for it for years, though some of that may have been paused by the Idiot.

    923:

    Ellen and I watched the victory speeches. We kept finding the room rather dusty... as the commentator said after, this is how Presidents always spoke to us, of unifying the country.

    He didn't say "until the asshole", but everyone heard it.

    And on the stage actually looked like the US: the big black guy off to the left behind Biden, we're guessing is Secret Service, Harris holding her little daughter, both the little girl and her son darker-skinned than her....

    924:

    It isn't exactly what you asked for but this timed chart of Covid Cases By State and Political Partisanship is consistent with that claim. Yeah, the autumn COVID-19 wave disproportionately hit states right before the election (surprise! Not.), in part because they were new to effective NPIs (public health measures vs COVID) and in part because the NPIs response was broken by stupid Republican COVID-related denialism thoroughly baked into their partisan canon by August. (Perhaps also in small part because of a completely green population; a few blue states have significant numbers of recovered(/(partially)immune) COVID patients who might reduce overall R0 a bit.)

    925:

    After watching the celebrations of Biden's win, with many people crammed close together and too many without masks, I'm afraid there'll be a new wave of COVID cases in Democratic areas. Sweet as the victory is, that's just too high a price to pay.

    926:

    After watching the celebrations of Biden's win, with many people crammed close together and too many without masks, I'm afraid there'll be a new wave of COVID cases in Democratic areas.

    Probably not. Outdoors, and nearly all were wearing masks in the photos I saw. Outdoors is a serious risk reduction; for instance I know of no superspreader events where the index patient was outdoors. (I have not studied all case studies, though.) Masks on top of outdoors is a large improvement on top of the outdoor effect. Also, it depends on the community spread rate where the spontaneous celebrations took place. Of course, if people went from street to bars/restaurants (or private parties) and took off their masks, that would seriously increase spread.

    927:

    The announcement of Judge Barrett's candidacy for the Supreme Court was a super-spreader event held outdoors.

    We'll just have to see.

    928:

    The announcement of Judge Barrett's candidacy for the Supreme Court was a super-spreader event held outdoors. There was a fairly large indoor gathering following the outdoor gathering.

    929:

    Trumpolini still not conceding - I don't think he ever will. This is going to get unpleasant

    930:

    Meanwhile a simple end-user question. As all know, Adobe flash is effectively dead & certainly will be from 31/12/2020. Unfortunately, I have several files which use it for animation [ Especially a set that show the internal workings of just about every steem locomotive valve gear arrangement! ] Please - Recommendations for substitute software that will run flash instead - there seem to be quite a few out there, but which one to choose?

    931:

    "Recommendations for substitute software that will run flash"

    I would look into finding something which can convert the flash animations to animated SVG or similar.

    Trying to keep old software and hardware alive to show flash animations takes you into serious data-archæology, and you will be stuck to those old platforms, unless you find a way to convert.

    If you decide to stick with old platforms, your best bet is to run an old Windows version in a virtual machine.

    932:

    The concession speech is not in the U.S. constitution or in any U.S. law. It's a tradition. The U.S. Does not need it to move on.

    https://www.npr.org/2020/11/02/929085584/how-to-lose-an-election-a-brief-history-of-the-presidential-concession-speech

    933:

    Interesting. If it has already escaped and is even somewhat more resistant to the vaccines being developed, a lot of people are going to be very, very pissed off. Me among them :-(

    934:

    For a mind-numbingly detailed description of what has to happen when between now and 20 Jan, see the Congressional Research Service report "The Electoral College: A 2020 Presidential Election Timeline."

    https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/IF11641.html

    935:

    This is fairly stark, because a lot of US military might runs on oil at whatever price, and we're in the process of downsizing our own oil industry.

    You're still thinking too small.

    Let's see ...

    Prior to the mid-18th century, economics was mostly dictated by agricultural production. Very crudely: more food = more people, more people = more muscle power and more soldiers, more soldiers = better at keeping what you've got.

    From the mid-18th to late 19th century, a huge shift occurred: coal power substituted for muscle power, and the first nations to mechanise had a huge advantage. But: coal energy production was centralized (depended on mines, and coal was difficult to transport).

    From 1900 onwards, we saw a shift to oil. Oil was like coal, except liquid and easy to move around. It changed geopolitics because it made it practical to invade and dominate oil-producing regions globally -- with coal, it was a lot harder (but not impossible) to do so.

    The British empire was largely a coal-fuelled thalassocracy. It's successor, the American empire, is an oil-fuelled thalassocracy. Both had global reach, both were concerned with constraining their rivals' access to the key resource (coal, oil) to maximize geopolitical advantage.

    (Nuclear was a putative rival to oil but suffered from the same problem as coal (it's hard to transport) plus other added political complications (weapons, waste). So as a replacement it mostly fizzled -- although the example of France showed that it was at least a possibility.)

    Now, to solar: PV panels are now so cheap that it's cheaper to build out new capacity for power generation than it is to keep digging up cheap coal and throwing it into existing, amortized, coal plants.

    This is huge, because solar is distributed and its product is not amenable to shipping. Like agriculture in a pre-industrial setting, where most food was consumed by the people who grew it, solar is intractable to thalassocracy.

    Worse: the geopolitics of solar is terrible for the incumbent great powers. Insolation is maximized near the equator, and poor in the sub-arctic and polar regions. The temperate/sub-arctic is, however, where most of the 19th/20th century great powers are clustered. (Big exception: China.)

    Long-term prognosis:

    Even without considering climate change, we're moving into an era where the energy geopolitics resembles the pre-industrial age, minus the labour constraint, but with the distribution of power closely tracking latitude largely regardless of rainfall/soil quality.

    The winners will be Africa, Central and (most of) South America, Australia, the Middle East, and South Asia (the Indian subcontinent, China, and south-east Asia).

    The losers will be: Europe (especially northern Europe), Canada/Northern USA, Russia. Hey, white people lands!

    A chunk of the current white supremacist outrage is an incoherent terror that the future is brown. And yes, the future is going to be dominated by wealthy non-white folks while whitey festers on the fringes. We (hey, I live fifty miles north of Moscow) are doomed to irrelevance unless someone makes a breakthrough in cheap fusion in the very near future (and by "cheap" I mean "too cheap to meter").

    I'm assuming that our ecosystems are on course to crash but giant PV farms will be able to power the HVAC needed to keep plants growing indoors in giant LED-lit sheds with optimal CO2 levels to encourage crop growth.

    But what's fucking up our politics? Look at David Koch's mining interests. The Australian mining magnates the Murdoch dynasty acts as mouthpiece for. Aramco, Shell, BP, Exxon. The old energy incumbents have most to lose because the solar onslaught is causing their book assets in the ground to crater.So all these forces are campaigning for reactionary/populist/neofascist "strong men" who are in favour of big pick up trucks rolling coal and continued climate denialism (and tariffs on cheap solar panels).

    Point is, the economic trajectory bends inexorably towards the rise of solar, and brings with it a wholly new era of global geopolitics.

    There's still going to be lots of trade in embodied energy products: aluminium, concrete/cement, steel, carbon-neutral synthetic fuels for aircraft and ships. But it's going to look a lot more like the pattern of trade in the pre-industrial world.

    936:

    Oh, and this needs to be the core of my next substantive blog posting.

    937:

    "But in the last hospital I worked in takeup of flu vaccine for staff was in the low forties percent. "

    I don't know what is was at the hospital where I used to work, but it was pretty close to manadatory.

    938:

    There's quit an overlap between the pv winners and areas liable to become lethally hot.

    There must be a temptation to accelerate climate change, set up automated pv farms in newly uninhabitable lands and try to have it both ways.

    It's inefficient, immoral and very unlikely to succeed but something to look out for over 5he next few years.

    939:

    Or maybe SpaceX's next project after Starship and Starlink will be a constellation of huge solar power satellites. And if it can double as a weapon of mass immolation, DoD will sponsor it, too.

    Just imagine, thousands of enormous shining stainless steel satellites, literally blotting the sun above third world countries, and raining down fiery death at the same time. Glorious.

    940:

    There must be a temptation to accelerate climate change, set up automated pv farms in newly uninhabitable lands and try to have it both ways.

    You can have automated floating pv farms on the surface of the ocean.

    941:

    "There is no "Democrat" party, any more than there's a "Rep[ublic" party. The ONLY people who say "Democrat party" are Trumpists. So either pretend you actually speak English, or I'll assume that you are a Trumpist."

    Note to people living outside the USA political system - 'Democrat' is a quite deliberately coined word by Republicans, used as an insult.

    942:

    I got tipsy last night. I don't often do that.

    Got into a barney with a good friend over this op-ed: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/election-result-trump-biden-president-pardon-b1600867.html. I can understand the desire to draw a line under the last four years, hold out a hand in friendship, and try to move on. The trouble is, those to whom the hand is extended are likely to slap it aside, take magnamity for weakness, and double down on getting the younger, smarter, Trump 2.0 back in the White House in 2024. Moscow Mitch still leads the Senate and, run-offs in Georgia notwithstanding, his SOP will be to block everything Biden does just as he did with Obama.

    If Biden is going to pardon Trump, there has to be a legally enforcable quid pro quo and the will to follow through when, not if, he breaks it. I'd go for making it clear that unless he openly, completely co-operates with all the investigations into his Government's conduct, there are detailed files on everything Meliana did while she was on her H1-B visa; and that children of those found to be illegal immigrants get deported too. Trump may not give a hoot about Meliana, but Barron...?

    Oh well, that's not likely to happen, so I'll just enjoy the sheer pants-wetting terror of Boris et al coming to grips with Biden being wholly on the side of the Irish re. the border with the Republic. The EU now have a loaded six-gun on the table along with the Royal Flush they've been holding for a long time, and our side haven't yet twigged that Mr. Bun the Baker and a creased Pickachu won't cut it.

    943:

    It hasn't been mandatory in any of the eight hospitals I've worked in. When I started work BCG was mandatory depending on the results of the TB test. In labs hepatitis B vaccine is close to mandatory but I refused because I have a family history of multiple sclerosis and the vaccine I was offered has a slightly increased risk for MS. At my last hospital the percentage overall rate was in the forties but the labs (where I worked) had the highest rate in the seventies.

    944:

    In the US, using "Democrat" as an adjective is a marker for being a conservative, and I'm pretty sure this goes back for some years before Trump.

    I've heard "Democrat" used as an adjective by the BBC, and to judge by tone and context, it's not intended as an insult*, it's just that they've heard it used so much that they think it's a neutral variant.

    *I could be wrong, British humor can be subtle for Americans.

    945:

    You can, but why would you when there's plenty of dry land? Sea water eats equipment.

    946:

    Murphy's Layer The trouble is, those to whom the hand is extended are likely to slap it aside, take magnamity for weakness, and double down on getting the younger, smarter, Trump 2.0 back in the White House in 2024. Moscow Mitch still leads the Senate and, run-offs in Georgia notwithstanding, his SOP will be to block everything Biden does just as he did with Obama. This. I'm very much afraid that is what will happen - we will have to see. Like I keep saying, teh crazy has only just started.

    BoZo the clown will do what he always does, bluster, tell mutually-incompatible lies & then fold. ( I hope )

    Nancy L Yes If you are a supporter of or member of the US Democratic party, you are a "Democrat" are you not?

    947:

    You can, but why would you when there's plenty of dry land? Sea water eats equipment.

    You want your solar panels as close as possible to reduce transmission losses.

    948:

    You have to switch Canada from your list of solar power have-nots to a list of renewable energy countries.

    • British Columbia runs on Hydro-Electric power (Hydro) and it has untapped reserves of it.
    • Alberta has vast reserves of geothermal power which it does not like to talk about because it is fixated on the tar sands these days.
    • The two other prairie provinces can run on wind power, something they have a lot of.
    • Ontario has been refusing renewable Hydro energy from Québec and is currently planning a whole new generation of small nuclear plants, running on uranium from the vast reserves in Saskatchewan and reserves in its own soil and in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. Maybe they'll change their minds and accept Hydro from Québec one day.
    • Québec runs on Hydro power and has untapped reserves of the stuff.
    • The Maritime provinces run on a mix of renewable and non renewable energy. They get some Hydro from Québec and will be getting some from Newfoundland and Labrador. Both of these outside sources have vast surpluses.

    Frankly, I think you should switch all of Scandinavia from the have-not list to a list of renewable energy countries since Norway aleady runs on Hydro-Electric power, Denmark is on its way to run on wind power and Sweden and Finland have the smarts to switch to wind power, eventually. I've visited all of these Scandinavian countries but I'll let the Scandinavians on your blog explain things further, if they wish.

    949:

    Also, can someone explain why the poor sunless western states doomed to wither under the overcast Siberian sky can't just build more fission reactors?

    950:

    OT, but it is a strange attractor around here. A reference to a possible A.I. revolt occurs in this comic strip.

    951:

    "Also, can someone explain why the poor sunless western states doomed to wither under the overcast Siberian sky can't just build more fission reactors?"

    BTW, the biggest problem with a nuclear-heavy future is that this would require the nuclear weapons powers to tolerate the building of a vast number of nuclear reactors.

    952:

    "BTW, the biggest problem with a nuclear-heavy future is that this would require the nuclear weapons powers to tolerate the building of a vast number of nuclear reactors."

    But these are exactly the countries who are supposed to be losers of the future solar economy. USA, EU, Russia, China - all have nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors already.

    953:

    If you are a supporter of or member of the US Democratic party, you are a "Democrat" are you not? It's basically the use as an adjective that is a problem; it is used as an epithet by Republicans. (Remove the "ic" from their party name and members of the Republican Party are Republans.)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet) I started typing up a flame of mdlve quickly realized (after reading 30 comments by them) that it was not deserved and that probably sloppy media was involved. If the BBC is actually using "Democrat Party", please fix.

    954:

    No, you're not wrong, we call them Democrats because... what else would you call them? Using the name of the party as an adjective to denote someone's affiliation is completely standard practice, as in "Bozo is a Conservative politician", which is invariably shortened to the adjectival-noun form "Bozo is a Conservative" if the name of the party is the kind of word you can do that with, as most of them are; so, we don't say "Starmer is a Labour" simply because "a labour" isn't a thing, but if the party's name was "The Labourers' Party" rather than "The Labour Party", we'd certainly say "Starmer is a Labourer".

    In that example, I very much doubt we'd be bothered by the potential confusion with the more general meaning of "labourer", because it would very rarely be other than completely obvious that we did not mean "Starmer is a guy who lugs shit about on a building site". But with "democrat[ic]" it's more complicated because the general meaning is itself political. We would not say "Biden is a Democratic politician" because the more general meaning, that he is a politician in a system of democracy, is too obtrusive. Nor would we say "Biden is Democratic", because that's even worse in that respect. But we are quite happy to say "Biden is a Democrat" because although the more general meaning is nearly the same, it isn't used very often, plus we are accustomed to seeing the word used with modifiers to refer to our own politicians/parties, eg. "Shirley Williams is a Social Democrat".

    So, basically, it's a bit complicated and not entirely rational, but it is certain that there is no thought of insult involved. We don't see any difference between saying "Biden is a Democrat" and "Bush is a Republican"; it's simply the perfectly normal, standard, entirely neutral way to refer to politicians' affiliations, and it's hard to think of any other way to refer to them. The notion that one of those phrases is an insult and the other isn't is thoroughly alien, and if whitroth hadn't brought it up there would be no way of telling which one was supposed to be the insult and which one wasn't.

    955:

    Also, can someone explain why the poor sunless western states doomed to wither under the overcast Siberian sky can't just build more fission reactors?

    Cooling water. Consider...

    The hardest part of building the last new thermal power plant in my western state -- quite possibly the last new thermal plant that will ever be built here -- was acquiring rights to enough water to cool the steam condenser. It took them years to negotiate and buy out more senior rights holders.

    There's an outfit that wants to build a new nuke plant to sell base load electricity into the lucrative Southern California market. The nearest place that they could find unencumbered water rights for cooling was 800 miles away in eastern Utah.

    A group of small western utilities think they're going to fund construction of a plant based on small modular reactors under the overall sponsorship of the Dept of Energy. It's being built on DOE property and the cooling water will be obtained by DOE exercising its ability to ignore state water laws and simply take what they want.

    The Diablo Canyon nukes are being retired because they can no longer dump waste heat in the ocean and remain in compliance with environmental laws, and they can't acquire rights to fresh water for cooling. (Not to mention that building cooling towers nearby would be ridiculously expensive.)

    956:

    "It changed geopolitics because it made it practical to invade and dominate oil-producing regions globally"

    More really that it made it necessary to do that; nearly everyone has got at least some coal, outside geological oddities like Japan, but there are only a handful of places you can get oil, especially a hundred years ago when it was a lot harder to find it. So the British Navy was fine running on coal because they could get all they needed at home, but when it converted to oil firing there was this great big problem that we hadn't got any. Meanwhile the US did have their own oil but it was already in decline and they were out looking for more sources. So there was a kind of race to stitch up the Middle East commercially before the Americans got it all. Then along comes this handy war which provides an excuse to stitch it up by conquest... and we are still walking in the shit we flung all over the place doing it.

    957:

    carbon-neutral synthetic fuels for aircraft and ships

    There's been recent mention of modest-scale projects in Germany and Denmark to explore ammonia and maybe methanol as ways to convert renewable (mostly wind, it seems) energy into more storable and transportable forms.

    https://gcaptain.com/germany-ammonia-green-fuel/

    https://www.maritime-executive.com/index.php/article/project-to-use-offshore-wind-to-produce-hydrogen-and-green-ammonia

    958:

    "It was a right pain to sign up to it as well - I needed to scan my driver's licence and take a pic as I am now"

    Oh for crying out loud. Thank you for confirming that it's not worth the grief trying to make the idiot website work. Looks like I will just have to hope I don't get ill until the surgery starts letting people in again. (I've made a little progress in trying to bludgeon them away from their ignorant and unhelpful attitude to email of "eurgh email smells and it's got fleas", but it's taken years and it hasn't amounted to anything usable in cases where I care about how long it takes to get an answer yet.)

    959:

    SpaceX won't be doing a solar power satellite project unless Elon's views on the subject have changed a great deal from 2012, when he expressed them thus: "You'd have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What's the conversion rate? Stab that bloody thing in the heart!"

    In an extended discussion of these brief remarks on quora, here:

    https://www.quora.com/Is-Elon-Musk-right-about-space-solar-power

    someone makes the additional point that the only orbit that keeps powersats in a stable position relative to ground-based rectennas is geosynch. Put them there, and the atmospheric losses to ground-based rectennas off the equator go up.

    The larger point is that we already have purely ground-based solar power infrastructure (solar farms), and it's cheap. Expanding it down here (which Elon's totally down with) is likely more cost-effective than anything involving space-based infrastructure.

    960:

    Is the supply of mined materials for building and repairing solar installations a potential chokepoint for this scenario? I'm guessing controlling solar energy by way of controlling minerals is a lot harder than for oil due to the energy/material ratio being much bigger.

    But I suspect everyone is going to try anyway, which makes this situation look surprisingly analogous to online piracy (copying files and pointing something at the sun are both almost free). That suggests the eventual emergence of abusive techno-legal attempts to control solar. Maybe satellite imagery to detect unauthorized solar installations, which informs microtargeting of economic sanctions? I'm not looking forward to finding out.

    961:

    SpaceX won't be doing a solar power satellite project unless Elon's views on the subject have changed a great deal from 2012, when he expressed them thus: "You'd have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What's the conversion rate? Stab that bloody thing in the heart!"

    Elon is known to change his mind quickly in the presence of new information. If the satellites and the launch are cheap enough, conversion rates may not matter matter.

    962:

    I've heard "Democrat" used as an adjective by the BBC, and to judge by tone and context, it's not intended as an insult*, it's just that they've heard it used so much that they think it's a neutral variant.

    Trust me, nobody in the UK except American expats and folks who've lived in the US for years have any clue about that level of nuance. It's exactly equivalent to Americans back in the day saying "Brits out of Northern Ireland", with no understanding of the history, politics, or implication of calling the people in question "Brits". (People in context: Ulster protestant unionists who'd lived there since well before the Mayflower set sail.)

    963:

    That's not quite correct. "Democrat Party" is a Trumpist insult. But properly speaking, a Democrat is a member of the Democratic Party. "Democrat" is acceptable when discussing a single person, as in "Obama is a Democrat." It is not acceptable when discussing the party, as in "Obama is a member of the Democrat Party."

    964:

    To my ear, "Democrat Party" sounds a bit less respectful than "Democratic Party"-- like not bothering to say the extra syllable.

    However, I believe it's the tone of voice and/or context that makes an insult. It's not intrinsic to the words.

    Possible dystopian future: If equatorial territory is essential for energy generation, might major powers start conquering it? How well-defended is the Sahara?

    965:

    There are lots of ways to do solar. There's a plant slightly north of me in which parabolic mirrors heat up water in pipes that feed a turbine... Or you can build a molten-salt solar plant. And so forth.

    966:

    I'll stop you right there, and ask that you consider the five factors: --Water --Food --Power and power distribution --Oil --Geoengineering

    And I'll also remind you that the British Empire did a really good job maximizing its empire under windjammers, not coal, which came of age in the late 19th Century. The big advantage the British Empire had when expanding was coal--for manufacturing, where it established ascendancy early on. But for warfare, its even bigger advantage was that it owned the Ganges Delta, which was (is?) the biggest saltpeter factory on Earth. Everyone else had to make saltpeter farms or fight over guano islands, while the British, thanks to India, could make really cheap ammunition and fertilizer.

    Anyway, scrap the idea of greenhouses feeding cities. I spent years doing my PhD in greenhouses and I've got a hobby greenhouse out back right now. They're resource intensive, fiddly, and therefore expensive. Basil, marijuana, and hydroponic lettuce work great as greenhouse crops. Wheat, corn, soy, potatoes, and industrial hemp do not. With staples, it's critical to get the cost of production down below what you can get out of a greenhouse, so field agriculture will matter. Keeping fields functioning with climate change is our #1 challenge, because without them, cities starve, infrastructure crumbles, and the whole thing snowballs. The other thing is that the biggest carbon sequestration pool we have access to are agricultural soils, so changing farming methods is our only reasonable shot at getting carbon out of the air.

    Water supplies are going to be the oil of the 21st Century. Fortunately, water's cleanable, so it's not the same dynamic as oil. Necessarily. Rather too many places adopted the 20th Century "drill baby drill" mantra with regard to groundwater, and they're in trouble. Underground aquifers, where they're not contaminated or collapsed by over extraction, are really good places to store water. However, they've got to be treated as cisterns, not oil fields. Fights over water are going to be an endemic problem going forward.

    Solar and wind: others who called you on this are right, because there are plenty of places to put these outside the simple-minded optimal zones like deserts. The problems are maintenance and distribution, and shortly, recycling them (at least for the rare earths needed for the essential bits). But right now, getting the energy to where demand exceeds local supply is the critical problem. Huge electric grids are huge manufacturing problems, and as we've learned in the western US, without proper design and upkeep they're shockingly dangerous fire hazards in high winds. In many places, meso- and micro-grids make more sense: wire locally and use a lot of batteries and other storage. What this may mean is that manufacturing shifts to key areas where cities have a surplus of renewable electricity to use in manufacturing stuff. But that's years off.

    You're quite right that renewables reset the geopolitical landscape, but it's more like the mess with saltpeter in the 19th Century, this time with rare earth elements for generators and motors, and lithium for batteries. At least until carbon or glass-based batteries become more practical. And yes, with respect to rare earth elements, China has the biggest exploitable supply, while lithium mining is going to further mess of Chile in the very near future. And let's not forget the joys of conflict minerals needed for electronics, and the unrealized potential for rare earth and lithium recycling.

    Oil isn't going away, because it's a really good way to store and ship energy. Absent a graphene-based miracle, it's likely the most versatile energy-dense medium we'll ever have worked with. That, unfortunately, is what makes it so important for warfare. To repeat ad nauseum, the last nation to abandon oil-based warfare has an advantage, at least until their adversaries prove that they can be defeated using only renewables. Right now, that defeat is through nonviolent attacks like election tampering, but we'll see how much more versatile electronic warfare can get.

    As a side note, I'm quite aware of US military attempts to go more green. The problem they face is that these attempts regularly get stifled by Congress. If you look at my post, I referred to American dependence of warfighting with oil. The US military isn't a group of frustrated environmentalists. Quite the contrary. But as many have noted, they're pretty good at threat analysis. Congress, on the other hand...

    Anyway, back to oil. My semi-informed guess is that American Big Oil is pivoting towards plastics and organic chemistry as their long-term market. These don't bring in the profits of fuel oil, but with oil prices going up, they're still profitable. As we saw with the coordinated attempts to kill all competition with oil as power, we're also seeing plastics saturating society and our biosphere. I don't know why they're so hell-bent on destroying things to stay rich through making disposable products, but that's the petroleum industry for you. And I increasingly think that the whole plastics are recyclable thing is more a greenwashing scam than reality. At best, I suspect we'll be repaving roads with melted scrap plastic and doing niche recycling. But wholesale plastics recycling won't happen, absent a miracle.

    Coupled with continued oil extraction and plastics, I suspect Big Oil and Big Tech are going to push hard for geoengineering, whether it makes sense or not. It's another matter of making money blowing stuff into the sky, basically. This is where those JP Aerospace airships and stratospheric Dark Sky Stations come in. Notice they're made almost entirely of plastic and carbon fiber, and they're cheap ways to haul 20 tons of freight up to the top of the stratosphere and do work up there? Now I don't think John Powell is anything other than a really interesting space enthusiast. However, I do suspect that, sooner or later, the geoengineering reaver capitalists will either steal or suborn the technology of giant stratospheric airships to loft whatever it is they want to send up. And that, for me, will be very sad. But it's a likely route to doping the stratosphere to reduce insolation, and thereby to make the world safer for continued burning of fossil fuels.

    Anyway Charlie, if you want to blog on this, riff off multiple factors and the ways they interact, not just one. It's more realistic and more interesting.

    967:

    I'm not sure I buy the idea of the U.S. as a solar loser. There's plenty of land here which is usable for solar, and Mexico, much of which will soon be uninhabitable, is right next door.

    If the U.S. does lose during this transition it will be due to lack of vision and pro-oil propaganda, not geography.

    968:

    Auricoma The Butlerian Jihad against nuclear reactors only seems to have gained traction in some countries ... As already noted France & Ontario seem to have escaped it - why can't we?

    H Water supplies are going to be the oil of the 21st Century Back to Mesepotamia of the Bronze Age, in fact. Water Empires. ( WIth real, actual water, rather than an analogue of it. ) Wind: see the link I provded earlier, regarding energy storage utilising "pumped storage" from overnight wind-power, yes?

    969:

    PLEASE!!!

    Back in the early eighties, we had a speaker at a PSFS meeting, who told us AT THAT TIME the SPS already had the Environmental Impact Statement complete, and that the power density being beamed down was single-digits of kw (or was that watts?)/m^2, and wouldn't fry a buzzard flying through.

    970:

    Biden said, weeks ago, no pardons from him.

    Consider: 2016, the pics of the overweight scum with the "Fuck your feelings" t-shirts.

    Since Friday: thousands upon thousands of people in cities all over, dancing in the streets.

    Little difference, d'you think?

    971:

    Ok, first of all, I'm picking you up by your damn lapels, and slamming you against the wall.

    There is no "Democrat" party, any more than there's a "Rep[ublic" party. The ONLY people who say "Democrat party" are Trumpists. So either pretend you actually speak English, or I'll assume that you are a Trumpist.

    So a simple typing mistake results in threats of physical violence and false accusations of being a Trump supporter.

    I feel sorry for you in that case.

    972:

    How do I know it's "a simple typing error" when I see, over and over and over and over in the white-wing media that usage, and in the same media support for the armed thugs literally threatening the rest of us for being people of color, or gender, or, even worse, ON THE LEFT?

    Fuck, ESR is on a list I'm on, and the other day he said that if he lived in MI, he would have been tempted to kill the governor.

    Then there's one of my daughters, who lives in OR in real Trumpist country.

    And another daughter, from VA, who told me her uncle, who makes zip, and is living in her grandmother's house, called my ex (her mom), literally crying that Biden's taxes were going to kill him, and he was going to lose the house.

    And you wonder why I'm touchy? Why should I "forgive" when no one's apologized and asked for forgiveness?

    973:

    I know, I know. I was trying to fuel Charlie's dislike of Elon and inspire in him a terrifying dystopic vision of a brutal orbital death-beam-based solar dictatorship.

    974:

    Let's see, would he make a good Grand Moff Musk?

    975:

    Charlie,

    When you guys discuss Solar, renewables, "Fossil fuel" you are missing the big picture.

    • A gallon of gas stores more energy than a battery ever will.

    A century from now we will still be using gas, diesel, jet fuel, for transportation. They have known how to synthesis fuel from carbon dioxide for over a century. The gas companies will still be around, making fuel for cars locally rather than extracting it from the ground.

    I googled the blog and found no mention of the new Michael Moore documentary, Planet of the Humans. He posted it on YouTube when the pandemic hit because theaters were closed.

    This is the documentary:

    Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Directed by Jeff Gibbs

    This a great article discussing the documentary and the massive attack by Green Billionaires, Foundations, and shills who make their living pushing Green who tried to ban the documentary.

    ‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary

    You guys may not like what the documentary is saying, but for me, this is a massive source for articles and video going into my story folders.

    976:

    No, Musk's title will be The Elon of Mars, with Earth merely a province of his interplanetary empire.

    977:

    I would say that mdive's general tone in the original comment is neutral or mildly positive towards Democrats.

    I don't know how much slack you should give people from outside the US for using what is a rather subtle local insult. You could look at general tone and then ask about what is meant, but that might be too much to ask.

    I suggest that your use of violent imagery-- "Ok, first of all, I'm picking you up by your damn lapels, and slamming you against the wall."-- doesn't help the conversation. In a way, it's milder stuff than ESR's fantasizing about killing a governor, but on the other hand, it's directed towards someone who's actually going to read it.

    978:

    There's a reason I didn't mention troll-bait like Planet of the Humans. Because I didn't feel like catching any trolls. Anyway...

    The problem we've got is that we have to get carbon out of the air from the levels it's at now, and keep it out for around 100 years. The reason this is a problem is summarized as, "it's the weather, stupid." Specifically it's massive fires, methane coming out of the permafrost in Siberia, hurricanes, and crop failures.

    The evidence is pretty simple: our species has a documented fossil history of at least 300,000 years in modern skeletal form. There's good archaeological evidence that someone invented agriculture--and lost it--around 22,000 years ago in Israel. Civilization is, at best, 5000 years old, and it sprang up worldwide around that time, in populations that had been separated for at least 15,000 years.

    The thing that ties this jumble together is a stable climate. When the climate is stable enough that you can do the same thing year after year and get fed, agriculture becomes a realistic choice for high population numbers. While people invented agriculture many thousands of years before civilization arose, civilization arose only in places where agriculture was predictable enough to support large numbers of people for generations.

    The problem with climate change is that it destabilizes the climate. Agriculture will increasingly be unpredictable, meaning that fewer of us non-agricultural parasites can be supported. Who will have the resources for manufacturing jet fuel out of the air, when they're not sure if they've got enough flour to make it through the spring?

    That's the tradeoff, and I'm pretty sure people will abandon gas power when food shortages become increasingly rampant. You may think otherwise, but I'm comfortable agreeing to disagree on that.

    979:

    I was trying to fuel Charlie's dislike of Elon and inspire in him a terrifying dystopic vision of a brutal orbital death-beam-based solar dictatorship. Well, especially since there is an obvious workaround for the conversion from photons to electricity back to photons again. (Solar panel efficiency is roughly linear in light intensity, hence "concentrators") Has Elon talked about the upsidesdownsides of that approach? [1]

    [1] Mirrors in space, to concentrate sunlight!!! Something that might work if all humans were rational and good and if it was immune to failure.

    980:

    My current thought about big structures in low Earth orbit at the moment is:

    "Holey, holey, holey, Kessler almighty. Doesn't anyone here know how fast the crap all moves up there..."

    And if you've been to a church, you'll know the hymn I'm messing up here.

    For everyone else: if we're worried about mere satellite breakage causing a Kessler cascade, imagine what fun we're in for when giant solar thingies get shattered by rapidly moving debris...

    981:

    You need to put these mirrors quite low anyway to for maximize death-beamness, and they will have high area/mass ratio, so debris will re-enter fast.

    982:

    Civilisation, in the sense it is normally used, is rather older - metallurgy and civil engineering may be only that old, but agriculture, fixed and fairly large settlements, advanced pottery and record keeping using symbols are all older. It didn't start with a bang, but gradually.

    I am always a bit suspicious of claims about the prehistory of Israel, because archaeology is a political matter there. Do you have links to that evidence?

    983:

    Current solar is, far as I can tell, chasing local optima down a dead end path. It needs too many rare earths, and its output does not store well, so all it is really good for is nullifying air-con power requirements. Now, that is not a small market, and it is likely to get a lot bigger with climate change.. But if I am going to predict the next century, energy wise, it is going to be the century of the molten salt.

    Salt is available in quantities without meaningful limits, and while building systems for it that handle the corrosion problems well is technically challenging, it is a challenge of the "Grind" type - there is no fundamental breakthroughs needed here, just a lot of engineering time spent on building good salt-drying facilities, and designing hermetically sealed plumbing systems.

    So, the typical power plant is going to be a thermal source - concentrated solar where the solar resource is good, a fission pot where it is not - heating a very large pool of molten salt, which is then used to spin turbines, with the pool acting as a power reserve, permitting load following supply without the need to overbuild the (expensive) heat sources.

    This is going to be the future, because none of this requires scarce materials - Concentrated solar mirrors are glass and aluminum, which we will never run short on, and nuke plants are steel and concrete, ditto.

    984:

    If you look at my post, I referred to American dependence of warfighting with oil.

    A key question is, what would they be fighting over, and where?

    The USA doesn't have any credible continental rivals on its borders (not unless it fissions into two or more post-USA successor states).

    Meanwhile, its military is optimized for fighting colonial wars overseas -- the thalassocracy is protecting its trade and energy influence. With a move away from oil, though, the need to maintain a big presence in Middle Eastern oil exporters is deprioritized unless they find some post-oil relevance (not impossible, there's a lot of sunlight in Arabia).

    Which leaves me wondering, what is the US military for, in the post-oil era?

    I'm not sure it has much of a role. The USMC and those LHDs and LSDs would remain useful for disaster intervention overseas, but the big strike carriers are less flexible and only really useful for dominating shipping lanes and supporting a ground invasion. What other use are they? The US army: again, fighting wars overseas, currently focussing on long-drawn-out colonial occupations in support of, again, the oil/coal baron's goals. And you can't use Abrams tanks and Apache gunships to occupy a semiconductor fab line or a megacity of 40 million people -- not without destroying whatever value you're trying to take and protect.

    985:

    How do I know it's "a simple typing error"

    mdive is an Aussie. I'm a Brit. We don't live in your media environment and we're tone deaf to these tiny nuances of American political discourse.

    Fuck, ESR is on a list I'm on, and the other day he said that if he lived in MI, he would have been tempted to kill the governor.

    ESR is a fucking racist. Source: I spent a morning at a gun range with him once. Take the words "arab" and "muslim" and replace them with "jew" in his tirade and he'd have fitted right in with the SS. That was over a decade ago, so his rightward drift is nothing new.

    986:

    I think it best that you understand how much the difference matters to the U.S. left. Phrases like "Democrat Party," if used in the U.S., will result in a stream of profanity at the very least. It's a very deliberate attempt by the right to make "Democrat" mean "white ni**er," and I'd be quite inclined to beat the crap out of anyone in the U.S. who used the phrase. I don't intend you any violence, but please stay in your lane!

    987:

    whitroth People actually believe the lies that taxes on the poor & even the middle-income ( Under $75k pa ) will see increases? Um - translate for a European: MI - Minnesota? Michigan? OR - Oregon? VA is Virginia, I assume.

    H There's good archaeological evidence that someone invented agriculture--and lost it--around 22,000 years ago in Israel. ... Or had it knocked out of their hands by the last big glaciation? Civilization is, at best, 5000 years old Err, no, SEVEN thousand see here (Catal Huyuk) - well outside "Israel", however that might be defined.

    988:

    Open in incognito window ... A WARNING from the Atlantic. As in The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024.

    989:

    I'll always remember a video where a young Daniel Radcliffe was answering mail from Harry Potter fans. At one point he had a letter from XXXX in Madison, WI. "I guess it's not from Madison, Women's Institute". He said, cheerfully.

    990:

    At last, an heir to the title created by Wernher von Braun.

    991:

    Which leaves me wondering, what is the US military for, in the post-oil era?

    I keep asking the question differently in conversations with friends. If we got away from oil and quit giving money for it to all these folks who don't like us... How much overseas military do we need. Unless we really do want to be the world's cop. (No thank you.)

    992:

    and we're tone deaf to these tiny nuances of American political discourse.

    To be blunt most people in the US are tone deaf to many things that set him off. Took me a while to just let him vent on this blog. But to be honest he would piss off most hard left folks I know personally in the US.

    993:

    I think it best that you understand how much the difference matters to the U.S. left. Phrases like "Democrat Party," if used in the U.S., will result in a stream of profanity at the very least. It's a very deliberate attempt by the right to make "Democrat" mean "white ni**er," and I'd be quite inclined to beat the crap out of anyone in the U.S. who used the phrase. I don't intend you any violence, but please stay in your lane!

    Learn something new every day. For those who didn't watch Kamala Harris' acceptance speech, it's worth noting a few things:

    One is that the Democratic Party is getting serious about black women. Purportedly (and I know of no reason to think otherwise), black women are the most loyal democratic voters, and black women like Stacey Abrams have made huge differences in promoting democratic voters in general in places like Georgia.

    Another Harris' mother was an Indian immigrant, while her father was black. Therefore, by American racial sorting, she's a black woman in power.

    But anyway, getting back to the "white n**r" slur, I'm personally more interested in owning it than getting angry about it, since the strategies, tactics of Martin Luther King and Black Lives Matter are doing rather more to improve the country then are those of the swastika wielding, pointy-hatted, opioid addicted super-spreaders and the politicians who pander to them.

    Still, I think in general, it's worth treading carefully around US racial and political terminology right now. There are any number of people that will take it wrong.

    994:

    My current feeling is relief that my worst fears about the Second US Civil War haven't come to pass, despite quite a lot of things lining up in exactly the way I thought would be most likely to cause it.

    (Discussion here starting at 1203)

    So here we have Trump obviously having lost, a significant minority of the US population convinced that the election was stolen, and still no nuts on the streets with guns. Even though during the count Trump (or one of his underlings) tried to kick things off in Philadelphia while counting was under way. All that happened was that some guys with guns turned up, the Biden supporters carried on having a party, the police kept the two sides apart, and then everyone went home. In some alternative history that night is remembered as the starting gun on Civil War II, but not in this reality.

    We've still got to see what happens when the courts kick out all of Trump's frivolous lawsuits and someone tells him that its now checkmate and he's lost (assuming he even knows how to play chess; he probably thinks you win by arguing with the King and grabbing the Queen by the pussy). But I doubt its going to be any different. Even if Trump calls on all true Americans to come and defend democracy by surrounding the White House on Jan 20th, I don't see many people listening.

    995:

    I've never heard him go on about Jews, but the rest - color me unsurprised. But I've actually known him since the only Boskone I've ever been to, 1979.

    996:

    &ltshakes head in anguish&gt

    Yes, they do. You need to really understand that the brainwashing since the late seventies (I'm deliberately ignoring all the outright racists and bigots who joined the GOP after the Civil Rights Act of '65), the end of Equal Time under Reagan, and esp. Murdoch creating Faux "News" in the nineties, they are, really and truly, brainwashed. They do believe it. (You've got the state abbreviations correct).

    One thing, as I typed that, that gives me hope, were the countries in PA that went for Biden - the Lehigh Valley (Allentown and Betheleham), and the part in the center of the state, part of the old "rust belt".

    I suspect one thing that got a lot of them was his promise that I heard weeks ago, that he was going to be the most pro-union President they'd ever seen.

    About "civilization", the oldest layer of Jericho is NINETY-FIVE HUNDRED years old, and had - I forget whether it was about half a thousand people, or 2k but you don't support that on hunting and gathering.

    997:

    Civilization is, at best, 5000 years old Err, no, SEVEN thousand see here (Catal Huyuk) - well outside "Israel", however that might be defined.

    I'm not sure Catal Huyuk gets defined as civilization. Wikipedia flags it as a proto-city, meaning it lacks planning and centralized rule. In Catal Huyuk, there's no evidence of social stratification, and all the buildings are approximately the same size. I'm not an expert, but I think of it as "early experiment in high density living" rather than civilization.

    The bigger point, though is that if we've been around for 300,000+ years, why did crop domestication spring up in South America, the Middle East, China, probably South Asia, New Guinea, and (for all I know) Africa, Australia, and possibly the US Pacific Nothwest within 1000-2000 years ago? These people weren't talking with each other, so there's no chance of the idea spreading. More likely the climate became stable enough for agriculture to take off, and it stabilized, people ran with it to the extent they could Australia and the PNW didn't get that far in terms of population densities, while the Middle East and east Asia transformed the world.

    That's also the warning: there's no guarantee that if we make the world more like it was in the last interglacial 120,000 years ago, that civilization will survive. It depends on predictable crops, and absent those, we're likely in real trouble.

    998:

    We would have seen a convoy, and there was none. They'd have been taking the Interstates....

    And then there's the thought I had this morning: libertarian militias just ain't gonna work, because a libertarian would never become a hero. Their "enlightened self-interest" would prevent them, for example, from ever throwing themselves on a grenade to save his squad.

    999:

    Oh... on the other hand....

    I think I mentioned getting a "military grade" laser pointer a couple weeks ago, noting that I understand it's really hard to aim a firearm if you've been blinded momentarily by one.

    Did any of you realize what I'm talking about, living in a DC 'burb, that my SO and I were literally worried about being attacked by these white-wing armed thugs?

    Perhaps I should mention, as we were watching Biden and Harris' victory speeches, that we were both deathly afraid of an assassination?

    Yes, it really, really is that bad.

    1000:

    So here we have Trump obviously having lost, a significant minority of the US population convinced that the election was stolen, and still no nuts on the streets with guns. It's still in play[1], but there has been a lot of preparatory defusing/calming work done by many people. (Including law enforcement.) Predictions like yours have been a part of it. We all need to continue; part of it will be to not feed into people's biases built on top of counterfactual priors; e.g. some RW Americans are genuinely worried about left wing gulags. (I curate my Rogues' Gallery but keep it to a fairly small number of individuals, in the 10s.)

    [1] Neighbor a few houses away has been shooting all weekend, somewhere between 500 and a thousand rounds so far. There's a reason I didn't have a Biden sign in my yard or a partisan sticker on my car. Sounds small caliber (e.g. 22 rimfire (5.56 mm rimfire?)) so I assume they're just letting off steam because their Orange God Emperor is losing, while imagining defending against rampaging hordes from an urban hood about 5 miles miles away. (Mixed urban/rural area.)

    1001:

    How do I know it's "a simple typing error" when I see, over and over and over and over in the white-wing media that usage, and in the same media support for the armed thugs literally threatening the rest of us for being people of color, or gender, or, even worse, ON THE LEFT?

    By remembering something about the posts made by the person using the phrase, and realizing that (a) they aren't American, and (b) generally support policies that are considered "left-wing" or even (clutch pearls) "socialist" in America.

    1002:

    Btw, did any of you see the story of the Philly cops, who'd had a warning call, arrest some armed white wingers from VA in a Hummer who were on their way to the Convention Center, to stop the counting the other night?

    1003:

    Yes, it was on the CBC site.

    1005:

    Eric Raymond, author of fetchmail, and "Catherdral and the Bazarre". Widely known in the computer field. Also a Libertarian and gun nut.

    1006:

    The molten salt pilot projects that I'm aware of have all been abandoned. I don't know why (I haven't bothered to find out), but I imagine that the "theory versus practice" test came down heavily on the side of practice. Trifling matters like realized performance in the field, reliability, capital cost, and so on.

    PV is proven commercial and taking off: the serious constraints on its growth are now things like the availability of glass, site designers, and power semiconductors.

    Rare earths* were never constraining for PV and with actually-existing nanotechnology, as opposed to the Drexler kind--nanometre-scale control of material surface properties--the proportion of rare earth dopants is reducing. We're using a lot less of them per square metre of PV array.

    Neither molten salts nor PV help with seasonal availability of electricity in places with dark and calm winters. But we have EHVDC (extremely high voltage direct current) transmission line technology and international treaties for that problem.

    • Despite the name, rare earths are abundant. They just don't form concentrated deposits that we can mine easily. We can get any amount we want if the price is right, and the price doesn't have to be very much higher than it is.
    1007:

    Hmm. So an egalitarian society is necessarily not a civilisation?

    I would remind you of the major neolithic and bronze age constructions of western Europe (think: Stonehenge), where there was clearly social and economic coordination over a large area and large number of people, but no settlements larger than a good-sized village.

    1008:

    Random thought on the US electiion system arising while looking at the NYT's interactive results graphic: -

    The Senate Problem disappears if/when 100,000 coastie families (left coast, upper right coast) move to each of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Utah is also feasible.

    With working from home now a thing, and Starlink about to become a thing, this could happen of its own accord.

    An organised Democratic Party wouldn't rely on that, though. "Want to escape the city? Move to picturesque Montana! We'll help with the costs!"

    1009:

    EHVDC lines are not exactly beloved by those who have backyards on their planned pathways. New Hampshire has been blocking such an hi-tech line from bringing Canadian hydro power to New England.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_%E2%80%93_New_England_Transmission

    1010:

    Paul & others - - about DJT "not" losing G W Bush congartulates Biden on winning a fair election. I think it's called A HINT, don't you?

    1011:

    Heteromeles @ 966 I'll stop you right there, and ask that you consider the five factors: --Water --Food --Power and power distribution --Oil --Geoengineering

    To which we must add a sixth, communication.

    Starlink opens up all sorts of possibilities in geographically dispersed (uncontrollable) communication, just as PV arrays do with electricity generation.

    Outsiders have estimated that the bill of materials for a Starlink satellite could eventually get down to about USD 50,000. Launch costs are in the neighbourhood of 100K per sat. The receivers are about $1K; that could be halved with mass production and the learning curve.

    If SpaceX is willing to sell the sats (or just open-source the plans) and launch slots ... interesting times await.

    Rather than geoengineering, I think the fifth factor is damage to the natural environment, or loss of ecosystem services. Geoengineering is a possible response to one or two parts of this, but doing it will make other parts worse (e.g. acid rain). Not to mention creating food instabilities and fresh-water availability instabilities.

    There is also a seventh factor, culture, which will have surprising effects in the coming 80 years.

    Oh, and demographics. The effects are probably more predictable than those of the other factors, but perhaps not.

    1012:

    Stonehenge is one of those great examples. So far as anyone can tell, it was seasonally occupied. Oh, and while they were in the time scale of the eastern Mediterranean bronze age, they didn't have any of their own. And the evidence currently suggests they were more herders than farmers at least at first, although since we're talking about Stonehenge, I won't be surprised if that interpretation gets overturned as well. The best mental analog I've got for Stonehenge at the moment is that it's like a County Fairgrounds for southwest England, seasonally occupied by various events and set up to temporarily house and feed the partyers for the few weeks they were there.

    That's the little warning, that non-classical examples don't look and didn't work the same as what we're used to.

    My canonical example is the one, well-documented case we have of an archaic state arising from consolidation of a chiefly culture, where the citizens went from a lineage-based society where families owned rights to distributed parcels of land, to classes of peasants tied to districts on land they didn't own, overseen by a hierarchy of managers with a god-king on top who owned all the land and divvied it up. That would be Hawai'i, and Kamehameha I was the one who united the chain after the paramount chiefs spent about 200 years setting up the system I just described separately on the islands. The unification was observed by westerners. Moreover, the Hawaiians got literate fast enough that they wrote down their oral history in the nineteenth century, and it agrees well with the archaeological record. This is a far better record we have of how states arise than from anywhere else, but few think about it that way.

    While Hawai'i is the last archaic state to form, it's missing a lot of the things we think of when we talk about state formation in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Grains, for instance, and densely-packed, walled cities are missing from Polynesia.

    Similar "weirdness" shows up in Dark Emu, when talking about the sophistication of the Australian aborigines, and their eel-based aquaculture and fire-based "agricultural systems" of various roots and grains (including an Australian true rice). In the aboriginal cases, the evidence for year-round residence in villages is scanty to entirely lacking, even though there were undoubtedly settlements that could be called villages--they were just occupied seasonally.

    The Pacific Northwest also has a history of its horticultural practices looking so unlike European models that until recently, westerners refused to believe that they cultivated any plants, and just called them remarkably sophisticated, anomalously dense, hunter-gatherers.

    What I'm trying to point out is that the current trend is to try to recognize the diversity of cultural practices, rather than trying to come up with diagnostic typologies on a linear scale of increasing complexity. I think this is useful, both for SFF writers trying for an alien perspective, and for futurists who get worried about what the world will do if we run out of something like maize or rice.

    1013:

    Actually, ESR maintains a dozen or so Open Source projects of varying importance, to the point that anyone using Linux is about 99.9 percent certain to be running some of his code. In addition to having written The Cathedral and the Bazaar he also exposed Microsoft's Halloween Papers, which was a big deal at the time, and he was a major influence in Netscape's decision to Open Source their browser code.

    Unfortunately, ESR's politics are similar to those of General Jack D. Ripper from Doctor Strangelove - very much out of the John Birch wing of U.S. politics - and any of Jack D. Ripper's quotes from the movie would be perfectly in character coming from ESR's mouth. My technical-self very much admires him, while my inner decent-human-being is absolutely appalled - there's no batshit Right-Libertarian political theory he won't repeat as if it's gospel.

    He is not merely human. He came to us directly from the Platonic realm to embody the idea that expertise in your field is not expertise outside your field.

    1014:

    I don't disagree, but I'm looking at the stuff Charlie tends to be interested in which is about critical bottlenecks and emerging new technologies. That's why I pointed to what I consider the utter insanity of geoengineering. It's not that I think it will be terribly effective, it's just that it's the kind of moronic, (right wing) technological fix that various heavy-handed lobbyists may push through, so that they can both make lots of money on contracts for the new industry, and keep on with their old business.

    Starlink may be successful, but it could as easily be a recipe for a Kessler cascade. Or worse. After all, we're living in a society that was created on the promise of energy too cheap to meter, trash that doesn't need to be sorted, an internet that will free us from the stranglehold of big companies, weapons that were so terrible that they were supposed to end war, and cheap fertilizer that will keep the world fed until we learn to control our population at under a billion.

    Just based on that list, would you accept a new technology more sophisticated than a vaccine as a panacea right now?

    1015:

    Outsiders have estimated that the bill of materials for a Starlink satellite could eventually get down to about USD 50,000. Launch costs are in the neighbourhood of 100K per sat

    It's worth noting that several launches back, somewhere around number 5 I think, one of the satellites in an enclosed stack failed part of its checkout. It already wasn't worth the cost of opening the fairing to repair or replace the problematic satellite.

    I have pondered the possibility of reducing the complaints from astronomers by taking 5 or 6 Starlink frames, bolting them together, keeping the control systems and payload from one but redistributing it around the inside of the larger box, and putting a 1m diameter telescope inside. Renting time on a large telescope in a better viewing climate is already common-place, these would just be in orbit instead of on a mountain in South America or wherever.

    1016:

    There will always be people with Opposition Reflex.

    Let 'em have a few winter blackouts. They'll come round.

    1017:

    There are no panaceas--for a global civilisation with a highly diversified economy and culture, it's impossible for any one thing to have much effect all by itself--but I think Starlink is an interesting hydraulic compressor that could ramp up pressures in closed socities quite a bit over time.

    Kessler syndrome will not be caused by Starlink satellites. Left to themselves they and their fragments de-orbit in months, because they're flying in thin air. The reason for their short lifetime is that they run out of propellant for the attitude thrusters that keep the thin side pointing into the wind.

    1018:

    I should say, impossible for any one thing save global thermonuclear war.

    1019:

    EHVDC lines are not exactly beloved by those who have backyards on their planned pathways. True, though given a right of way with an existing AC (above-ground) transmission line, I'd be happy if it switched to DC. AC is noisy and leaky. (I'm assuming DC is not noisy.)

    1020:

    The Senate Problem disappears if/when 100,000 coastie families (left coast, upper right coast) move to each of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.

    I'll buy you a one way ticket and you can move and apply for citizenship. There is a reason those places are so thinly populated.

    Weather.

    Most people who move there do it for the oil/fracking boom money (oops) or they are retired or past the mid point of their life rich folks. The rich buy large ranches with huge houses they can hole up in during the winters and can afford to keep them warm. Many of the younger leave because they are just totally fed up with being cold.

    The original settlers of European decent were the ones that wanted to be left alone. You need LOTS of acres to raise anything plant or animal and things tend to be spread out. A lot.

    But if you want weather approaching something like Moscow but without the rivers to allow big cities to grew, by all means head there.

    1021:

    Has anyone read Servigne and Stevens's book How Everything Can Collapse?

    I'm watching the pennies and don't want to buy it if it doesn't have valuable things to say. Some of the reviews I have read suggest it does; others seem to focus on EROEI, which I have other texts for.

    1022:

    People fighting again HVDC have no idea of the difference between DC and AC. I wouldn't mind HVDC under my house. I'd personally rather not live within a few 100 feet of a 750KV line.

    When in Los Angeles for a conference a year ago they were having fire north of the city where really close to the offices of the people running the place. A lot of the folks at this tech conference were wondering why they didn't just bury the HVAC lines. I mentioned that HVAC and HVDC are NOT the same thing. At all.

    1023:

    Kessler syndrome will not be caused by Starlink satellites.

    But they might screw up launch schedules for a month or few.

    1024:

    EHVDC lines are noisy in fair weather and quiet during a rainfall. It's the opposite with AC.

    1025:

    politics are similar to those of General Jack D. Ripper from Doctor Strangelove

    As in Real Estate there are 3 important things.

    Fluids, fluids, fluids.

    1026:

    Photovoltaics have two major advantages right now: Any idiot can put them up, and feedin tarrifs mean that they get paid the same no matter if there is actual demand for their product right now or not.

    In order to work, a molten salt loop needs its plumbing to be airtight, so that no moisture can leak in, because 800 degrees salt + water means rapid corrosion. This is not a real issue for the nuclear folks, because, well, all their plumbing needs to meet that standard anyway, so one more reason to triple check the welds does not really make a difference.

    But once the practicalities are all worked out for reactors, the same tech will get applied to solar, and it will have superior actual economics to photo-voltaics, because a molten salt solar plant is a load-follower with very large energy storage buffers.

    1027:

    Also, you want Dick Cheney as your neighbor? Seriously.

    I know someone who moved to Wyoming. He made his pile and retired in his late 40s. While he likes California, Wyoming doesn't have income tax. So he bought an estate there and spends six months and a week each year in residence, so that he doesn't have to pay state income tax. Apparently many of his neighbors do likewise. They spend the bad-weather months in their "snowbird" homes in California and elsewhere.

    Anyway, he's down the road from Dick Cheney, who he's met. But not gone hunting with.

    1028:

    A breakthrough that would make all this cheaper (IE: Buildable by welders not holding nuclear certification..) would be a way to make such loops moisture resistant. I wonder is it would be enough to just add a vacuum chamber at the top of the loop? Should dehydrate salt as it passes through..

    1029:

    Kessler syndrome will not be caused by Starlink satellites. Left to themselves they and their fragments de-orbit in months, because they're flying in thin air. The reason for their short lifetime is that they run out of propellant for the attitude thrusters that keep the thin side pointing into the wind.

    Oh dear. I didn't know much about Starlink, so I dove into Wikipedia for it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink). Then I doublechecked the Wikipedia entry on Kessler Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome).

    And the blunt answer is that yes, the lower end of the Kessler Syndrome cloud does completely overlap with the planned orbit of Starlink at 550 km.

    Want to double check?

    Moreover, I'd simply point out that we've been through the megalomania of Gates, Jobs, Brin, Z-berg, and the others, and we're now stuck with a few ultra-wealthy individuals owning systems that apparently know things about us that we do not know.

    And people are so enthusiastic about this that they want yet another white male billionaire to have control over their information, because it's all worked out so very well.

    We're also stuck with systems that have taken nonviolent struggle activities, like strikes, that used to require organizing hundreds or thousands of people, and automated them (distributed denial of service) so that a single person can do the attack. This kind of electronic warfare helped put Trump and others in power, and you want to make it even easier for everyone to be hit by psyops and other attacks.

    And we're talking about climate change and resource shortages, so this is the ideal time to blast hundreds or thousands of disposable satellites into disposable orbits? That doesn't sound carbon neutral or resource efficient to me, really. What am I missing.

    Now why do I have to be the one to point this out?

    Shiny is really not a sufficient excuse any more, is it?

    1030:

    "Huge electric grids are huge manufacturing problems, and as we've learned in the western US, without proper design and upkeep they're shockingly dangerous fire hazards in high winds"

    No. Not at all. The long distance transmission lines under discussion aren't a fire hazard. It's the local lines and transformers that are a hazard. The 800+ kV lines are much too far from everything (including their other phase) to ever get blown into anything or each other. The level of "proper design" needed to avoid clashing is so low that its like saying that "proper design" is needed to have wheels on the bottom of the car instead of the top. Like it wouldn't work at all if it didn't have at least that level of design.

    There's no fire risk related reason that solar plants need to be even on the same continent as the end user.

    1031:

    I was seriously depressed Tuesday night, to the point where I was wondering whether I should have the moderator excise my comments from all Charlie's blog entries, how quickly I could move my 401k to Ireland, and if I could stay under the radar long enough to get out of the country.

    I'm much better now, thank you.

    Re: Biden White House vs. McConnell Senate. I'm doubtful either Georgia Senate seat will go Democratic. Miracles happen, even so. Regardless, Darth McConnell doesn't hold all the cards - there are significant schisms within his membership, plus, as noted, a number of Republican senators up for election in 2022. The narrow margin maintained by the Republicans gives individual senators much more power to make deals across the aisle, and weakens McConnell's ability to impose discipline. I very much doubt Mitt Romney, for example, will go along with everything he wants.

    Consider also that Moscow Mitch can't hide in Trump's shadow any longer; failure to pass legislation will fall squarely on his slumping shoulders. Finally, though completely amoral, McConnell is a realist, and knows he will have to pass critical legislation to protect himself and his caucus.

    Now as to El Cheeto Grande: I've been watching the rats start to inch away from him for a while now, and I think he'll see an increasing number of defections as former toadies make "principled" stands against his futile attempts to hold on to power. The margins of most of the state electoral results are too large to change by disputing individual ballots, and as noted by Greg @1010, George W. Bush has congratulated Biden on his victory.

    The Republican Party is now hooked on the horns of a dilemma of its own making. They won in 2016 by driving as far to the right wing as possible, gathering disaffected votes against one of the least liked Democratic presidential nominees in history, and slaving themselves to the random bullshit thrown out by the Current (soon to be former) Occupant and the right wing infosphere. Seeing the end coming and expressing some vestigial conscience, groups like the Lincoln Project have started what could be a prolonged civil war within the party, which will not help them in 2022 or 2024.

    John Scalzi's last two blogs are spot on, particularly this one. We have a serious, endemic problem with white supremacy and racism in this country, in case anyone hadn't noticed. Those who are vulnerable to the arguments of the right wing racists have been fed a steady diet of propaganda for, well, probably the entirety of the "American Experiment". Countering this entrenched pipeline of hatred will be the work of generations, although demographics are also going to make this group weaker over time. We will, however, be fighting against the vast resources of the plutocrats like Koch and Murdoch. I think it's about time the rest of us embark on a vigorous information operations persuasion campaign to affect hearts and minds.

    1032:

    As a point of information, a friend of mine, who is right wing (I don't actually think he's white wing) worked for KB&R late nineties, I think, and ran an office for them in Germany. He met Cheney, and, right-wing as he is, he thought Cheney was, and this is a direct quote, "creepy".

    1033:

    The molten salt pilot projects that I'm aware of have all been abandoned.

    I think you're writing off the technology much too early in its lifetime.

    The example that comes to mind is Crescent Dunes in Nevada, which is illustrative of many startups. They built an experimental system that worked and discovered a few things with the prototype they wouldn't do with a production model - needs more mirrors, needs a bigger salt tank, other stuff you expect to find out during the R&D process. Then they got shafted by the finance people because the test unit wasn't a money making power plant.

    (Another occasional poster here knows more about that plant than I do.)

    Even if you're not a solar power fan, it is obviously desirable to perfect molten salt technology with mirror arrays because the nuclear power fans are already sniffing around it. Humanity really needs to work out the molten salt teething problems with nice safe sunlight before some optimistic loony tries running it through a hot fission pile.

    1034:

    Agreed. McConnell has a lot coming down on him. For one, I do think it's possible that the Dems may win at least one of the contests in GA (which reminds me, I need to send Stacy money). For another, he kept saying that he wasn't going to do stuff without the WH's ok... yeah, about that.

    And now he's talking about COVID relief asap.

    Also, yes, more of the GOP will pull away. I can easily see Romney, and probably a few others, voting with the Dems, once they don't have the Hairballs' psychos coming down on them.

    He's going to have a real problem not confirming Biden's Cabinet, for example.

    1035:

    The long distance transmission lines under discussion aren't a fire hazard.

    I have a memory that some of the long distance lines in CA are 100 years old. So they are not 100' up in the air with a 30' separate. Or whatever.

    And everyone is a fault. No one wants the money to come out of their pocket to replace something that "is working". Not the ratepayers, shareholders, whoever. So it is left as is until it doesn't work any more. And now there's a bit of a backlog needing an eye watering budget to address.

    1036:

    And the blunt answer is that yes, the lower end of the Kessler Syndrome cloud does completely overlap with the planned orbit of Starlink at 550 km.

    Yes.

    https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/orblife.htm
    The following table provides a very rough guide to the lifetime of an object in a circular or near circular orbit at various altitudes. Altitude Lifetime 200 km 1 day 300 km 1 month 400 km 1 year 500 km 10 years 700 km 100 years 900 km 1000 years

    So without specific measures to deorbit them (retrothrust, deployable drag structures), it looks as if the Starlink sats would stay up two or three decades.

    1037:

    I do hope that those predicting the end of the Republicans are correct.

    But McConnell and company were quite happy to stonewall everything they could when Obama was President, only to be rewarded with (eventually) a Republican of sorts President with Trump.

    Despite the blocking of items, the voters didn't punish the Republicans.

    And while they admittedly lost the White House, and lost some Senators, they made gains in the House and at the State level (think more gerrymandering given it is yet again apparently time to set electoral boundaries).

    So while the Trump supporters may at the moment be in despair, I don't think the Republican Party as a whole is - I suspect on the whole they view the election as a success particularly given whoever runs in 2024 for the White House won't have to own the mess Covid leaves behind economically in the next couple of years.

    Or, to put it another way, experience tells me not to write off the Republican chances in 2 and 4 years so quickly given people were saying during G.W. Bush's time that the Republicans would be unable to win future elections any day now.

    1038:

    "Which leaves me wondering, what is the US military for, in the post-oil era?"

    Which is why I generally add a good chunk of the cost of the military (and veteran's) to the balance sheet as "fossil fuel subsidies"

    1039:

    I think that the Democratic Party has what it needs to impose some lessons on the Republicans. First, Biden's AG can arrest a lot of Republicans. I'm fine with that. We have a major problem with corruption in the U.S. and it has to be ended. (The AG can arrest some corrupt Democrats too - I'm not picky!) Turn the AG and the FBI loose on Trump and his people, including Moscow Mitch, and things will change.

    Second, if Biden makes a cabinet or Judicial appointment and Moscow Mitch won't let it come to a vote, just name the person to the position on a temporary basis. If Mitch complains, the reply should be "I've to four syllables for you Mister McConnel: Merrick Garland." then make the appointment and let the whining Republican babies complain. If they won't give the cabinet member or judge a vote, fuck 'em.

    Third, Pelosi can hold hearings on everyone that might be a suspicious person from the Trump administration. She can start by asking Kavanaugh who paid off his debts, then she ask Barret the hard questions. (Also - call this number four - every judge Trump appointed needs an FBI background check ASAP, because you know that Trump didn't do those right.)

    Fifth, Pelosi can explain to Moscow Mitch, using words of one syllable, that no budget will be considered until he allows a few House bills to be debated in the Senate. Explain to Mitch that given the ability of the House to hold hearings and the President to give executive orders and make temporary appointments he's pretty much helpless.

    After six months of this, ask Mitch how he feels about a bi-partisan government! But first, he needs a lesson!

    1040:

    For one, we have a few years to clean up a lot of the voter suppression, at least for federal elections.

    For another, Lindsay Graham was on the air yelling that we have to change the election rules, or no "Republican" will ever again be elected President!!!

    Oh, and this is lovely: Ellen just showed me that 97% of the Navaho Nation voted for Biden. Take that, white men!

    1041:

    On that subject, what do people think of fairfight.com? (Stacey Abrahms, I think) Seems to rely on the observation that most voter suppression relies on the imposition of relatively low barriers. (ie, inconvenience) As such, modest boosts seemed to make a pretty big difference in Georgia.

    1042:

    There aren't any long distance transmission lines of the sort that we're discussing that are 100 years old,

    For powering industrialised countries at high latitudes during the winter from solar power thousands of km away, we're talking 800 kV DC as an absolute minimum. Such things didn't exist until relatively recently. (I'm not sure of exact dates, but certainly after Thyristor valves became available in the late 70's). Nothing built before then is any kind of indication of what we're discussing. This is all going to be new build stuff. There's no chance of reusing anything other than perhaps an easement, should one happen to be going the right way, which is unlikely.

    1043:

    Ah, update. The first 800kV line was commissioned in 2010.

    1044:

    There were implications of using older lines and that the lines in use were not a problem due to modern designs.

    My point is a LOT of the California issues are about transmission lines in use today that would not allowed to be built due to current standards. And they swing in the wind and arc. And start fires. Switching to HVDC or modern lines HVAC would require replacing these lines. And nobody wants to pay. At all.

    HVDC with modern lines would be great. All it takes is money and will.

    1045:

    What are you missing? You're missing the bigger picture.

    I get it. I used to be anti-Musk. I still dislike what is reported of his personal behaviour. But I have reviewed what he has achieved, and decided to ignore his motivation for doing it all and his flaws.

    (Although: unlike the others you mention, his motivation is not to Own All The Things.)

    In 2006 electric cars were a punchline; so were grid-scale batteries. In 2020, they are the conventional wisdom. In the west, that's pretty much down to Musk.

    With Starlink Musk is bringing the internet to people who were previously excluded from it and therefore from society. Sure, he'll take money from rich people while the sats are over wealthy countries, but they'll spend a lot of time over Africa and Asia too. There are a lot of villages there that would love to have ready access to information and advice. Sure, some of it will be horrible information, but Africans are smart. They'll figure it out much faster than USians did.

    And fossil fuel consumption? Seriously, rocket launches are too small to even be a part of the rounding error in fossil fuel consumption. You'd have a much bigger payback agitating to get flying for pleasure banned (#nofly), and for urban design for walkability (#peoplenotcars).

    But Musk is ahead of you. The new rocket will run on methane, which can be synthesized using PV arrays and lithium batteries from water and carbon dioxide. That's the plan. That's more expensive than fossil methane, but fuel costs are minor for rocket launches so the cost is easily bearable.

    Similarly 30,000 200kg satellites are not even worth putting in the rounding error when it comes to the waste we generate, or the interplanetary dust that rains down on the Earth.

    The potential benefit of allowing another billion people to contribute to solving our problems? I don't know, but it seems like it's worth trying.

    Despite the risk of Kessler syndrome, which would kick civilization all the way back to the dark ages of the 1980s.

    1046:

    "Inconvenience", you mean like allowing only one polling place in the county and moving that outside of town, so no public transport?

    Or just throwing people off the roles because they'd not used, say, a middle initial?

    Or were you thinking, as my late ex told me about 2000, when a Black friend was headed to the polls, and at the end of the block, a state trooper looked at him, and said, "you don't want to be hear"?

    1047:

    First point. I'll be blunt. I don't tend to be as reactive as whitroth (and I do tend to overlook a lot of his comments as a result of his volatility), BUT.

    The only thing that kept me from a similar explosion about that particular usage of "Democrat" was the knowledge that this is an international blog and that given the lack of awareness about USian political nuance here (and a matching one, I was not aware of the "Brit" issue) the comment was possibly innocent.

    Look. Former Democratic Party political activist here, up to the state level for several years. I can remember when that particular usage started coming up to "own the libs." We're talking nearly Reagan-era, for certain by Gingrich's benighted political dominance as I remember far too damn many uses of "Democrat Party" being used as a sneering epithet in the 1990s, while I was on the political battle lines.

    It's not a new thing, and if you're going to pretend to knowledge about USian politics, be advised that such usage is going to get a volatile reaction.

    Second. Addressing the nuclear issues. I strongly suggest that people look up the following: "Washington Public Power Supply System bond default."

    I worked on that particularly complex securities litigation for almost a year and a half as a paralegal for a particularly not-very-nice US defense/computer systems contractor (with later ties to Abu Gharab) doing legwork for the Department of Justice, who represented the Bonneville Power Administration in that massive class action lawsuit. That case ensured that no major bond issuer or financier in the US was at all going to risk financing a nuclear power plant for at least a generation.

    Short version: original plans for 20 nuclear plants in the Pacific Northwest reduced to 5, only one went into operation, and the $2.25 billion municipal bond default is the largest municipal bond default in US history. Estimates of around $20-$24 billion would have been required to complete it, and two of the sites were problematic and could have run costs higher. Let's just say that no serious nuke plant proposals have been floated in the US since then.

    Third. Moving suggestion to deal with the Senate situation? As others have pointed out, one winter and many coasties are gonna run away screaming. I live in red (well, maybe magentaish county easing into lavender) Eastern Oregon. Between connectivity issues (satellite? Gimme a break and try to convince me that it works at all decently in Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in the US at one mile at Hat Point. Much narrower than the Grand. But it has dirt and trees and grass. And cranky rattlesnakes), weather issues (even in global warming -50 Fahrenheit is not unknown), and transport issues due to weather (fires, floods, blizzards and windstorms have shut down the nearest Federal Interstate Highway between Pendleton and the Idaho border multiple times)--and many folks can't stand it. That's just my corner on the edge of that part of the world. Comparable issues exist in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and etc. It is a rough, arid country. Parts of it are perpetually windy, ergo, wind farms. Water availability is complex. It's not just the cold winter that is the challenge; it's the combination of cold weather, communication issues, and isolation that can be problematic for a lot of people.

    Fourth. Heteromeles says: "Anyway, scrap the idea of greenhouses feeding cities. I spent years doing my PhD in greenhouses and I've got a hobby greenhouse out back right now. They're resource intensive, fiddly, and therefore expensive. Basil, marijuana, and hydroponic lettuce work great as greenhouse crops. Wheat, corn, soy, potatoes, and industrial hemp do not. With staples, it's critical to get the cost of production down below what you can get out of a greenhouse, so field agriculture will matter. Keeping fields functioning with climate change is our #1 challenge, because without them, cities starve, infrastructure crumbles, and the whole thing snowballs. The other thing is that the biggest carbon sequestration pool we have access to are agricultural soils, so changing farming methods is our only reasonable shot at getting carbon out of the air.

    I concur, based on research I've been doing for my now-released near future agripunk corporate soap opera dystopia, The Martiniere Legacy. Additionally, scaling greenhouses to replace field produce crops is going to be a challenge. A better usage would be to take a look at the soil quality surrounding major urban areas and convert high-quality agricultural soils back to agricultural usage.

    As for commodity crops such as grains, potatoes, oilseed crops and the like...you just can't do those in adequate volume in greenhouse form.

    There's a lot of work happening right now in agritech to increase carbon sequestration wherever possible. Problem is, there's also a lot of crap coverage about it, especially (sorry) in the Guardian. But if you look at agricultural financing and venture capital news sources...there's funding taking off in these area. I particularly suggest AgFunderNews as a decent source.

    Ah well. End of rant. With luck it's not too boring.

    1048:

    Well, I'd start with a) fixing the DOJ (which means putting a lot of acting ethical people in charge, to get rid of the Trumpers), and b) looking into any ties between Mitch McConnell and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who in 2019 invested in a reasonably large aluminum factory in Kentucky after Mitch lifted sanctions. One would hope that nothing untoward has happened, but any suggestion of wrong-doing needs to be checked and cleared. Probably worth checking other legislators and people in the executive who have been claimed to have ties.

    Also worth Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao's connections to China via her family's shipping business. I'm sure everything is aboveboard, but it's worth being sure. Especially since she's McConnell's wife.

    Although these are very rude suggestions, I'm quite sure that McConnell would never descend to blocking appointments that might clear him of the suggestion that he's done anything improper...

    1049:

    Not a bad rant at all, and thanks for the link to AgFunderNews. I'm trying to figure out if there are ways to help San Diego farmers get into carbon farming. Unfortunately, the new farm bureau rep seems to have quaffed far too much red koolaid, unlike their predecessor, who could do a decent job listening.

    1050:

    Agripunk corporate soap opera dystopia?

    Love it. I might want to read that... esp. since one of my true, real-life terrors for maybe 30 years has been some year, some asshole 23 yr old MBA, working for an agribusiness, decides that taxes, etc, indicate that he'd get better ROI for his group by NOT PLANTING 10% of the US cropland, and worldwide famine hits....

    Remember the riots in Mexico and Central America, when they sold the corn for ethanol, and the price of tortillas went through the roof a few years ago?

    1051:

    I think molten salt technology is fairly well understood. The Oak Ridge Experimental Molten Salt Reactor of 1964 ran without problems, and it was concluded that it was a viable technology. Just switching the thing off and walking away for decades is not a safe strategy, though.

    For solar, molten salt is inefficient. It was viable when PV panels were much more expensive than tracking mirrors. Now, not so much.

    1052:

    I should mention that there are a few books I want to buy now, incluing DLD... but I'm working out a way to buy ebooks that does not involve B&N for my Nook (they hide the files you buy from them, and no, they're NOT on the visible storage when you plug it in with a USB), and ACE from Adobe is broken past CentOS 6, and it's epub, or figure out how to run either Nook Study under wine, or how to run android (android studio, or a VM with android) to run the kindle app....

    What a pain. HATE DRM.

    1053:

    I'm not particularly anti-Musk, I just think he's not always right. Hyperloops and the Boring company are two examples thereof.

    And yes, I can see the benefits of giving broadband to people who don't have it, particularly if you're the only game in town and you're supplying it.

    However, here's what you don't get about the Kessler mess: if it gets particularly bad, it makes it very hard to replace satellites, including GPS and weather satellites. Unfortunately for us, weather satellites are now a necessary part of civilization, not for forecasting our weather, but for helping route cargo ships away from hurricanes. GPS, of course, has become a ubiquitous location technology.

    The other thing to realize is that cargo ships are the cheapest and most efficient means of transport available, cheaper in some cases even than pipelines. Making it harder for them causes supply shortages.

    Given the choice between good international shipping and cheap international broadband, I'd say the former gets priority. It's hard to live without food, and many people depend on the stuff that moves in ships.

    1054:

    Addressing the nuclear issues. I strongly suggest that people look up the following: "Washington Public Power Supply System bond default."

    Ah, WPPSS pronouced whoops.

    Is it true that the bond was issued by 5 elected officials who really didn't understand what they were getting into?

    1055:
    Heteromeles says: "Anyway, scrap the idea of greenhouses feeding cities. I spent years doing my PhD in greenhouses and I've got a hobby greenhouse out back right now. They're resource intensive, fiddly, and therefore expensive. Basil, marijuana, and hydroponic lettuce work great as greenhouse crops. Wheat, corn, soy, potatoes, and industrial hemp do not. With staples, it's critical to get the cost of production down below what you can get out of a greenhouse, so field agriculture will matter. Keeping fields functioning with climate change is our #1 challenge, because without them, cities starve, infrastructure crumbles, and the whole thing snowballs.

    I concur also, but note that the problem is somewhat self-fixing on a global scale.

    Food gets short, people don't travel so much. Less "need" for biofuels (maize ethanol, palm oil biodiesel, sugar cane ethanol - egregiously destructive practices all)

    Food gets short, it gets short for animals too. Animals are slaughtered (food) and then the land that grew their feed can grow crops for humans. (Except grassland, but grassland is going to be ex-grassland - the Great North American Desert returns.) Sure, yields might be low and food prices rise a bit, but so what? There will be enough food.

    Food gets short, suddenly our minds are focussed on producing it more efficiently. In many parts of the world yields are small fractions of what is possible, due to lack of access to knowledge and to funds for equipment and works.

    Complex adaptive systems adapt. They adapt in lots of ways concurrently, over different timescales. If people starve, that's down to feral political elites controlling access to resources. A political decision, not anything to do with nature. Same as the Great (Irish) Famine and the Indian Famines in the British Raj, and the famines that helped precipitate the French Revolution. All political.

    Grain harvests might be our #1 challenge, but it's not a big challenge. We'd be a sad excuse for a civilization if we couldn't meet it.

    1056:

    "Eric Raymond, author of fetchmail, and "Catherdral and the Bazarre". Widely known in the computer field. Also a Libertarian and gun nut."

    Thanks. I had assumed it might have been initials for an author but couldn't pick who. And your answer explains why.

    However, even after after 46+ years studying and working in IT - aka "computer field", I must say I still don't recognise the name - but then I generally haven't been working in the technical side of the open-source/unix/linux space where I suspect him being "widely known in the computer field" would come from.

    1057:

    I think you need to work through what a "political failure" means. In the case of the US, something like a failure of the wheat crop would be disastrous, as we don't have stockpiles to replace it, nor can we grow another crop to prevent shortages. Unfortunately, the US government developed a policy of stockpiling surpluses to prop up crop prices (government buys the surplus). This was expensive and often the quality was lacking, so the program was dead by 2008.

    A comparison is with the Inka. The Andes regularly experience localized crop failure, and a big part of the Inka empire was about storing food (easy at high altitude, due to cold, dry conditions) and moving it around. We're likely going to have to do that going forward, as crop failures become more common.

    How much danger are we in? Well, over the last few decades, US universities have been downscaling shuttering plant pathology departments (which study plant disease, and produce field workers who can identify diseases, as well as epidemiologists who can track and predict them). Meanwhile, international shipping is bringing about one new pest per week to the US, although fortunately, most of them are not serious. And, rather more worryingly, a number of diseases which were controlled through selection of resistant cultivars have evolved to infect resistant strains. One of these is wheat rust.

    Ultimately, the political problem with things like crop failure right now is that the experts know the risk but the politicians have chosen not to prepare. Thus, it's in the same basket as climate change. And coronavirus outbreaks, for that matter.

    1058:

    Heteromeles says: "I'm not particularly anti-Musk, I just think he's not always right. Hyperloops and the Boring company are two examples thereof."

    You can add self-driving cars to that. When it snows up here you can't see the road lanes at all for days or weeks and Tesla's system needs to see road lanes. To be fair Tesla isn't the only car maker with loony self-driving cars.

    1059:

    Here it's "fun" in winter when there's enough snow and ice on the ground to cover up the lane markings. Suddenly the lanes become a matter of where there are tracks in the snow, and in many places four lanes transform into three, or something. Even though there are over-the-road signs, not enough people seem to look at those but look only at the road ahead, and then the lanes disappear. This of course creates somewhat ambiguous situatios as some people still remember the summer lanes and drive like they existed, but some drive in the winter lanes...

    Having some kind of automation there would be kind of dangerous, unless everybody had the same system and agreed with the lanes.

    The most fun situations I've seen are on narrow roads, where there are two lanes, one going in each direction. When there's no snow, it's easy to drove a bit wide and then make room when somebody comes towards you - many people do drive a little bit too much away from the right side of the road. However, if there's enough snow, there often are three tracks for wheels, and people drive on the rightmost and the middle one, which becomes a slight problem when two cars need to pass. The snow (and ice) makes it harder to get out of the grooves. Fortunately, these are usually roads where people drive slowly, but it's very annoying even then.

    Then there's of course the nice snow and ice on the ground and snow in the air combo. I'm not sure what kind of sensor would be sufficient there. (Of course that kind of weather is something it would be smart to leave the mk I eyeball at home, too, and just... not drive.)

    1060:

    GregvP Not so sure .. Some of the fuckwit greenies here would rather go back to medieval living conditions than have (HORROR) Nuclear Power - they are that stupid. Later ... Oh dear .. the "great irish famine" was also the great European famine - only England & Belgium did not starve - & even there, there was lots of grievous hardship & some deaths.

    Dave P Lets alter that very slightly ??? The Republican"Conservative & Unionist" Party is now hooked on the horns of a dilemma of its own making. They won in 2016 by driving as far to the right wing as possible, gathering disaffected votes against one of the least liked Democratic presidentialLabour/PM nominees in history, and slaving themselves to the random bullshit thrown out by the Current (soon to be former) Occupant and the right wing infosphere. Um.

    1061:

    Just a quick note on HVDC. I worked on that in the early-mid 90s (sponsorship at a GEC company which became part of Alstom). We were running up to 400kV back then. Distance-wise, the company had done the Manitoba Hydro link a few years earlier in the 80s, which was 937km. There's no technical reason why you couldn't extend that way further - you just need one area (e.g. a city) to need significant amounts of power, and another area (e.g. a dam in the mountains) to be able to generate that power cheaply. The main limiting factor for long links isn't electrical, it's either physical (earthquakes are not your friend) or political.

    By the way, the first cross-channel HVDC link between England and France was set up in 1961 - it used mercury-arc valves in a time before thyristors were available.

    1062:

    I think Starlink is an interesting hydraulic compressor that could ramp up pressures in closed socities quite a bit over time.

    Starlink won't do that, in its current form: here's a user's review of the beta test ground station. It requires a router the size of a (current) desktop PC, a satellite dish the size of a, well, satellite dish, and mains power (it draws on the order of 120 watts).

    A generation 2 or generation 3 Starlink satellite with bigger antennae and more PV cells to power it could conceivably talk to a tablet or laptop with a rectenna built into its outer shell/screen lid: an order of magnitude less surface for signal pick-up, but compensate at the satellite end.

    That would be somewhat disruptive and is conceivable within 5-10 years.

    (But a pocketable phone with Starlink access is still some way away.)

    Currently a contract is $500 up front and $99/month, and although that cost is ridiculously cheap for satellite internet and is only going to come down, it's a much bigger obstacle to disrupting closed societies because how are you going to pay for it without attracting the attention of the secret police?

    1063:

    Please do read what I say and put a bit more thought in. Of dourse I know that Stonehenge and the other circles were not settlements or even the centres of settlements, but that is irrelevant to what I said. And I said that there WERE no large settlements in Britain of the time.

    The point is that there had to be social and economic coordination involving thousands (probably tens of thousands) of people over several decades and hundreds (possibly thousands) of villages, with some reasonably advanced use of mechanics to construct it, for several of the phases. That's a reasonable basis for saying that there was something tantamount to a civilisation in the area.

    It is strong evidence that a society based on large, dense settlements is NOT the only way in which a civilisation can develop.

    Similarly, most of the industries we think of as critical (including iron smelting) have been done (and often were done) very successfully on a small scale. Say, 10 workers and 200 people to support them, and the results of other technologies would be obtained by trade. Inter alia, we know that there was active trade over all of the British Isles and to the continent from the neolithic era onwards; I have walked and cycled over some of the trade roads.

    Bugger agriculture - that's not as critical as is made out in a lightly-populated, fertile area - what matters is the social structure and culture of trade (probably in ideas as well as goods). It is quite likely that the non-centralised civilisations were destroyed by the centralised ones, not because the latter were more efficient, but because they made raising armies easier.

    I heard from a reliable source that the health of the average Briton didn't equal that of the neolithic people until the 20th century. And, despite common belief, the neolithic people were both hunter/gatherers and farmers; indeed, the only thing it is worth farming under those conditions is a source of calories, to supplement the gatherable seeds and nuts. Climate matters as much for both, of course.

    If you look carefully at the record, you will see that things as not as black-and-white as almost all 'experts' make them out to be. Think laterally - especially when creating science fiction!

    1064:

    A breakthrough that would make all this cheaper (IE: Buildable by welders not holding nuclear certification..)

    3D printing, maybe.

    It seems to be making rapid inroads in high performance rocket motor manufacturing, because the welding required to make something like an RL-10 is extremely fiddly and precise and if any welds fail your billion dollar spysat just turned into a firework display. NASA's experimental approach suggested it can produce high-quality (spaceworthy) motors in half the time as conventional welding, at reduced cost and with better quality control.

    Admittedly space-grade pricing is a bit much for a mass produced energy storage technology, but if there's enough demand prices may come down a way and a properly engineered system should have a very long life to amortize the initial costs over.

    1065:

    In response to the statement this morning on Irish radio (https://twitter.com/morningireland/status/1325725852966019072?s=20) that a US=UK trade deal was not a priority (from a leading congressman) and in the teeth of repeated cross-party commentary that the IMB would scupper any such anyhow...the UK government is signalling its intent to go ahead and legislate to break international treaties and laws. https://news.sky.com/story/brexit-government-vows-to-reinstate-any-uk-internal-market-bill-clauses-removed-by-house-of-lords-12128287?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter So: no-deal crash out + raging pandemic + USA washing its trade hands of the UK...Charlie, stock up on pasta and beans!

    1066:

    For solar, molten salt is inefficient. It was viable when PV panels were much more expensive than tracking mirrors. Now, not so much.

    What you use it for is load smoothing. Don't use mirrors, just use electric heating elements powered by a grid interconnect fed by PV cells; at night, run a working fluid through a turbine to generate base load while the PV cells are inactive.

    With any thermal reservoir, bigger is better: the square/cube law kicks in and ensures that you lose heat due to passive conduction more slowly the larger it gets. So this is a grid-scale solution to the needs of those industries that require constant power, e.g. aluminium smelting plants and other industrial processes, and can't easily switch to direct PV/wind. It may also be useful for municipal CHP in cold regions.

    1067:

    Ahem: you're in the USA. Tor.com (who publish DEAD LIES DREAMING) do not impose DRM on their titles. I believe you can buy and download a DRM-free epub copy from the Google Play Books store -- the Kindle version on Amazon was likewise DRM-free.

    1068:

    Brian Lucey BoZo is willy-waving for the benefit of the fuckwits & the "Murdochs" The Lords will totally trash the relevant clauses of the "internal market bill" - & can guarantee to at least delay it until well into 2021 - which negates the whole point of the wretched thing. It will go round several times, I can assure you. Amyway, Biden has siad, quite clearly: "Hard border in NI/Eire means NO TRADE DEAL AT ALL."

    I suspect we are going to miss the "deadline", but that something will be cobbled togather before 31/12/2020. Also ... "sky" is a Murdoch mouthpiece - can you trust it?

    1069:

    I'm not particularly anti-Musk, I just think he's not always right. Hyperloops and the Boring company are two examples thereof.

    If he was always right he'd be the first billionaire who ever was.

    Remember Steve Jobs? Want me to list some of his very-wrong ideas that never made it out of Apple's labs except in prototype form: sometimes he had to be given what he'd asked for and shown why it didn't work as an engineered product: examples included the Black G4 Cube Mac (the actual shipped version is silver) with passive cooling, the Black G4 Titanium-alloy Powerbook (kind of grey-gold color scheme).

    1070:

    Conrarywise Even the daily Hate is saying that a "Deal is there to be done" & hinting that the "deadline" actually isn't ...

    1071:

    The old wax storage radiators writ large :-)

    1072:

    "Self-driving" is massive over-sell for cars today (and quite possibly for a very long time to come). Marketing it as "autopilot" is grossly misleading to the point of criminal -- the public don't understand that aviation autopilots are just glorified cruise control and think airliners "fly themselves", so they apply this assumption to their cars and wind up dead.

    If, however, you call it "adaptive cruise control with lane tracking and a few bells and whistles like semi-automatic overtaking" and accept it's for use on low-to-medium crowded highways in good driving conditions, then it makes sense as a luxury extra, kind of like heated seats and reversing cameras. Computers being dirt-cheap these days, it makes sense in that context.

    (Actual self-driving, a la the DARPA grand challenger competitions, is more appropriate for military applications -- "send this supply vehicle cross-country as fast as possible with ammo for the fire team that's pinned down" -- where you can accept some risk of failure or collateral damage ("if it doesn't get there on time they're dead meat").

    1073:

    I suspect its the parts of the bill that override the devolved powers that the government are really determined to keep.

    1074:

    Yes, exactly. They're still a thing in some British dwellings that don't have a gas pipeline passing near enough to tap into.

    (Underfloor electric heating is gaining in popularity and can be fed from e.g. a Tesla Powerwall battery, but that's all pretty new, i.e. this-century tech. Meanwhile night storage radiators are still sold, although they're a pain in the arse to use: I've lived with them in the past, I co-own a flat (a good chunk of my retirement fund, basically) that has to have them because Scottish Gas Networks want £15,000 to dig a 20 metre trench.)

    1075:

    Yes. The Conservative and Unionist Party government in Englandshire have to be a bit concerned about the polling in othe countries: support for independence at 54-58% in Scotland, and now hitting the dangerous 48-52% level in Wales. Trying to override devolved powers to prevent a referendum or exit would be explosive and counter-productive, but they could conceivably try use those powers more subtly, to make the devolved governments look bad by dicking with their spending/funding.

    (Admittedly "subtle" is not the right word to describe the Johnson hive of scum and villainy cabinet.)

    1076:

    "...support for independence at 54-58% in Scotland, and now hitting the dangerous 48-52% level in Wales. ...

    And the Tories have set a political precedent that 52% on a referendum justifies anything.

    1077:

    It is a pity that Dave The Proc dropped off - my understanding is that even Northern Ireland is beginning to think that, just perhaps, being ruled from Dublin wouldn't be much worse than being ruled from London.

    As you say, the situation in Scotland is 'interesting', and I agree with you and arbee. My suspicion is that it will evolve like this:

    Malicious polemic and dirty fighting until May, when the SNP has a landslide, and the Conservatives are demolished. Sturgeon asks Johnson's successor for a binding referendum, and is refused, offensively.

    She starts a consultative referendum, which the gummint fails to stop in the courts, which passes, comfortably. Scotland then takes the SoS to court with a judicial review, which I think would side with Scotland.

    Whereupon, we are in Trumpian territory ....

    1078:

    Yep.

    Wildcard unaccounted for: who the UK Prime Minister will be by May. (Almost certainly not Johnson.) A Brexit ultra might actively give Scotland a shove -- it's full of lefty backsliding remoaners, after all, and they can play hardball during the divorce negotiations so that the Scots serve as a horrible object lesson to everyone else.

    (I'm pretty sure the ultras have zero respect for the Unionist tradition in conservativism.)

    1079:

    The trouble is that even if we don't oversell lane-watching radar-equipped cars they become dangerous the moment you put them on not-too-perfect roads. As Mikko Parviainen notes the "fun" starts when four lanes become three or one track becomes one and a half because of the snow. Then, under all that, or apart by itself, you have the sheer "joy" of sheets of black ice.

    What we need is a positronic brain, in each car, whose sole purpose would be to shut off the automatic driving system completely and tell the driver to shape up and drive.

    1080:

    I note that we've had the tech for over a decade now to build cars that only exceed the speed limit on roads where that's permitted. (IIRC it's mandatory on high-end cars sold in Japan: you can only push the pedal to the metal in your supercar on a race track.) It's pretty fine-grained.

    We've also had black ice/frost warning systems on cars for 20+ years.

    And we have in-car GPS with OTA updates for road works/congestion.

    So it should be practical for driver-assist systems to detect when conditions are sub-optimal and first warn the human, then demand human oversight, then finally cut out entirely (as happens on Airbus fly-by-wire airliners if the autopilot can't figure out WTH to do and switches to "alternate law", i.e. do exactly what the trained monkey tells you to).

    1081:

    On orbital lifetimes in LEO, it turns out that there's an ISO standard on it:

    ISO 27852:2016 Space systems — Estimation of orbit lifetime

    Alas, they want money for it.

    1082:

    I have had several near-accidents caused by such technology, both when driving and when using other equipment; it's always a potential danger when things suddenly stop working. If they restricted themselves to warnings and blocking really extreme behaviour, it wouldn't be a problem, but that's not how bureaucrats think, and not how even existing mechanisms work.

    Note that I am speaking as a cyclist, more than a driver. I utterly LOATHE the people who religiously stick to speed limits, because it encourages them and other people to drive in ways that endanger me, when that could trivially be avoided. Double white lines and similar are worse and, if those start to be enforced automatically (as has been proposed), I shall have to give up cycling and even walking on many roads.

    Of course, the cars COULD be forced to give me a safe distance, but there are practical and (above all) political reasons that won't happen.

    1083:

    People go nuts when I slow down because I'm behind a cyclist.

    No. I'm not going to kill someone just because the person behind me didn't build any slack into their commute!

    1084:

    Yes, but that's not what I was referring to; while I could describe why I say what I do, I am not going to (for reasons given elsewhere on this blog). My general point is that automated limits are a two-edged sword and, if they are decided by politicians, bureaucrats or execsuits (as they will be) in steady of pragmatic safety engineers, they are quite likely to increase the risk rather than reduce it. There are a lot of examples from other fields that I could mention, but people are discouraged from putting 'mandatory safety equipment/rules' as the cause in accident reports.

    1085:

    I agree. Also, far too many engineers will do as they are told when instructed to make compromises. I know one or two people who have resigned over the years over that sort of thing. They all had colleagues who just grumbled and did as they were told.

    On the speed limits side, I haven't seen an analysis for the UK but I do remember reading about rich residential areas having significantly lower limits than poor ones across the pond.

    1086:

    AND We have a vaccine 90% effective, large test. Downside - has to be stored COLD - except liqid Nitrogen is CHEAp, so ... It'll do for a very good start.

    "Speed Limits" Yeah, because fuckwit politicians scream "THink of the CHildren!" - locally we have 20 mph on everything, even where all the traffic, including the buses is doing 30 ... - & me coming down hill on the bike, also doing at least 25 mph, oh dear. Or a local-ish main road, limited to 40 for the same idiocy, where it should be the normal 60. This wanking brings the law into direpute

    1087:

    Charlie I'm pretty sure the ultras have zero respect for the Unionist tradition in conservativism. Much too true - I've heard & seen them at it - they are following Stalin's line of SocialismFascism in one country" OTOH, I still think we are going to get a (shit-sandwich) "Deal" with BoZo proclaiming victory - after all, it's his usual modus operandii, isn't it?

    1088:

    I think you need to work through what a "political failure" means. In the case of the US, something like a failure of the wheat crop would be disastrous, as we don't have stockpiles to replace it, nor can we grow another crop to prevent shortages.

    At which point the US discovers a new (old) purpose for the military - go and take what you need.

    1089:

    According to the story it has to be kept at -80 Centigrade, which is not "ultra-cold", its actually a fraction below the sublimation temperature of CO2 (-78 C), and that's probably why they picked that temperature.

    There is an article discussing the likely logistics (US only) here. Other industrial countries with good roads should also be able to manage this without difficulty; its a small matter of money and organisation. Poor countries without good roads are going to be another matter.

    1090:

    Nah. Provided that the roads are even usable, there isn't a problem. Half a century ago, I was at my uncle's in Zambia, 8 miles down a (mediocre) dirt road, and he received a delivery of bulls' sperm in liquid nitrogen, and a top-up for the Dewar flask in which he stored it. A few countries can't manage that, but not many.

    The logistic problem is that it is different and more complicated to use, which means that trained, skilled staff is needed. A bunch of squaddies won't do - so, by-bye the British gummint's plans - but we're used to that ....

    1091:

    "People go nuts when I slow down because I'm behind a cyclist."

    If I was the cyclist I'd be going nuts too.

    I cannot stand wankers who creep along behind me sitting on my arse, where I can't see them but I can hear them and I know there is something continually present in a maximum threat position on and on and on and it won't fuck off. I can't even pull out to dodge drains in case they happen to pick that moment to realise that there actually isn't anything stopping them coming past and finally decide to do it.

    Just come past. You've got an engine, use it. Get your arse somewhere where I can see you and so can take account of what you're doing in my own driving, instead of having to creep along constantly cringing at this ever-present threat where I can't see it. Yes, there is buckets of room. You're not driving a bus. How wide do you think your Micra is, for goodness' sake? No, you do not have to leave several metres clearance in case the vehicle suddenly jumps violently sideways of its own accord with several g of lateral acceleration. 20cm clearance is plenty, it's more than enough.

    These days I'm on a mobility scooter rather than a bicycle, but the speed is not much different, the actual width is the same, and the fantasy width in the heads of the divots with the vertical-axis cylindrical lenses in their specs is if anything even greater. They won't even come past when they're coming the other way, now.

    1092:

    Yeah, which works really well on that kind of scale...

    1093:

    It's one possibility. I suspect that he is sufficiently vulnerable within the Conservative MPs that he will take a hard line, not sign a deal, and blame the evil EU. The third, and most 'interesting', possibility is that he orders a shit sandwich, a majority of the Commons is against it, and either (a) he tries to ram it through bypassing Parliament or (b) he loses an important vote on it in the Commons.

    1094:

    20cm clearance is plenty, it's more than enough.

    No it bloody isn't! That constitutes terrifying close! It would be terrifyingly close even if I was riding a recumbent trike where at least it would be part of the trike that was the furthest thing out rather than part of my anatomy.

    It's also a breach of the Highway Code - pass cars with enough room to allow car doors to open suddenly without any chance of collision, and give cyclists the same amount as room when passing as you would when passing a car.

    1095:

    [ Neo-Tories, Ultras, Conservatives. Wheeee, it's Fun With Acronyms Day... ]

    1096:

    The Pfizer vaccine is only the first to report tentative Phase 3 test results, expect a slew of other test results in the next few weeks from other manufacturers. Most of those vaccines have less problematic logistics requirements for their nostrums and some may only require a single injection rather than the more complicated two-injection treatment schedule the Pfizer vaccine requires.

    What will be giving a lot of people hope is the claimed 90% effectiveness of the first vaccine to report completing a successful Phase 3 test schedule -- note that this does not guarantee success, just that the people with something to gain think it's enough of a success that they are willing to make this announcement now. If they're lying then it's heads-on-pikes time and they know it. If it's true then a lot of the other vaccines should be in the same ballpark for efficacy and they will be produce in large numbers too, multiplying the total available vaccinations that could be carried out by, say, early summer worldwide to a couple of billion, perhaps.

    1097:

    "...and give cyclists the same amount as room when passing as you would when passing a car."

    Yeah. 20cm, but you need (car width - bike width) less road space to do it.

    Those bloody diagrams in the Highway Code are part of what I'm complaining about. The problem has got noticeably worse since they put those in and gave all the Nesh Gits On Bicycles propaganda groups something to point to.

    Vehicles on your arse are a danger because you can't see them, you can't keep track of what they're doing, and they're in position to go over the top of you if things go up the spout. Vehicles coming past are fine because they are moving in a direction perpendicular to the separation, with no component of velocity towards you, and even if you do decide to steer into them you only bounce off the side instead of going underneath. Also, they are there and gone in a second or two, whereas the ones on your arse stay there creating difficulties for ages.

    1098:

    whitroth @ 844: For those worried about what the military might do, a tranche of ballots in PA came down a while ago: PA Military ballots:
    4134 Biden
    1076 Trump

    Not that surprising. I think I pointed out before that when he called veterans "losers" and "suckers", service members & veterans wouldn't forget, nor forgive.

    1099:

    The problem with Het’s theories on climate stability triggering agriculture is it ignores the relatively significant technical advances that occurred in the 50k years prior to agriculture’s emergence. He acts like humanity was in some kind of steady state and then “boom” agriculture abs that’s really very much not what happened

    In reality human capabilities especially with regards to hunting. Archery for instance was a compete game changer. 20K-5K BC was an extremely fast period of technological advance for humanity, which cumulated in agriculture.

    If you look at megafauna extinction and other signals it’s more likely agriculture emerged due to a population exploration and associated over hunting, not a sudden period of stable climate

    You also need to examine the converse of his theory

    • if agriculture was primed and ready to explode simultaneously across the world (not a mainstream notion by the way )
    • then in order for agriculture to NOT emerge you need an unstable Clare everywhere there are significant human populations in order to retard it
    • the climate period 20k years ago was not THAT unstable
    1100:

    Right. The agriculture proponents seriously over-estimate the reliability and productivity of pre-industrial agriculture, and seriously under-estimate the productivity of hunter-gathering in lightly populated, fertile areas. For high population densities, you need agriculture, not least because they hunt-out and gather-out the surrounding area, but primitive agriculture in itself wasn't the great improvement it was made out to be.

    As I have posted before, it would have been (technically) perfectly possible to have taken a different path, and to have developed woodland and perennial management rather than clearing woodland and planting annuals and biennials. It would have been a very different world!

    1101:

    David L @ 855:

    There are less than 13 million people living in Pennsylvania and it takes them 5 days to count votes?

    Counting votes is easy. Just put paper into the slot.

    But getting the ballots ready for the slot is physically time consuming. Open up the envelopes. Verify correct envelope was used. Flatten out the ballot. Verify the signature. Dates. Witness sig (PA?). Etc... Document what came in by who and that they have now voted.

    This takes time and I'm thinking all verification steps must be done by 2 people.

    Especially when you have another 2 people looking over your shoulder, arguing every step of the way whether you've used the proper procedure to open the envelope?; was the correct envelope used?; does the signature match the signature on the voter's registration card (in my case I registered to vote more than 50 years ago, do you think my signature looks the same today)?; are the witness signatures valid?; did the voter use the correct ink to fill in the little ovals and/or color within the lines? - rinse and repeat for every race on the ballot

    ... basically obstructing every step of the count to try to prevent counting as many votes as possible. That will cause the count to drag on and on and on and ...

    And then there's the bomb threats and threats of mass shootings, which have to be taken seriously & dealt with just in case it's not just some crank caller, but another Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh or Dylann Roof.

    1102:

    “ As I have posted before, it would have been (technically) perfectly possible to have taken a different path, and to have developed woodland and perennial management rather than clearing woodland and planting annuals and biennials. ”

    Thats pretty similar to what the west coast of North America did

    However it’s hards to achieve the same population density or to establish a powerful ruling elite

    Which means a culture taking that tack would have likely been conquered by one that took the agricultural tack

    1103:

    As I said in #1063 ....

    1104:

    Heteromeles @ 857: The key word missing from your explanation is "former" in front of the word "president."

    Former presidents have lifetime secret service protection, but they are no longer law enforcement officers. It's an interesting question if a secret service officer guarding a former president acts more as a loyal bodyguard or more as a law enforcement officer, but I suspect if the FP's crime was serious enough, they would act to enforce the law first, since their oath is to the constitution, not to the man. Unfortunately, the constitution essentially says that the president is the head of national law enforcement, and IIRC SCOTUS has ruled that sitting presidents cannot be legally charged for their actions while in office, so it is hard to prosecute a sitting president for abetting terrorists.

    Not SCOTUS. It was an opinion from the Office of the Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski during the Watergate investigation. Later formulated into official Department of Justice "policy" during the current administration and carried to extreme by the current Coverup Attorney General. The SCOTUS has ruled that civil suits against a sitting President can proceed while he is still in office.

    And that policy has never been tested against violations of STATE law; e.g shooting someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue in New York, New York.

    1105:

    David L @ 864: Now in NC we allow mail in ballots which show up early to be counted ahead of time. Most counties did it once or twice a week in the prior month. Just that the results were sealed. Plus we had just over 2 weeks of "early" voting. (My wife worked a polling place.) So by dawn on Nov 4 the results from all 2662 voting locations in NC, all early votes, and all received mail in ballots (by Nov 1) were processed and the results known. But we still, as of Nov 7, have 99,000 possible mail in ballots that might show up between Nov 4 and Nov 12. I doubt most will show but they might. And add in an additional 41K provisional ballots. (Someone showed up and something was odd so their ballot got set in the special box to be hand processed later.)

    Also note that the North Carolina Republican Party sued the State Board of Elections in an attempt to prevent counting early in person votes or absentee ballots before election day. SCOTUS said no, they couldn't change the rules a month before the election. If they'd been successful, counting the vote in North Carolina would be an even greater Charlie Foxtrot than the count in Pennsylvania was.

    1106:

    I see the Trumparseholes have put the fox in charge of the henhouse in Georgia ( Recount of the ballot ) - they have "form" for this don't they?

    Pigeon How wide do you think your Micra is, for goodness' sake? Don't! The number of times that I've been sitting in the GGB waiting for the tosser in front of me who has absolutely ZERO CLUE as to how wide (not) his road-going pimple is ....

    EcC: But he doen't need those hardliners ... because Labout & the SNP will vote for a shit-sandwich, rather than crash out & no deal & food riots

    1107:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 868: Only once you have seen an actual ballot in a US election, does the lack of speed make sense.

    Try looking for images of "sample ballot" and you will see why elections are slow in USA, both in terms of time to cast and count votes.

    FWIW, this is the sample ballot I used to prepare myself to vote:
    https://s3.amazonaws.com/ncsbesb/20201103/856_92_B0054.pdf

    You can use it as a reference example.

    1108:

    They are not represented on the 1922 committee, which controls Bozo's position, and that is why he might go for no deal.

    The last is why I doubt that even a poor deal would be rejected by Parliament, but it's not as clear-cut as you make out, and may depend on whether there is enough sandwich around the shit, as well as whether they think they can make enough political capital. However, I suspect that at least Labour will abstain, on the grounds that this is all Bozo's mess.

    1109:

    Michael Cain @ 872:

    Right now the Democrats best hope for the Senate is that whatever happened Moscow Mitch's hand last week will prove to be not only fatal, but contagious & he won't die before passing it on to a substantial number of his Senate Caucus.

    Assume the Senate is 52-48 Republican and that McConnell (or his replacement) goes full scorched earth -- no legislation passes, no appointments are considered. At that point the Dems' best hope is to buy off Collins and Murkowski to change their affiliation to independent and caucus with the Dems. That makes it 50-50 and Harris is the tiebreaker. This would be easier if the Dems could pick up one of the Georgia seats in the runoff election.

    No. Fuck Murkowski and Collins both. Lock 'em the fuck up!

    1110:

    JBS That is utterly FUCKING INSANE You should not be voting for law enforcement officers, at all, apart from any other lunacies

    1111:

    I wish they'd make those things not merely an artificial stupid, but a rude one.

    "Hey, you! I can't see the lines, so either take over driving, or I'm pulling us off the road!"

    1112:

    Far out... oh, crap. I have to create a google play account, and give them more information about me.

    I suppose I'll have to do that (lying where I can).

    1113:

    Y'know, I bet you could have the trench dug by four guys for < #1,000 in an afternoon....

    [[ HTML fixed - mod ]]

    1114:

    That drives me crazy, when they won't pass, both as a biker, and as a driver.

    When I ride, I'm as close to the white line on the side of the road as I can be - preferably, I'm riding on it. The idiots who think that they can't pass unless, on a two-lane road, they can cross the double yellow line, and go the wrong way on the other side of the road, rather than dip into the other lane....

    And as they have a lot of signs in the DC area, all we need is three feet of clearance.

    1115:

    Heteromeles @ 889: (to the tune of Danny Boy, ideally off-key)

    Oh Donny Boy, the prosecutors will call you
    From court to court, across the USA
    Once convicted, what will you be doing then?
    Oh Donny Boy, it's time for you to go.

    Oh Mister Flight Risk, what are we to do with you?
    A man of your morals and your needs?
    Oh Donny Boy (!!!), America just fired you
    Just shut up, man, pack your things and go.

    It needs a verse about convicting him in New York State and "lock him up" in the Clinton Correctional Facility.

    1116:

    Don't be silly, it wasn't archery, it was cats.

    They decided to domesticate us, and the next thing you know, we had agriculture and civilization, so that they could live in a manner in which they intended to become accustomed to.

    "If we domesticate them, we'll have all the rodents we want to eat!"

    1117:

    whitroth @ 922: Several years ago, I read of a DoD report on climate change, and they have been planning for it for years, though some of that may have been paused by the Idiot.

    It's because their largest Naval Base at Norfolk is 10 feet (or less) above mean sea level. Plus getting hit by Atlantic hurricanes every few years & as the hurricane seasons get longer & the hurricanes get stronger ...

    1118:

    In reality human capabilities especially with regards to hunting. Archery for instance was a compete game changer. 20K-5K BC was an extremely fast period of technological advance for humanity, which cumulated in agriculture.

    There's a big problem with this, which is that the two biggest megafaunal extinctions (Australia and the Americas) happened without archery. Bows didn't start spreading in the Americas until fairly recently. They were brought in by the Eskimos. To put it in context, the Maya didn't use bows until quite late in the Classic era. They used javelins and atlatls. So did the Inka.

    For that matter, so did the Greeks and Romans. They preferred arming everyone with a couple of javelins and a sword, and leaving the archers as an auxiliary. One reason is that it's hard to use a bow and a shield simultaneously. Another reason is that a javelin sticking out of a shield impedes the shield more than does an arrow. And apparently, both javelins and arrows hit at least as hard, until you get into the 120 lb long bow, composite bows, and comparable tech in China and later in Japan.

    The other problem with the megafaunal extinction thing is that the archaeological records and fossil records don't record a humans in/animals out rapid change on the main continents. That's IS what unambiguously happens on islands, but in the Americas and Australia, there's a period of centuries to millennia where humans and megafauna coexist, before the megafauna disappear. This isn't to say that humans played no role, but it's not clear that they played the deciding role. The joker in the deck is evidence of a small asteroid strike, probably in Greenland, at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. That seems to coincide with the megafaunal dieoff in the Americas at least.

    Now we can debate about whether the animals would have survived the strike if humans weren't around, and that's legitimate. However, any theory that wants to invoke humans as extinction-makers on continents has to also deal with that long-term coexistence.

    As for domestication of crops, that started happening independently thousands of years after the great die-off, but often before bows showed up. It's also still happening today That's why I tend to pick on climate as a cause, rather than technological dispersion. Why are we only doing this now? Why weren't our ancestors trying to domesticate everything in sight hundreds of thousands of years ago? The answer may well be that they were trying, but that conditions were too variable for the efforts to succeed like they do now.

    1119:

    Pig @ 954: No, you're not wrong, we call them Democrats because... what else would you call them? Using the name of the party as an adjective to denote someone's affiliation is completely standard practice, as in "Bozo is a Conservative politician", which is invariably shortened to the adjectival-noun form "Bozo is a Conservative" if the name of the party is the kind of word you can do that with, as most of them are; so, we don't say "Starmer is a Labour" simply because "a labour" isn't a thing, but if the party's name was "The Labourers' Party" rather than "The Labour Party", we'd certainly say "Starmer is a Labourer".

    It's not the "Democrat" Party, it's the Democratic Party. Calling it the "Democrat" Party is an insult. You shouldn't insult someone unless it's intentional

    Are you happy to have your name shortened to "Pig"?

    1120:

    Robert @ 1001:

    How do I know it's "a simple typing error" when I see, over and over and over and over in the white-wing media that usage, and in the same media support for the armed thugs literally threatening the rest of us for being people of color, or gender, or, even worse, ON THE LEFT?

    By remembering something about the posts made by the person using the phrase, and realizing that (a) they aren't American, and (b) generally support policies that are considered "left-wing" or even (clutch pearls) "socialist" in America.

    But, now y'all know why some 'mericans consider it an insult, and will try to avoid unintentionally insulting those of us whose skin crawls every time we hear (or read) it in use? Right?

    1121:

    StephenNZ @ 1004: Who/what is ESR. My only context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Environmental_Science_and_Research

    That's what I got at first too, but then I figured he must be a writer, so I searched for Author ESR and it took me right to him.

    1122:

    I accept that it's possible, but there are several other possibilities and, as far as I know, almost no evidence to choose between them.

    Some of it is unquestionably plain chance - such as why did the horse-collar (a really simple idea) take so long to invent? And why did we domesticate the plants that we did, instead of other, equally plausible, ones? History is full of such blind spots and acausal choices.

    1123:

    I'm not going to comment about cycling any more but at the risk of invoking the wrath of OGH I couldn't disagree more. In a car I don't pass cyclists until it's safe. On a bike I want cars to wait behind me until it's safe. These are the kinds of roads I cycle on. Note that most don't have a white line in the centre. That's because they're not considered wide enough for two vehicles even though the road is not one way. I'm riding as far to the left as possible.

    https://photos.app.goo.gl/79DHPaftTLf2bgDr9

    1124:

    Heteromeles @ 1027: Also, you want Dick Cheney as your neighbor? Seriously.

    I know someone who moved to Wyoming. He made his pile and retired in his late 40s. While he likes California, Wyoming doesn't have income tax. So he bought an estate there and spends six months and a week each year in residence, so that he doesn't have to pay state income tax. Apparently many of his neighbors do likewise. They spend the bad-weather months in their "snowbird" homes in California and elsewhere.

    Anyway, he's down the road from Dick Cheney, who he's met. But not gone hunting with.

    Does Cheney actually live in Wyoming? Or does he just maintain an accommodation address there?

    He was living in Texas at the time he chose himself to be Shrub's running mate. He established the Wyoming residence because the Constitution says the President and Vice-President can't be from the same state.

    1125:

    Well, he has a place there, so far as I know, and his daughter Liz Cheney has represented Wyoming since 2017. Is that his only or voting residence??? Got me.

    1126:

    Oh, I agree about inventions. There's a large element of chance there.

    As for things like domestication and sharing territories, I think the mosaic theory of coevolution is probably the most useful. See John N. Thompson's Relentless Evolution for a recent take.

    The tl;dr version is that we know how evolution works in things like predatory, parasitic, mutualistic, etc. relationships. What Thompson does is add the landscape component, such that the relationships among interacting populations of species are strongly influenced by the habitat the interactions occur in, and that habitat is a mosaic. A cheap example is the difference between feral dogs, working dogs, pet dogs, and lap dogs. Same species, but the differing habitats mean that they vary from predators or dangers (feral dogs) to strong mutualists (working dogs), to commensals or emotional support animals (pet dogs) to social parasites that exist because we bred them to resemble children (lap dogs).

    It's a really handy theory, and it is testable and falsifiable (not from the one paragraph above).

    What I'm postulating here is that domestication requires a stable enough landscape that humans can breed plants or animals to be better food, etc., without endangering the survival of that population. If the landscape is too unstable, then breeding species to become better food makes them less able to survive, and the relationship collapses with the proto-domesticated population either getting extirpated or selection for more survivable (and less domesticated) traits.

    1127:

    The people of island Oceania pulled off the perennial food supply thing and got very high population densities. You're right about the PNW Indians, and it's also likely true for parts of tropical Africa.

    I hate to say it, but Diamond's old Guns, Germs, and Steel argument that the people of Eurasia did well simply because there were more people in similar climates doing different things and trading with each other still works reasonably well. A lot of the counterexamples, while ingenious and even brilliant, are from other cultures that are smaller and more isolated.

    The other thing to contemplate is that if we destroy our civilization over the next few decades, while the manioc and yam growers survive, the idea that human culture does best with grains and high tech may be decisively disproved. We're only ascendant right now. Forever will take a while longer.

    1128:

    While all that is clearly true (*), it does NOT provide evidence that climate stabilisation started domestication, merely that the latter could not have started in a really unstable climate. But that's hell on hunter-gatherer populations, too.

    (*) Incidentally, I regard the 'mosaic theory' as not so much a theory as accepting that the monomaniacal theories of evolution are the crap they obviously were. Anyone who keeps his eyes open and/or gardens know perfectly well what you stated in the third paragraph, and the knowledge is centuries old.

    1129:

    I read Guns, Germs and Steel, and was seriously under-impressed. He made a few good points, but ignored ones that contradicted his thesis. In particular, association does not prove causality.

    1130:

    Because of the way the Milankovitch cycles work, Australia for the last few millennia has had one of the most variable climates on the planet. So books like Dark Emu suggest how people deal with this. The aboriginal solution seems to have been like domestication, but with low densities of people moving around quite a lot, lightly exploiting a wide variety of species that were all managed to varying levels.

    This is different than the idea of hunter-gatherer bands collecting whatever they happened to find. Even in a wildly variable environment, land management is possible. The problem is that there's no consistent yield, so management has to be for lower yields and long-term resilience, instead of consistent surpluses to support managerial hierarchy and craft specialization.

    That's my concern with climate change. Diversifying for resilience is certainly possible, but feeding even a billion people on a resilient, low yield agricultural system would really be pushing it. If things are really bad, even 100 million people would be too many mouths. That's the urgency around dealing with climate change, at least to me.

    1131:

    No, you do not have to leave several metres clearance in case the vehicle suddenly jumps violently sideways of its own accord with several g of lateral acceleration. 20cm clearance is plenty, it's more than enough.

    Personally, I leave enough room that if the cyclist topples sideways (which I've seen happen) I don't run them over. (Or veers while checking their phone, ditto.)

    1132:

    That's STILL irrelevant! What that shows (assuming it is correct) is that importing agriculture into a climate that will not support it will fail. Well, sheesh! So what else is new?

    As far as I know, there is no evidence that the Eurasian climate was that volatile, nor that it stabilised at the relevant time, both of which are prerequisites for your theory.

    In addition to my other points, the lack of serious plant breeding in western Europe from neolithic until mediaeval (and, in some cases, recent) times indicates the importance of either chance or social factors. We could have developed short-staple wheat a millennium earlier, for example.

    1133:

    Off the immediate topic, I saw this headline: Welsh pubs to check drinkers' ID to prove they are not English residents sneaking over the border Mark Drakeford, the First Minister, vows that Wales will enforce the hardest border with its neighbour in 'several centuries' Oh, REALLY, there's this wonderful pub in Redbrook, called "The Boat" - it only has a partial back-wall, just a rock-face, where the cool beer is kept ... the car-park is in England & access is by a footbridge strapped to the defunct railway bridge. Just how do you propose to keep "English" visitors out, fuckwit, especially as they will be the majority of those drinking the excellent ales? Aeriel view here Google street view here as well Effing bonkers, I tell you! And, yes, obviously, I have been there, many times, hic.

    On - peripherally, C-19 Today's Daily Torygraph front page is worth it for the "Matt" cartoon alone Caption: "I must have the Pfizer vaccine - It's not for me, it's for my mink coat!"

    Oh yes, two smidgens of good news: Eating lots of chilis is good for you Well, I have this Capsicum pubescens tree in my greenhouse! And ... Trump's fraud hotline gets Pwned, how sad Gotta laugh sometimes ...

    1134:

    Does Cheney actually live in Wyoming? Or does he just maintain an accommodation address there?

    Well he represented Wyoming in Congress from 79 to 89. I'd say he has some reasonable claim to that state as a residence.

    1135:

    Far out... oh, crap. I have to create a google play account, and give them more information about me.

    The Tor website has some other options for buying ebooks if any of them are better than Google

    https://publishing.tor.com/deadliesdreaming-charlesstross/9781250267023/

    1136:

    Pigeon @ 1091:

    "People go nuts when I slow down because I'm behind a cyclist."

    If I was the cyclist I'd be going nuts too.

    I cannot stand wankers who creep along behind me sitting on my arse, where I can't see them but I can hear them and I know there is something continually present in a maximum threat position on and on and on and it won't fuck off. I can't even pull out to dodge drains in case they happen to pick that moment to realise that there actually isn't anything stopping them coming past and finally decide to do it.

    Just come past. You've got an engine, use it. Get your arse somewhere where I can see you and so can take account of what you're doing in my own driving, instead of having to creep along constantly cringing at this ever-present threat where I can't see it. Yes, there is buckets of room. You're not driving a bus. How wide do you think your Micra is, for goodness' sake? No, you do not have to leave several metres clearance in case the vehicle suddenly jumps violently sideways of its own accord with several g of lateral acceleration. 20cm clearance is plenty, it's more than enough.

    I've never had problems with the vehicle suddenly skipping sideways into a cyclist. I have had cyclists suddenly tip over sideways into the side of my vehicle even with a meter of clearance.

    I don't pass cyclists unless/until I can pass them the same way I would pass another slower moving automobile. I wait until I have both a clear road ahead & a zone of roadway where passing is lawful. If that means I have to dawdle along back there waiting until those conditions coincide, so be it. It can be frustrating - you get to a passing zone & there's oncoming traffic; the oncoming traffic passes & you're back into a no-passing zone ... You just have to wait until you get both.

    If that bothers you, you can always pull off the road long enough to allow traffic to pass.

    1137:

    Brits have to survive on roads that are impossibly narrow. No wonder you have issues about biking on them!

    When I took a vacation in the UK 20 years ago I rented a car to visit Oxford, Cambridge, Bletchley and Sandringham in 10 days.

    Every day I would marvel at the little clearance there was on minor or major roadways. You could not have paid me to ride a bike on any of these roads.

    1138:

    Unholyguy @ 1102:

    “ As I have posted before, it would have been (technically) perfectly possible to have taken a different path, and to have developed woodland and perennial management rather than clearing woodland and planting annuals and biennials. ”

    Thats pretty similar to what the west coast of North America did

    However it’s hards to achieve the same population density or to establish a powerful ruling elite

    Which means a culture taking that tack would have likely been conquered by one that took the agricultural tack

    When European colonists arrived in North America they found natives practicing a mix of agriculture & woodland management along the Atlantic coast ... although they didn't know it was called the Atlantic Ocean. And trade between groups for things that weren't available locally.

    They even had a medium of exchange that served as both currency and an aid to memory for oral traditions, treaties & agreements.

    1139:

    As far as I know, there is no evidence that the Eurasian climate was that volatile, nor that it stabilised at the relevant time, both of which are prerequisites for your theory.

    Before we engage in this, could you please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles. Look in particular at the first graph, and get back to me with your understanding of it. Eurasia has had quite a wild ride, climate wise.

    1140:

    David L @ 1134:

    Does Cheney actually live in Wyoming? Or does he just maintain an accommodation address there?

    Well he represented Wyoming in Congress from 79 to 89. I'd say he has some reasonable claim to that state as a residence.

    Yeah, I'm pretty sure he moved to Texas after serving as Bush Père's SecDef. Needed to be closer to Enron's accountants while he was running Halliburton.

    A few months before the election Cheney put his home in Dallas up for sale and changed his drivers' license and voter registration back to Wyoming. This change was necessary to allow Texas' presidential electors to vote for both Bush and Cheney without contravening the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which forbids electors from voting for "an inhabitant of the same state with themselves" for both president and vice president.
    1141:

    The headline is accurate. :-) Gun stocks tumble after upbeat vaccine news, lack of civil unrest (U.S. Markets, November 9, 2020, Noel Randewich) Smith & Wesson Brands SWBI.O and rival Sturm Ruger & Co RGR.N fell more than 9%, while Vista Outdoor VSTO.N, which sells ammunition and a range of sporting goods, fell over 12%. May the reasons they tumbled stay true.

    1142:

    With regard to "Democrat Party" (bad) vs. "Democratic Party" (Good) I would very, very strongly recommend that non-U.S. citizens very fucking carefully fucking avoid pissing on the God-Damn fucking electric fucking fence!

    This is the last kind warning I will provide.

    1143:

    Whereas I’d like to see my fellow Americans stop demanding that the rest of the world dance to our culture war craziness. See #132.

    1144:

    sigh "Culture wars".

    What they really are is a) cover for ultrawealthy to shove their agenda down our throats, and b) cover for the white wing "evangelical Christians", who HATE secular society with a passion, really want this to become Iran, but with Christianist rulers, and Christian Sharia law (they're jealous), and the rest of us trying to fight back.

    I might reference Poland and Hungary.

    1145:

    Oh, and yeah, a lot of freakin' money for culture wars in other countries (seen stories about witch-killings in Africa?) is coming from ultrawealthy white-wing Americans.

    1146:

    OT: A new, carbon neutral "fuel" (really, energy storage medium): powdered iron. Burn it for heat, use electricity to reduce the resulting iron oxide back to fuel powder, repeat. A Dutch brewery is using a 20 kilowatt demonstration system (https://earther.gizmodo.com/a-dutch-brewery-is-burning-iron-powder-as-a-recyclable-1845585963). Reportedly it's up to 80% efficient on returning the energy stored by making the fuel, which is comparable to hydrogen. The sketchy bit is regenerating the iron powder without generating a lot of CO2 in the process.

    It's different, anyway. And there's just something about juxtaposing a system of burning metal with a brewery. Not sure what it is...

    1147:

    "There's a big problem with this, which is that the two biggest megafaunal extinctions (Australia and the Americas) happened without archery."

    I don't know about the Americas, but in Australia we had woomeras. They had a hitting power about 4 times higher than a modern compound bow and are about as accurate as you can alter the flight while throwing. Mungo man from about 43 000 years ago shows stress marks that are thought to be from using woomera.

    1148:

    whitroth At least in Poland, they're fighting back .... These arseholes have been here ( Right where I live ) "demonstrating" against our very popular female MP over "pro-life" issues. We do not want them ..

    Oh yes, troutwaxer. CALM DOWN ... & ... can we just call them "D's" & "R's" - the latter pronouinced "arse" of course?

    1149:

    Sorry, my previous comment was a reply to Hetermeles.

    1150:

    Meanwhile Trumpolini & his mafia goons are continuing to spew lies & misinformation & attempt to block the hand-over. Oh yes, walking shit Lindsey Graham wants to get rid of postal voting, openly acknowledging that the "R's" (see above) would never be elected again, if that is allowed to continue, which is what's called "A give-away!"

    I think it's going to get very unpleasant ... IIRC deadlines are: Dec 8 Vote counting must be done Dec 14 Electors meet, vote, and send results to Senate. (Pence) Dec 23 Last day ballots can be received by Senate Jan 6 Congress counts the official votes Jan 20 Inauguration

    Presumably one can expect serious "trouble" for all of those, or "just" 12 / 14 Dec & 20 Jan?

    1151:

    Barr need to do this at the Irn Bru factory.

    1152:

    I just looked at the news, and realised I may need to clarify. Barr the soft drinks manufacturer, not Barr the sketchy lawyer.

    1153:

    It can be frustrating - you get to a passing zone & there's oncoming traffic; the oncoming traffic passes & you're back into a no-passing zone ... You just have to wait until you get both.

    In Queensland, at least, it's officially allowed to cross a double solid white line to give a cyclist the required space when overtaking, that space also being mandated (1.0m for a 60km/h and below zone, 1.5m otherwise). It's still pretty hairy on narrow multi-lane roads and heavy traffic, though most cyclists out in such conditions will be pretty hard core anyway, not travelling much slower than the fastest local safe speed. Mostly other drivers will co-operate with zipper-style half-merging and unmerging around the cyclist, but it only takes one idiot to make that hazardous too.

    1154:

    A Dutch brewery is using a 20 kilowatt demonstration system...

    That statement in itself almost promises that there's a punchline coming.

    It's different, anyway. And there's just something about juxtaposing a system of burning metal with a brewery. Not sure what it is...

    Quite so - maybe that's the missing punchline.

    1155:

    With regard to "Democrat Party" (bad) vs. "Democratic Party" (Good) I would very, very strongly recommend that non-U.S. citizens very fucking carefully fucking avoid pissing on the God-Damn fucking electric fucking fence!

    Don't hold back now, tell us how you really feel. Seriously, I've been observing US politics (from a considerable distance that is still probably too close for safety) for most of my life. I was a fan of HST since my early teens and remember Carter as president. I also remember like most of the world seeing Reagan as a fairly tasteless joke. And I've picked up that the correct name is Democratic Party, I may even have noticed when some American politician said "Democrat Party" that it was wrong or that it didn't fit, but I had no idea about the insult or whatever history it has. I like to think I'll never understand the language of white supremacist dog whistling anyway, but this is the sort of thing that can blindside even relatively astute observers (not that I'm claiming to be especially astute).

    The Australian Democrats were a centrist party when they formed in the 70s, drifted left in the 90s and after they faded away a handful of their people turned up in The Australian Greens (including one senator for Queensland). But anyhow that was the official name of the party, which is another way of saying that there are reasons why that usage would not seem odd to Australians. I'm not fond of the proclivity our conservative brethren have for turning everyday language into insulting epithets. It's an aspect of the way that competition is inherently wasteful, and just as frustrating as anything that burns away the efforts we make for progress. This is not a symmetrical problem either and it's the sort of thing that leads me to dystopian imaginings about screening for social dominance orientation.

    1156:

    Sigh. Yes, I know about those - but you are STILL introducing hand-waving explanations without a scrap of solid evidence. Yes, AS WE ALL KNOW, Eurasia has had serious instability and was unsuitable for agriculture before c. 10Ky BP; furthermore, average temperature NOT stability was the reason. But much of Africa was a lot better suited for it in the era 50-25Ky BP, as was probably much of southern Asia (*).

    For rather more relevant data, see:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#Paleoclimate_(from_12,000_years_before_present)

    (*) Diamond was talking plain crap about the availability of natural resources. There are plenty of other plant and animal species that could have been domesticated, and many important 'Eurasian' ones that have been occur in Africa and India (and may well have been restricted to those c. 15Ky BP). Also, Zambia/Zimbabwe have coal, important metals and minerals in quantities and availability Europe could only dream of, though that is relevant later in development.

    1157:

    I live in an area with fairly narrow roads. If I end up behind a cyclist my options are generally to slow down, drive through through them or veer into oncoming traffic.

    You have chosen.. poorly.

    1158:

    Diamond was talking plain crap...

    I wouldn’t dispute this at all in the general case, but (and I may misremember) I thought Diamond’s shtick was that the large spread along similar latitudes made domestication in one place workable in many places, in turn leading to a big jumpstart for Eurasia (including North Africa, more or less).

    1159:

    The Australian Democrats were a centrist party when they formed in the 70s, drifted left in the 90s and after they faded away a handful of their people turned up in The Australian Greens (including one senator for Queensland). But anyhow that was the official name of the party, which is another way of saying that there are reasons why that usage would not seem odd to Australians

    It wouldn't seem odd to Brits either, with our Liberal Democrat party.

    1160:

    The Lib Dems have always been a refuge for temporarily-embarrassed Tories, a Keir Starmer clone army of sorts. Before the Great Shoggoth Absorption the Liberals had their own political position separate from Labour and the Tories, afterwards it drifted into the right-wing sphere culminating in the kamikaze Tory-enabling Coalition disaster of 2010 which led to Brexit among other things.

    1161:

    The same would almost certainly have applied in what is now the central and east African savanna, in the Sahel and probably in the African jungle belt; it certainly has during historical times. Southern Asia I know less about.

    FAR too many academic scientists (of all types) seize on a plausible explanation, pump it up to a theory, denigrate alternative explanations, and ignore (or even suppress) inconvenient facts.

    While the two main H. sapiens diasporas coincided roughly with a sharp global temperature increase, I have never seen a convincing explanation of why they happened, why then and why not in previous ones. Ditto the development of technology (including agriculture). One generally-ignored factor of complex systems (including technical development) is that they often change gradually and then jump to a new level - but, even when an identifiable triggering factor exists, it is often irrelevant. I.e. if it hadn't done it, something else would have done almost immediately afterwards.

    1162:

    Nojay OKAY What actual choice did the Lem-0-Crats have --- "Confidence & SUpply" I suppose? Remember that the Conservatives were easily the largest party. And a reg-tag "different" coalition of "Everybody-except-the tories" wouildn't have held together for more than 18 months, because you could guarantee that some fuckwit would throw a hissy-fit. I blame Blair for following Shrub into Iraq, rather than doing as H Wilson did (not) in the 1960's over Vietnam. That would have delivered a slim Labour majority. Of course the Lem-0-Crats have since simply commited suicide, whist the Conservatives have morphed into the tories, edging towards fascism .....

    1163:

    What actual choice did the Lem-0-Crats have --- "Confidence & Supply" I suppose?

    Opposition, full-throated rejection of the Tory scum and their plans? Instead we got Cameron and Brexit and May and Windrush and racist immigration policies while the Lib Dems played grown-up politics with Fisher-Price Cabinet positions so they didn't hurt themselves while the Tories (who are scum, remember) happily brutalised the nation.

    Remember that the Conservatives were easily the largest party.

    This is always going to be true, in England at least (and spare me the "London is different", please). Property prices and racist attitudes to immigrants will ensure the Tories get the majority of of the votes going. The mass employers of the working classes, the mines and steelworks, shipbuilders and all are long gone courtesy of Health and Safety regs and automation of manufacturing so there's no factory-gate unity or solidarity left, just folks with a mortgage and a car and kids going to University who want Brexit to happen and the Eastern European plumbers to go back to where they came from.

    1164:

    "just folks with a mortgage and a car and kids going to University who want Brexit to happen and the Eastern European plumbers to go back to where they came from."

    IMHO, they want what they were promised with Brexit ('sunlit uplands').

    The problem is that when they get sh*t, they'll blame the Tory-designated targets.

    1165:

    " Eastern European plumbers to go back to where they came from."

    Personally, I want more Eastern European plumbers. Our bathroom refit has been delayed for a week and a half due to a shortage of them!

    1166:

    The word Democrat has been used for a member or supporter of the US Democratic Party since 1794, by people from both sides of the pond. I now return the thread to the flame war ....

    1167:

    There are many things he could have done. Clegg was, at best, a naive idiot.

    1168:

    Before the legendary Polish plumbers showed up in the UK, circa 2000, plumbers in Edinburgh charged more per hour of labour than Java programmers. And that was during the dot com 1.0 era.

    1169:

    Nojay @ 1163 "Not even wrong" for far too many reasons to enumerate. I repeat - how was a coherent opposition-to-the-tories guvmint AT THAT POINT going to be not only put together, but hold together? And from here: The mass employers ... onwards you are simply ranting with zero connection to reality, I'm sorry to say. I agree with EC ' 1167 incidentally (!)

    Meanwhile, it seems DJT is in for an all-out wrecking spree

    1170:

    I remember cartoons in Punch, that date to before the Ark, which made fun of the inability of UK plumbers and electricians to make any repair.

    1171:

    Same applies here in Cambridgeshire. Narrow roads in places, with hedges obscuring vision around corners. If I overtake a cyclist on a blind bend and a car comes the other way, I'm going to swerve into the cyclist. I can assure Pigeon that encouraging cars to overtake him on blind bends is a guaranteed route to a final method of transport which is a wooden box carried by four men.

    No, you do not have to leave several metres clearance in case the vehicle suddenly jumps violently sideways of its own accord...

    A bike hitting an obstacle (pothole, brick, mud, ice, bottle) will suddenly jump sideways some distance; or the cyclist will take rapid avoiding action causing them to jerk sideways very rapidly. This always happens much faster than any possible reaction time, so the only possible mitigating action is to give the cyclist enough passing room. Pigeon is assuming that his bike has infinite sideways inertia. Good luck with that.

    This is clearly a "not even wrong".

    1172:

    Clegg was, at best, a naive idiot.

    I think you mis-spelled "willing accomplice" or maybe "power-hungry". His successors were outright Quislings and worse still, after they got kicked to the kerb in 2015 when their usefulness to their Tory masters was at an end they still retained power and prestige within their party, what was left of it. Some of them even got re-elected, for crying out loud!

    1173:

    I'm mostly giving up driving, but if I have to take the wheel, my policy with bicycles is to give them an entire car's width while overtaking (and to hang back far enough to do an emergency stop if they suddenly go head-over-handlebars). Same with horses.

    The cyclist doesn't have to be at fault or an idiot to run into trouble due to road conditions that a car driver will barely notice, never mind to be blindsided by another car coming out of a side road without looking.

    1174:

    how was a coherent opposition-to-the-tories guvmint AT THAT POINT going to be not only put together, but hold together?

    What Tory government? The Tory scum had the most seats in Parliament but they didn't have a majority. That was their problem to solve, not anyone else's job to fix it for them. They could have attempted to govern on a minority basis hoping to survive confidence and supply, with the various other parties providing case-by-case opposition if the Government's legislative and monetary aspirations were felt to be wrong. The evidence is that minority governments don't last so some time later we'd get another General election and maybe a Tory majority but that's later.

    Instead we got lap-dogs on a leash pulling Cameron into Number 10 along with the odious May et al, Brexit and much worse and all because the Lib Dems wanted their feet under the table in the Cabinet room of Number 10.

    1175:

    I am not saying that bows were responsible for mega fauna extinction. I am saying late Stone Age advances in general were not only responsible but probably also played a role in the disappearance of Neanderthals

    This is more then just weapons systems but weapon systems played a big role in knocking off basically all our natural predators and also increasing calorie intake and providing bone and hide for tools abs protection from the elements

    Bows were probably the very last nail in the coffin that drove us into full fledged agricultural society. They were not a silver bullet but the cumulation of about 50,000 years of rapid (based on the past) technical advice

    Remember, humanity went from being an almost extinct tribe living around some African lakes to one of the dominant predators on the planet, and did it relatively quickly and did it before the agricultural revolution

    This doesn’t seem to have been a gradual spread, more like a whole lot of hanging around some lakes and then a rapid advance

    You should be super careful about drawing military analogies. Military has to contend with armor and is an entirely entirely different thing from hunting. And even in military the bow and the spear are the most common weapon

    1176:

    Nojay AT THAT POINT, the "Conservative Party" not only had Cameroon, who was pro-EU, but also people like Ken Clarke & Nicholas Soames - who were later kicked out by BoZo. You are projecting today's "tories" back to then, when the number of them rabidly in the Murdoch camp were much fewer. And. you are carefully ignoring the fact that I pointed out earlier, that if Blair hadn't fucked-up, they wouldn't have even been thelargest party in 2010.

    Trying to solve yesterday's gone problems is, anyway, irrelevant.

    Lets' try to deal with DJT's wrecking spree & stopping BoZo crashing out, shall we? Though I note that some people ( hem-hem & cough ) are telling him to DROP the illegal clauses of the "Internal Markets Bill" ... ALso ... Tory MP Sir Roger Gale wrote this morning: “When Michael Howard QC and Ken Clarke QC agree that the Government’s Internal Markets Bill is unlawful it’s time for Downing Street to listen

    1177:

    I used to believe that archery was a key innovation, because I like bows. But really, it isn't. The spread of archery in no way correlates with conversion to agriculture. I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that we moderns over-value bows as weapons and undervalue spears and especially javelins. Part of that may be Dungeons and Dragons and similar RPGs making archery look really good. But when you read historical accounts, the bows aren't where you'd expect them to be.

    Go look for yourself. I agree it's a reasonable idea, but it is testable. I didn't see good evidence for it, so I let it go, not without regret.

    As for modern humans, the thing to remember is that we're a mix of African human, Neanderthal, and Denisovan. It's also worth noting that the African diversity includes several extinct lineages that show up in our genes but have no known fossil record. We may well have killed them off, but we mingled with them for thousands of years first. And that makes the question of who did what to whom rather more complicated.

    And this gets to the final point: sudden, in pre-historical terms, isn't. The Australian Aborigines coexisted with various megafauna for thousands to tens of thousands of years before the latter vanished, so any theory about human causes also have to account for a long period of human coexistence. The timespan between arrival and extinction appears to be shorter in the Americas, but there's still millennia of coexistence before the megafauna disappear. There's also the problem that the oldest modern human remains are from Morocco and are around 300,000 years old. So any story of us being rampaging killers has to include that 270,000 years of coexistence. And with the possible Toba Bottleneck at 75,000 years (assuming it happened that way), there's still over 200,000 years of modern human history entirely missing prior to the bottleneck. Our oldest cultures (aborigines and !Kung, among others) are younger than the bottleneck, so they aren't pristine relics of the dawn of humanity, they're rather late in our species' history.

    There's a lot missing from our history of who we are.

    1178:

    Yes. For reasons unknown, H. sapiens was essentially a rare, localised ape for some 200+ Ky, had a significant expansion and limited diaspora, hung around for 30-40 Ky, and then started a massive expansion and diaspora. The timing of the latter may have been climate-related, but why did it not happen before in one of the suitable climatic circumstances? I can think of three plausible possibilities off the top of my head, and wouldn't bet on any being right; the first is the 'official' theory, but only because stone tools survive and the other ones leave no record.

    1) The gradual advance of technology reaching a critical point.

    2) The development of modern language.

    3) Changes in cognition, possibly the evolution of the Asperger's spectrum - a hell of a lot of innovations have been produced by people on that.

    1179:

    I wasn't going to enter this mess, but .... Unusually, Pigeon is being both ignorant and discriminatory. Anyone with impaired balance is seriously intimidated and even endangered on a bicycle or even on foot; I can speak from experience, and am fairly typical of active people with impaired balance. I can wobble by over 20cm if I hit a small pothole or junk on the road (very common next to the verge), or am caught by a gust of cross-wind, not just on a bicycle but even on foot. Worse, even a high car passing me at 30 MPH at 20cm will pull me off balance and, if I go over, I have no control over which direction; so what if THAT car misses me, and the NEXT one runs me over? Also, even a simple fall is often life-changing for post-menopausal women and elderly people of both sexes.

    A good rule for passing cyclists and pedestrians is 2' (30cm) plus 1' for every 10 MPH - and double that for large vehicles, poor weather conditions and so on.

    The fact that I and most elderly cyclists and pedestrians NEED the space, even when passing or being passed by other cyclists, is one of the main reasons I drive one (1) mile into my local village, utterly loathe psychle farcilities, and like riding on single-track roads with passing places.

    1180:

    I don't know about the Americas, but in Australia we had woomeras. They had a hitting power about 4 times higher than a modern compound bow and are about as accurate as you can alter the flight while throwing. Mungo man from about 43 000 years ago shows stress marks that are thought to be from using woomera.

    Oddly enough (hah!) the Clovis culture almost used spear throwers. So did the Maya 10,000 years later, who preferred them over bows.

    That's why I sympathize with Unholy guy about his bow obsession. If you're in the US, you get this idea that Indians used bows, your predecessors the Medieval Europeans used bows, or if you're on the west coast, the Japanese (and yes, the Chinese, Koreans, and Mongols) used bows. And so you think bows are best, barring firearms, and naturally come up with ideas that the development of archery goes along with all the other cultural advancements that we normally think about, like agriculture.

    But as you point out, there are a lot of inconvenient counterexamples lurking out there, especially in European history. Bows and arrows are good weapons systems, but they aren't universally more applicable than spears and spearthrowers, as you rightfully point out. Part of the advantage is that there are more things you can do with a spear and with a woomera than you can do with a bow and arrow, and thrown spears really are deadly weapons, just as arrows are.

    1181:

    Part of it is that modern bows, even traditional ones are very much more effective then primitive self bows. There is a lot of tech and knowledge in bow and arrow making especially in advanced composite bows which took a long time to develop while spears we’d been on for a couple hundred thousand years

    So the introduction of bows is not going to be an instant game changers more of a gradual one. This makes it hard to correlate it with anything

    But the end state was impressive. If you read historical accounts of Mongols hunting with bows it’s beyond insane what they seemed to be able to do, but by then it’s late stage

    Remember the Mongols were hands down bar none the single most effective fighting force of the pre industrial world and they were all bow, all the time

    Also the super weapon of the Bronze Age was bow + chariot

    There were really two models of ancient militaries, fast with bow and heavy shock infantry. You had spurts of heavy shock calvary here and there but that didn’t really catch on as a common model until the Middle Ages

    We also don’t seem to have a built in instinctual understanding of shooting bows like we do throwing spears. You want to train a good archer you start with his grandfather

    With regards to hunting archery really shines is small game hunting which is pretty difficult with spears. It beats throwing rabbit sticks handily. Also the pure efficiency of it means less manpower required. But both technologies, spear and bow are capped by available game. So while archery probably provided a boost of calories available it was probably more important in providing a surplus of labor

    Again I am not saying that archery was any kind of silver bullet just another nail in the coffin along with much better stone tools, spear heads , organization, etc etc

    1182:

    Everyone used spear throwers. Your knowledge of how to use a spear thrower is actually semi instinctual that’s how old they are

    But that analysis comparing them to a compound bow is utter bullshit. Kinetic energy doesn’t mean anything, these weapons don’t kill by delivering kinetic energy they aren’t rocks. They kill via penetration either wrecking an important bodily organ (like the heart) or knocking a major artery or vein hence blood loss

    The important thing is how accurate they are and how well they penetrate and the reason bows are good is they are accurate at range and deliver a lot of kinetic energy to a very small point and hence penetrate well. Plus they have a much better flight profile for medium and long distances

    Someone with a modern compound bow can kill an elk at 800 meters. Spear throwers cap out at about 150 meters

    1183:

    The most plausible explanation(s) for Trump's refusal to admit defeat:

    1) He is incapable of admitting a loss or a mistake. We've seen that many times. This combines with:

    2) He is actively and vigorously fundraising to 'fight the stolen election'. In other words, one last grift on the way out the door. He has big debts and if he can get some of those 70 million suckers to send him some money he will do so.

    Over 7 decades there hasn't been a grift he won't use, and if he can steal a few more millions he will. The creep is in his mid 70s, he only has to keep the balls in the air a few more years at most and he can die a 'rich' man and never be held accountable. Why wouldn't he try to run out the clock with ever more desperate scams?

    1184:

    Sighs. I'll quote from my coaching above. "...properly speaking, a Democrat is a member of the Democratic Party. "Democrat" is acceptable when discussing a single person, as in "Obama is a Democrat." It is not acceptable when discussing the party, as in "Obama is a member of the Democrat Party."

    It's not that difficult.

    1186:

    The usage 'the Democrat party' dates from 1836 in the USA; in 1985, the Chicago Tribune called it an 'annoying Republican habit', which is reasonable. If you want to regard it as unacceptable, I shall have to start calling out a lot of the transpondian misnomers used here as unacceptable.

    1187:

    Several things on bikes: 1. US roads seem to be wider, based on my trip to the UK in 14. 2. I did say that here in the DC area, they occasionally have campaigns for "give the biker 3'". 3. In residential districts, streets may not have white lines along the outside of cars parked on the side of the road. In others, there's almost always a white line on the right.

    So, as a driver, I'm just fine with passing someone, as long as I can give them at least 3', which frequently means my left tire is on the outermost of a double yellow line.

    Many bikers, like me, right as much on the right as possible. The only time I take the lane - and in many cases, I'm entitled to, is when I get an idiot who won't pass, sits on my tail, and gives me the feeling they're trying to make me stop and get off the road.

    1188:
  • Thanks for telling us what a modern, high-tech, compound bow can do. Now, how does that compare what was commonly used 10,000 years ago?
  • What are the odds that most paleolithic tribes had really good expert bow-makers, and not average or "this is the way my great-great-great grandfather did it, and I'm not changing!"?
  • What are the odds of a thin arrow breaking, meaning you need to make more, vs. a spear?
  • Which do you want when something charges up out of cover after you?
  • Please note that I have read from about the 1200s into the late 1400s? 1500's? that the Kings of England had an ordinance requiring Welsh bowmen to be in practice all the time....
  • 1190:

    Heteromeles Ah yes, the role of "Rishathra" in Human evolution ... was it FUN?

    Weapons: Spears do not have to be thrown to be deadly - they are multi-purpose, useful at range & close up.

    Rocketjps Your point (1) is a difference between DJT & BoZo ... BoZo will bluster & bullshit, but will, eventually U-turn or admit a mistake. Trumpolini, never. And referring back to our idiot - J Major puts boot into BoZo - will BoZo take any notice? He never has, in the past, until, of course, it's time for a U-turn ...

    1191:

    The only time I take the lane - and in many cases, I'm entitled to, is when I get an idiot who won't pass...

    Hmm. I mostly agree, but only because most drivers are impatient bordering on openly hostile to cyclists here (and I'm sure some parts of there too), and taking a lane can be the think that triggers someone into out-and-out road rage, something to avoid doing unnecessarily. I will definitely take the lane if I'm turning right (read left for you), at the very least to cross to a turning lane, but also most of the way into a roundabout if there is one. I definitely take the lane even on single-lane roads when I'm going at (and capable of going faster than) the local speed limit, something that isn't that unusual even in Brisbane (long downhill straights, including ones that drop to 40km/h limit when they pass through an "urban village" cluster of shops). I'll take the lane if I'm the only one on the road, and in the case of a multi-lane road if there isn't a knot of traffic coming behind me (mirror check needed), because the car-driver-side-wheel-track is smoother than the gutter. Mind you I also take to the footpath where it's clearly safer to do so, and that might set me apart a bit.

    Electric pedal assist makes some of these scenarios more common (though I haven't gone there yet myself). I also mostly stick to off-road dedicated bike tracks, something we are getting more of every year here.

    1192:

    What Greg Said in 1190: unlike arrows, spears are also hand weapons. This is important, when you've got to minimize the crap people are carrying. A couple of spears, a shield, a sidearm, and perhaps an atlatl is a very widespread load for skirmishers.

    More importantly, you have to be careful to compare modern equipment (cable bows) with historical 50 lb hunting bows, versus the specialized 100 lb warfare bows. Also, According to Guinness Book, the longest accurate shot is 283 meters (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/mens-archery-farthest-accurate-distance). This is like the M16, where the maximum range is around 3600 meters, but engagement distance is 500-600 meters.

    I should point out that the record athletic javelin throw in Guinness book is 98 meters without an atlatl.

    1193:

    Ah yes, the role of "Rishathra" in Human evolution ... was it FUN?

    A lot of it was probably rape, at least in modern terms. (Unless proto-hominids went into heat? But I don't think anyone's got a good answer to that question.)

    1194:

    I shall have to start calling out a lot of the transpondian misnomers used here as unacceptable. Would appreciate it, actually; this is a safe place to be corrected.

    1195:

    I doubt 800 metres, even by chance, unless you include crossbows. Likewise. But politically relevant (for this thread), elk kills with a rifle at 800 meters (well, yards) are common. One sometimes sees "elk rifle" used by American wingnuts, where "elk" is clearly a placeholder for "human". (They are insane; the skills and weapons are not purely possessed by the right wing. The last scary incident was the beltway sniper, a kid in a car boot with a hole in it (plus an older driver), and an AR-15 equivalent rifle killing at a few hundred meters. Not right wing.)

    1196:

    OK. But I shan't regard most mistakes as unacceptable, however egregious :-)

    1197:

    to Heteromeles @1146:

    Once again I was holding myself off from fuming over Musk-related news in this comment section, but now at least I've found a suitable target to sharpen my claws on, since I am at least putting to use my specialized engineering education in electrical energy and not a general one.

    (Part of the reason I am not going through trouble to reason with people is because of popular public relations strategy is that of modern tabloids - to generate as much "news" and noise as possible so it would be completely impossible to criticize or ostracize reasonably within the same time frame. By the time someone has managed to scientifically disprove one statement, there's 10 times more, and everybody already forgot that 90% of them has already been there in the past years. So trying to even read them is useless waste of time and effort unless they are 20+ pages long academic articles - and I have yet to meet with a plan that is longer than few sentences long. /rant)

    First. It doesn't take long to find what medical troubles powdered rust and iron can create - permanent lung damage, especially considering modern combustion-cycle safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siderosis

    OT: A new, carbon neutral "fuel" (really, energy storage medium): powdered iron. Burn it for heat, use electricity to reduce the resulting iron oxide back to fuel powder, repeat.

    Second. I would like it better if the article did stick to the same more educated approach you demonstrated, but they are using the wrong premise. This essentially is the same techno-babble that is used in other high-tech companies use anywhere possible, for the reason I described above.

    A Dutch brewery is using iron powder as fuel to demonstrate its potential utility as a carbon-free power source It is not carbon-free - it is wasteful, it adds additional cycle to the same process that can be achieved more directly. Even with 80% conversion efficiency (which is highly doubtful, more like 40% they mention later) it cannot beat 100% efficiency of plain classic "not doing anything at all". As noted hereby, the only plausible reason to use additional conversion of energy is to cover spikes in generation and consumption, but of course this niche is already occupied by gravitational, compression and other similar storage methods with near-100% efficiency anyway.

    Combusting the iron power only creates one direct byproduct—iron oxide (rust)—which can be converted back to iron with electricity, perhaps generated by renewable sources in a carbon-neutral cycle. Fuel efficiency also rather doubtful. Truth be told, rust dust is only slightly more toxic than carbon dioxide and not as toxic as rare-earths or lithium from batteries. But I think the hydrogen might still be better at this, if not for it's explosive and volatile nature. Then again, if you are going to electrolyze the whole thing, better to use something more common and safe. I cannot avoid seeing barges of powdered iron the size of oil tanker for overseas exports, burned into rust and then offloaded on the same barges to be restored in the point of origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_carrier And of course, it is flammable. Highly flammable, even, and the article even does point it out once.

    The other major technical obstacle is recycling the iron without generating large amounts of carbon dioxide in the first place, which would require the development of the aforementioned high-energy electrolysis technology. The economics of the whole thing aren’t yet clear and may not end up comparing favorably to more traditional sources of renewable energy. I think in the end it sums up my complaints - although it is technically interesting to consider such process, they would spend their time better trying to find more specialized application than trying to shove it in their personal car or communal boiler.

    Third. There still must be reason and for this entire idea of adding additional "sources of energy" between producer and end user that are explained through economic reasons rather than engineering and practical, and I find them in the following. It is a process of minimizing risk by offloading/offshoring it somewhere else (through redistribution or plain export), and it is a cornerstone and distinctive feature of capitalist economy, in any case.

    Long story short, I imagine, with technologies like this the process is two/tree stage depending on tenacity of management: I. Invent and patent things and sell them elsewhere - profit on them by licensing. Attract investment and wealth through innovation. II. Export carbon footprint in other less wealthy countries via additional technology cycles. Profit on that as well by buying cheaper resources. III. And of course after that you can still try to carbon-tax exported carbon footprint for additional profit on that again. Business as usual.

    1198:

    Ah yes, the role of "Rishathra" in Human evolution ... was it FUN? A lot of it was probably rape, at least in modern terms. (Unless proto-hominids went into heat? But I don't think anyone's got a good answer to that question.)

    Speaking as a member of an increasingly multi-racial family (I'm a white guy with a grand-niece who's black-asian and not adopted)...

    ...I'm trying to figure out how to say those were awfully white things to say, both about Rishathra and rape. I'd also gently point out that I'm not the only person in a racially mixed marriage who posts here.

    1199:

    I take your point.

    But, how much genuine attraction would there be across species lines? As opposed to people of different ethnicity who are, for all of that, the same species.

    1200:

    I'm not anti-hunting, so the idea of killing an elk at 800 meters sounds like ordinary hunting in the dry mountains. At one point I was seriously considering hunting on imported deer on Catalina where the normal shooting range is around 200 meters. That was mostly because the only way people were allowed to control those pests was through recreational hunting, even though as a hunting ground Catalina is suboptimal in multiple ways.

    But anyway, there are statements around (not in Guinness) of the maximum bowshot being 1200 meters. I haven't been able to track them down, but I'm quite sure they were unaimed, and I strongly suspect they were deliberate distance attempts, not fighting or hunting.

    1201:

    If you're in the US, you get this idea that Indians used bows, your predecessors the Medieval Europeans used bows, or if you're on the west coast, the Japanese (and yes, the Chinese, Koreans, and Mongols) used bows.

    You mean there is a difference between movies, TV, and, ah, actual history?

    1202:

    We don't know what it would be like to live with closely related human sub-species. Why would attraction be that unlikely?

    1203:

    Sort of a side track.

    According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are about 1 million car accidents with deer each year that kill 200 Americans, cause more than 10,000 personal injuries, and result in $1 billion in vehicle damage.

    That is from 2011.

    We have a huge over population of these things given that we have to take out 1 million or so a year with autos. And still have a major hunting season each year. Getting rid of wolves is the most common explanation.

    Which seems to have also led to a population explosion of coyotes. Which live in almost any area with grass/yards and eat most anything 40 pounds or smaller.

    In my edge of urban/suburban yard I've caught 6 deer at a time on my security cameras at night.

    1204:

    The short answer is that humans, neanderthals, and denisovans were, from all evidence, completely interfertile. So genetically we were all one species. That means that in the past, humans were a lot more morphologically diverse than we are now. What that in turn says about attractiveness among populations, compared to now, is simple: it says absolutely nothing, because too long has passed for us to know how they saw each other. This is another case where applying modern standards to ancient lives can be extremely misleading.

    1205:

    I'm thinking more about the proto-hominid side of things. Peaceful intermarriage implies some degree of social intercourse: I'm not sure how much culture is a prerequisite for that, though.

    (When did human culture get started?)

    1206:

    Human culture started more than 64,000 years ago, with the first painting in Maltravieso cave.

    1207:

    In my edge of urban/suburban yard I've caught 6 deer at a time on my security cameras at night.

    Different places, different critters:

    https://tucson.com/news/local/watch-now-16-javelinas-roam-yard-of-home-on-tucsons-east-side/video_f32e65c9-17c4-5ea9-9592-0524dc8bca03.html

    1208:

    DavidL #1203 Our neighbourhood has a family of deer that are quite comfortable. They are in my front yard every night around 8pm. My dog and the deer now just ignore each other completely.

    They are comfortable here because anytime a predator moves in it is killed - specifically cougars - with good reason (known to occasionally prey on children).

    We also have a neighbourhood bear, at least in the Spring and Summer. For many years it was a big sow and her cubs, but she is gone. Now there is a single young bear that (I think) lives on the ~5 lot patch of forest across the road from our house. We see him around occasionally. Nobody approaches him but nobody gets particularly excited either.

    1209:

    I think using the term "peaceful intermarriage" instead of simply "interbreeding" is cramping the thinking here.

    The DNA evidence we have only tells us that some women were impregnated by men from different branches, that some of the offspring survived to breed, and that it was not a singular event.

    There is absolutely no evidence which tells us if the impregnations were voluntary, transactional (intermarriage as peace-treaty etc.), coerced, prostitution, consequence of slavery or rape.

    All of these possible scenarios individually or jointly can explain the probabilities the DNA sequencing reveals, and all of the are still prevalent in homo sapiens to this age.

    1210:

    And the very small amount of transferred DNA indicates that this was a rare occurrence, possibly because we weren't that attractive to each other, we weren't completely interfertile, or that those children were rejected.

    1211:

    Not later than then, certainly. But, as with early tool usage, we don't have a clue how much earlier it existed but in forms that have left no record.

    1212:

    1186 @ Elderly Cynic

    Troutwaxer is correct.

    Further, momenclature such as Democrat and Republican in the 1830's did not mean what was meant by the parties of the 20th century. Back then, it was Whigs (sorta heirs to the Federalists) vs. the Democrats. These Democrats were heirs to the so-called 'republican' party of the Jeffersonians in the first iteration of the US political party system. Andrew Jackson was their torchbearer and their god. He emerged as a 'populist' when the franchise was extended and the Congress no longer actually elected the POTUS.

    The 1836 United States election saw the emergence of the Whig Party, in defiance of "King' Andrew Jackson and his autocracy. The Whigs succeeded the National Republican Party in the Second Party System of the US, as the primary opposition to the Democratic Party."

    For that matter, of course, it hardly needs to be said that the present Republican party resembles not at all that of the first 60 - 70 years of the 20th century either.

    1213:

    Archeologists have less stuff than archivists.

    1214:

    There is absolutely no evidence which tells us if the impregnations were voluntary, transactional (intermarriage as peace-treaty etc.), coerced, prostitution, consequence of slavery or rape.

    So when did people become aware that sex -> babies.

    1215:

    This is where, in America, people get into trouble, with the idea that marriage between people who look different is bestiality, that it cannot be consensual, and so on.

    The point is not that babies can be born of rape, or that women have limited windows when they are fertile. The point, rather, is that we're talking about men and women who were genetically human, and the conversation has been about justifying their humanity. And also, why am I even defending the notion that sex between humans, neanderthals, and denisovans could have been something other than rape? That it could have been consensual?

    This is what racism looks like. And you're about to object that you're not a racist, that you...blah blah self-justify blah.

    Give it up. Since I live in a very multi-racial family, I'll let you in on a little secret, if you haven't figured it out. I'm racist too. I've just been put in a huge number of situations where I've realized (and occasionally been made to realize), that the fact that I communicated inappropriate stuff is my problem, not theirs. And because I do not feel that I've done something wrong when I've been a racist asshole, I've had to learn from experience, not from feelings. This is what the new term "anti-racism" means. It's about using your ability to learn to overcome the biases you don't feel you have.

    People are people, and diversity is skin deep compared with our shared and very diverse humanity. A lot of misery in the world comes from people who think that interracial relationships are not consensual, akin to bestiality, and that women who look different are females who are in heat rather than women with menstrual cycles, and so on.

    If you think the latter style of conversation still appropriate, I'll just ask: how much money did you give Trump this last election cycle? Because rather more of his followers seem to think the same thing.

    And I'll remind you again: modern humans, every one of us who is not 100% African by ancestry, has Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in them. Moreover, we've got bones of a person who was the descendant of a Neanderthal and Denisovan relationship, so all possible combinations happened. Genetically, we're all human.

    1216:

    Not one year later than they started fencing in critters. Possibly while herding them.

    1217:

    Finally - I bought DLD. Had to use ebooks. I tried Rakuten/KOBO first. Let's see, start to purchase, oops, enable more things in noScript. Wash, repeat at least three times, Finally, everthing but google analytics (NEVER)... and it still never gets through processing my payment.

    1218:

    I was wrong in my units for compound bows, 800 ft not 800 meters. Though that was probably not a feat that gets repeated often. Archery competitions involving compound bows generally max out at 100 yards

    I actually don’t know how effective primitive bows were it actually matters a lot the specifics of the construction and material, bows generally don’t survive into the historical record unless through freak occurrences like the Mary Celeste

    However a modern compound bow benefits a lot from the pulley system and Leila outperform anything in the ancient world by a wide margin. It’s not just better material it’s better physics

    Yew long bows for instance are actually pretty primitive compared to mongol composite bows but they benefit from good material and are quite effective

    So it probably varied quite a lot area by area

    Bows became pretty ubiquitous pretty fast though so you figure they must have had some advantage over the old spear throwing

    1219:

    Here is a video of someone trying to test primitive bow long range shooting

    https://youtu.be/lF1TxiforHc

    He was having reasonable success at 80-100 yards

    1220:

    Here is a video of tests of a compound bow at 350-400 yards. I wouldn’t call it entirely successful 😀

    https://youtu.be/OTIHN16j44k

    1221:

    Not one year later than they started fencing in critters. Possibly while herding them.

    Actually I don't think so. There are all kinds of things we think are obvious now but it took 100s or 1000s of years before anyone noticed.

    1222:

    It has been suggested that why some "R's" are not backing away from Trumppolini is because of the run-off Senate election in Georgia - they need his (party) support to win. IIRC though said run-off election occurs after the critical dates of Dec 8th/14th. Whihch could cause problems - means we've got another month of this lunacy, though. What happens if the Electoral College votes for Biden (14th) & DJT still refuses to accept it?

    1223:

    I'm not sure about hunting, but I am against wanton killing, and I'm not sure killing an elk at 800 metres can be other than wanton. I do think that the specially USian perspective on hunting is very strange in a global context, largely because it has been the beneficiary of conservation for such a long time and the participants are the least likely to understand that.

    I think we overestimate the contribution of "hunting" to the diet of our ancestors in general, and it's totally overblown to suggest that a modest increase in the efficiency of a ranged weapon would have a significant impact on available calories (per other commenters here). I think that our tendency to treat hunting and agriculture as discrete does us a disservice in understanding the situation. You'd also be able to point to Pascoe, for instance, and how kangaroo traps worked. You use your firestick forest management to create clearings that funnel panicked macropods into narrow runs. When you need to feed a few dozen people with red meat, you station a few guys in the narrow run with spears and clubs, then everyone else starts making noise at the other end of the clearing. Clever enough management is indistinguishable from industrial agriculture, even though first contact whiteys were the least likely to understand why you'd do things in certain ways.

    Is there a dark parallel between modern day "hunters" in the US and contact-era experience of indigenous lanad management? You betcha, but it's not something the former are going to readily understand, and not due to any deficit of rationality...

    1224:

    Interesting blog post here: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania.

    The main take-away is that the people who wrote the election procedures did consider that someone might want to tamper with the results. Therefore information is conveyed in multiple formats by multiple routes/people, and checked at each end. Ballots are counted out from the desk that issued them, and counted into the machines. Discrepancies are noted (they did find one ballot had gone missing). Both blank and completed ballots are secured by tamper-proof seals with the numbers logged. The total counts go by a bunch of other routes to the ballot counting centre where they are presumably also checked against the arriving ballots to make sure everything matches.

    Also, many of the workers are volunteers. They get paid a modest amount for their time, but mostly they do it from a sense of civic responsibility, and they don't have any kind of career that could be influenced (other than the impact of a prison sentence for vote tampering). The redundant checks mean that any tampering would require a conspiracy, but recruiting these people into a conspiracy is going to be very difficult, at least.

    This was from one person who worked as a volunteer in a polling station. It would be interesting to read an account from a vote counter as well, but if the vote counting system is as well-designed as the poll station system then its going to be very hard to tamper with the results.

    1225:

    At the moment the R's still have the legal fig-leaf that the election results are not certified, so in theory its still the Commie Liberal Media trying to call the election early, and the legal process should be allowed to play out.

    Once the election results are certified (dates here, Pennsylvania is Nov 23rd) you can't argue that the results are still pending.

    Despite the fact that this hasn't led to civil war on this occasion, its still a very bad time. Trump's attitude to institutions has always been "they are either for me or they are illegitimate", and this attitude has rubbed off on his party and his supporters. It will also spread to the D's, who have long had perfectly reasonable complaints about voter suppression and gerrymandering (its not that the D's won't do gerrymandering, its just that the R's have more opportunity and possibly more expertise). So increasingly we will see US politicians claiming that electoral defeats were due to vote rigging. This will have further corrosive effects on public trust in the voting system.

    1226:

    "It has been suggested that why some "R's" are not backing away from Trumppolini "

    The reasons R's are not backing away, is that Trumpolini gave them the two election results which were much better than they had hoped.

    Mitt Romney said this in a TV-interview:

    “I believe the great majority of people who voted for Donald Trump want to make sure that his principles and his policies are pursued. So yeah, he’s not disappearing by any means. He’s the 900lb gorilla when it comes to the Republican party.”

    When even supposedly "moderates" like Romney says so, Trumpism and the Republican party now one and the same thing.

    1227:

    'I think we overestimate the contribution of "hunting" to the diet of our ancestors in general, and it's totally overblown to suggest that a modest increase in the efficiency of a ranged weapon would have a significant impact on available calories'

    I have formed the (possibly half-baked, but it seems plausible) notion that the hunting of large game serves a different function to that of foraging, including the trapping etc of small game.

    Foraging is what keeps the community going, day in day out. To achieve this, it has to be done day in day out. It may or may not be arduous, but it is never ending, and leaves little time for anything else.

    But when the hunt succeeds, which it only does some of the time so it cannot be relied on, then everybody can take a break, and do the things that make the difference between a herd of beasts and a community of people.

    So both are needed.

    JHomes.

    1228:

    I think probably the major advantage of bows over throwing spears, particularly from a military viewpoint, is the number of missiles that can be carried. A bowman can carry a couple of dozen arrows without being overly encumbered, and can be resupplied with larger numbers without much difficulty. This means they can be used for area denial as well as direct attack of an individual enemy, which makes them considerably more versatile.

    1229:

    We are past 300 and talking about bow hunting so I thought I would throw in this nice little irrelevance.

    https://sophieehill.shinyapps.io/my-little-crony/

    A visualisation showing the links between HMG covid contracts and the conservative party.

    1230:

    I see the UK government have a plan (i.e. say they want) to move almost 100,000 UK students out of London in one week. Given their proven capacity for organisation and the reduced capacity of public transport this could be interesting; I look forward to pictures of students queuing up at train stations with their belongings in a single small suitcase (or a brown paper parcel) and a box containing a supply of face masks slung over one shoulder.

    1231:

    Their plans to take us back to the glory days of The Blitz are remarkably well developed

    1232:

    My wife's immediate reaction: "the worst school run ever"

    1233:

    That has been documented among existing hunter-gathering communities. What most people seem to miss is that there is a huge difference between the (sub-)tropics and northern Eurasia. In the latter, except in autumn, there is almost no gatherable food that gives enough calories for either an active life or cold weather - one of hunting, herding or farming is essential.

    1234:

    On my-little-crony:

    Interesting, but not surprising. Problem is, how exactly do you stop this kind of thing happening?

    Few if any of the links are smoking guns. If you were making a decision about a contract, faced with bland market-speak bids from a couple of dozen firms, going with the one run by someone you know personally probably looks like a good plan, because if there is a problem you can get him on the phone and bypass their contracts department (see below on Serco). OTOH that is indistinguishable from doing your friend a favour in the hope he can do a similar one for you in the future.

    More oversight? Well we've got that in the linked web site. And?

    More rules? The reason Serco are in there running a big contract is precisely because there are so many damned rules already. Navigating those rules has become the core competence of Serco and a few other big companies. They aren't any good at actually doing the jobs they bid for, but they are good at landing the contracts and extracting a profit from them. Adding more rules doesn't prevent this, it enables it by adding barriers to would-be competitors.

    Less rules? That just opens the door to more cronyism.

    Smarter rules? I've worked in a big company where I tried to improve the criteria used for judging software development bids. Trying to turn "code smells" into objective criteria with no wriggle room is non-trivial. I also got a look (accidentally) at the scoresheet they used for bids. About half the points were allocated for a range of criteria that could be summed up as "one of the usual suspects". Trouble is, they were all things like "has delivered similar systems before" and "senior staff with industry experience" which you really do want to see in a supplier.

    This is an illustration of a much wider problem, which is the tension between democracy and technocracy. On the one hand we want our leaders to be democratically accountable, but on the other hand the job of actually running the country is big, complicated and very boring. "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits". So the job needs a lot of technocrats to pay attention to all the boring bits. However that leads to out-of-touch mandarins and professional politicians making decisions to the personal advantage of themselves and their mates. This problem gets gradually worse until democratic oversight finally cuts in with some kind of scandal or popular outcry.

    The one thing that democracy has going for it over totalitarian systems like China is that its much harder for the technocracy to suppress this kind of oversight.

    1235:

    How much of this sort of thing" is going on ... both instant appointments of grossly unsuitable people & wreckers or both? And how easy will it be to reverse? Not that fucking BoZo is any better - is this an indication that he may preparing to crash out, followed by food riots & a state of emergency .... as well as "limiting access" - a sure sign that he's losing it & is trying to shore up his own "defences". OTOH it's the alternative to caving before 31st Dec, but he's got the crash option ready. Very confusing & not good news, either way.

    1236:

    I suspected that :-) Some of the figures quoted here are ridiculous - as I taught/teach, the Web Of A Million Lies is a gross underestimate! It's not new, because I was taught bullshit about the superiority of longbows over crossbows at school (age 8) - more accurate and more penetrating? Oh, really!

    1237:

    You are making the claim that we were a single species without providing any evidence for it. As I am sure you know, a small amount of species X DNA in species Y does not show that species X and Y are not distinct, nor does the existence of a single hybrid of unknown fertility. What is more, the fact that the multiple groups lived closely together for thousands of years without becoming a single, composite group is almost conclusive evidence that they WERE distinct species. Yes, I know some analyses claim large amounts of DNA overlap, but the ones I have tracked down in reputable journals don't.

    Again, as I am sure you know, species distinctness in vertebrates is quite often not due to the lack of interfertility, but on behavioural aspects that discourage them from interbreeding. It is quite possible, for example, that the different species had characteristic scents/pheromones that made them unattractive to each other.

    We simply don't know.

    1238:

    You are swallowing too much of the establishment's lies. A lot of the problem is that, except in a very few areas, there isn't ANY technocracy or technocrats and often not even any technopeasants. "On tap, but never on top" has been enforced for a long time, and has been made much worse by outsourcing.

    Once an organisation's senior staff are entirely politicians, bureaucrats and execusuits, and it has to outsource even the supervision of its outsourcing, it's beyond hope - and importing external 'expertise' which is more of the same but motivated entirely by the wish to extract money doesn't help. As I can witness (and have delivered), the key to successful outsourcing is an in-house technical team that is a major part of the executive authority for it.

    Unfortunately, we need a revolution.

    1239:

    The existence of Neanderthal & Denosovan sequences in humans suggests that they had not diverged far enough to achieve speciation, though the divergence was more than in existing varieties of human.

    1240:

    Please read what I said. If you use the absolutist definition that two species that can interbreed at all are the same species, you would have to reclassify a huge number of accepted separate species (including mammals). Species is not an entirely well-defined concept, and the mainstream definition is that they remain genetically distinct subpopulations even when in contact. The fact that they lived closely together and even cohabited without becoming a single genetic population is strong evidence that they had speciated.

    Even if you use the absolutist definition and call them subspecies, my point stands. They remained distinct even when in contact, and were quite distinct enough for some of of their differences to discourage interbreeding. We don't know why they remained distinct, but they did.

    1241:

    It has been suggested that why some "R's" are not backing away from Trumppolini is because of the run-off Senate election in Georgia - they need his (party) support to win. IIRC though said run-off election occurs after the critical dates of Dec 8th/14th. Whihch could cause problems - means we've got another month of this lunacy, though. What happens if the Electoral College votes for Biden (14th) & DJT still refuses to accept it?

    I am guessing it isn't any one reason.

    But likely a key factor in a lot of the reasons will be that the Trump/Republican base don't believe in reality - polling shows 70% of Republicans think the election wasn't fair. The the key dates don't matter.

    The Georgia Senate run-off is one factor certainly, as the Republicans only need 1 of 2 to make Biden's job difficult to impossible.

    But, they are also playing already to 2022 and 2024 elections - keep those people sending in money and motivated to turn out in the next elections.

    And of course, keeping Trump happy - he is unlikely to give up his tweeting after January 20th and thus he will remain a powerful weapon.

    Because, as noted by Poul-Henning Kamp and as I have indicated, despite losing the White House and losing Senate seats Trump has delivered in 2020 for the Republicans - despite everything of the last 4 years, and particularly the last 9 months, he still had a close election and the Republicans had gains elsewhere even though is a normal universe such a year should have had them wiped out.

    It was only a month ago that the talk was a solid Democratic Senate, they were going to flip states like Texas, etc.

    None of which happened.

    So yes, sadly, there is no reason for Republicans to abandon Trump.

    1242:

    How much of this sort of thing" is going on ... both instant appointments of grossly unsuitable people & wreckers or both?

    Seen elsewhere suggested that it is resume padding, both for the next 4 years and potentially for positions under the next Republican President

    And how easy will it be to reverse?

    Appointed by a President means they can be fired by a President.

    1243:

    Yes, biology could use some pruning ... ;)

    1244:

    (its not that the D's won't do gerrymandering, its just that the R's have more opportunity and possibly more expertise)

    Ahem.

    This is the North Carolina Democratic Party calling: Please hold my beer.

    I've been living in a gerrymandered district for 30 years. The first 20 by the D's. It was the D's who in the 2000-2009 period tied 2 clumps of people together via a many miles long stretch of Interstate 85 median grass.

    The difference here is that the R's in 2010 used computers and data analysis to do a much better than the D's had done before.

    1245:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1238

    I think you are taking too narrow a definition of "technocracy". The technocrats are not just the civil servants: if the government outsources the management of some operation to a private company, like test-and-trace, then those managers are just as much part of the technocracy as they would be if the government had kept the entire operation in-house.

    One of the problems with the whole public/private debate is the assumption that there is a hard line separating the public and private sectors. In fact its all shades of grey. You have outsourced contracts, regulated monopolies, regulated industries, too-big-to-fail companies, and so on with decreasing levels of government control as you get further away from the centre. The state is not a single organisation, its lots of them with all sorts of organisational relationships going on. Ultimately even Bob the Builder is partly an agent of the State, in that he collects PAYE taxes, enforces laws on illegal immigration and conforms to building regulations, health-and-safety etc.

    In the USA they have the 1st Amendment, which prevents the government stopping people from speaking. It only applies to the government, which is why Facebook et al can ban people, block postings and generally restrict how their users communicate. Lots of people claim this is censorship and therefore illegal under the 1st Amendment. As a legal matter of course they are wrong, but as a practical matter the social media companies look and act an awful lot like a wing of the government charged with regulating speech, and this matters.

    Another example is Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the US mortgage companies. They are notionally private companies, but the assumption leading up to the 2008 crash was that they enjoyed an implicit government guarantee, and hence were able to borrow money more cheaply than the competition.

    Take a look at the case of Marsh v. Alabama, in which a company was required to allow the distribution of religious leaflets on land it owned, because it was acting in the role of government.

    (BTW, I completely agree with you about the need for an in-house team of experts to keep an eye on the outsourced experts. Been there, done that.)

    1246:

    The redundant checks mean that any tampering would require a conspiracy, but recruiting these people into a conspiracy is going to be very difficult, at least.

    My wife and 2 friends did poll work this cycle. One who is computer literate and was the "computer specialist" for an early voting site said yes it would be possible if you timed it very carefully to vote 2 and maybe 3 times in one day by quickly driving between sites with no lines. But it would get noticed at the end of the day.

    The registration systems where it records your vote are a store and forward setup so they can keep working if the internet connections go down. Basically every site has the full list for the county and about every 30 minutes it tells the county system who has voted and when and the results get send to all the systems at each site. Even if all the links go down for a day, the computers could be taken back to headquarters that night and synced. And if the computers become futzed there is also a paper trail.

    And as you mentioned all sites keep running totals of voter counts. And the voter marked ballots ore sealed into the recording machines at each site as the ballots are recorded.

    Things like the LBJ election of 1948 are hard to do these day. Very. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal And it's not in this article but I've read/heard reports that those last voters voted in alphabetical order.

    Generating votes means you'd have to do a lot of work. A lot.

    1247:

    Bellinghman NO Even in the Blitz, people were FED ... But a no-deal crash-out will mean food riots.

    EC @ 1236 Also - NO For some applications, the crossbow is "better", but for some other applications the longbow, or a good composite bow is "better" What do you want to do with your bow(s) & how many people are using them & what are the targets? Then pick which "weapon" you are going to use, oh & the training/practice level of the users matters - a lot.

    Meanwhile in possibly good news .. Rolls-Royce (nuclear) engineering to the rescue! - provided, of course that the fake greenies are kept at bay ...

    1248:

    Looks like life is going to be excessively interesting for Intel: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive

    1249:

    Unfortunately, we need a revolution.

    There is a quote by Terry Pratchett in Interesting Times which I can't locate right now, but the gist was:

    It doesn't matter how many revolutions you have, at the end you look around and you find the Rulers are still in charge.

    Whatever system you replace the current one with, its going to have technocrats in it. The problem is, how do you keep the technocrats in check?

    1250:

    Do please READ my postings before jerking your very English knees! Where did I say one was better than the other? That was my ignorant teacher. I was referring specifically to his statement that the longbow was more accurate and more penetrating, both of which are bollocks (and the latter is the converse of the truth). As I have posted before, the longbow was superior for warfare because of its rate of fire.

    1251:

    Rolls-Royce (nuclear) engineering to the rescue! - provided, of course that the fake greenies are kept at bay ...

    I think I prefer this approach. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/first-modular-nuclear-reactor-design-certified-in-the-us/

    But they are running into trouble getting funding for their first plant.

    1252:

    Sigh. Please READ my postings before responding. My point is that we DON'T have technocrats in charge, or even in most parts of government. Our rulers are entirely non-technical - and, worse, technical people are kept down at a level that the decision-makers do not even talk to anyone who talks to them. No, the mandarinate is not made up of technocrats and may not even include ANY in its ranks. The infamous Hutton enquiry made THAT clear for one important area!

    1253:

    I missed this. It's even MORE off-beam. No, I am not, and have been pointing out to Thatcherites that she did NOT reduce the size of the bureaucracy, but merely hid it by outsourcing (and expanded it) for four decades.

    The answers in #1252 and #1238 apply as much to those organisations as to the civil service, and they rarely employ technocrats (and are NEVER run by them). Some of them employ technopeasants, but others don't even do that, and merely manage the outsourced government at the execusuit level, further outsourcing any technical expertise that they realise they need.

    1254:

    Canada's small modular reactors differ from the other SMRs in that they will be heavy water reactors like the safer Canadian CANDU reactors. They also differ from the rest in having two major launch customers for funding, the province of Ontario and the province of New Brunswick. Plus, there are huge reserves of uranium in the province of Saskatchewan.

    Natural Resources Canada established a road map for SMRs as early as 2017.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

    Personally, I see no need for this new class of reactors. We already have our Slowpoke (tm) small reactors for R & D and Canada has enough hydro, geothermal and wind capacity for all our future energy needs. What's really needed is a transmission line backbone to interconnect the provinces.

    Regardless of our ability to power ourselves entirely with renewable energy, without SMRs, I think the SMR project will plough ahead, fueled in part by the illusion that we can sell a lot of them to other countries.

    1255:

    I actually don’t know how effective primitive bows were it actually matters a lot the specifics of the construction and material, bows generally don’t survive into the historical record unless through freak occurrences like the Mary Celeste

    If you're interested, the volumes of the Traditional Bowyer's Bible are a really good place to learn, especially the first volume. (I just found out those lunatics are up to volume 4, and I've only read the first three volumes). The chapters are written by bowyers and archers, for the same audience, so they're about making bows and arrows in a wide variety of styles, from neolithic reconstructions to more modern ethnographic and historical bows from all over the world, as well as some theoretical bows made to test that the principles work (like the bow made from four bamboo garden stakes tied together).

    Primitive technology, a book of earth skills has a couple of chapters on atlatls and other spear throwers, if you want to understand how those work. Unfortunately for this audience, the technology they're building is based on North American and European sources, so there's nothing on Australian-style woomeras. Again, these are works by people who make the things, not theoreticians.

    1256:

    The Rolls-Royce reactor design is... weird. It's "modular", yay! but all modern reactor builds are modular anyway -- the major components are manufactured and QAed in factories before being delivered on large trucks. Construction on-site involves bending steel and pouring concrete but everything else gets welded and bolted together, pretty much.

    Another thing is the reactor size -- it's supposedly a 440MW output reactor design which is in a weird market position. Almost all of the new-build reactors in train around the world are 1000MW-plus output with a number of them 1400MW and even 1600MW since three times the output costs less than twice the price. Another thing is that RR doesn't have a track record of building regular power reactors, it specialises in "Formula 1" military submarine reactors of a sort that would never be licenced for commercial operations. They've also never built a reactor of more than ca. 40MW output, if that.

    In other news it looks like Sizewell C will be getting the go-ahead, another two 1600MW EPRs to follow on from the two EPRs being built at Hinkley. I think the plan is that the ground-works and structural teams will finish up at Hinkley and then move over to Sizewell to start construction there, not losing the expertise gained from building the first two EPRs. We'll see. The EOL of the existing 6GW or so of our AGR fleet is now clearly in sight and by 2030 either we'll be burning a lot more gas or experiencing rolling blackouts (or both).

    1257:

    With regard to Denisovans, Neanderthals, and humans, we actually don't know whether they were genetically distinct, because the number of human specimens of the correct age is unfortunately small.

    However, there's this little problem that remains are very rare. If, given the small number of ancient remains of these three, we have already found hybrids between humans and neanderthals, neanderthals and denisovans, that strongly suggests that mixed relationships were not uncommon. And if the genes of everyone outside of Africa has identifiable DNA from Denisovans and Neanderthals in it, there is a distinct possibility that all three did intermingle readily, that modern eurasians, aborigines, and melanesians are the result, and that the last populations of Neanderthals that show up as "structurally pure" (per the skeletal fragments recovered) were isolates, either by accident or intention, from this larger phenomenon. Were they paleo-racists, perhaps, who didn't believe in fucking with them others? We will never know.

    I'm point out that this scenario is at least as likely as the idea that all mixed kids were the result of rape, because humans, neanderthals, and denisovans couldn't have seen each other as human, given how much we struggle with modern racism, and given they appear to have been even more different from us than blacks are from whites. Just as an intellectual experiment, it might be worth contemplating whether the difficulty is not in the structural differences of ancient humans, but in the constraints imposed by modern racism.

    1258:

    What's really needed is a transmission line backbone to interconnect the provinces.

    Given that Canada contains the magnetic north pole and is thus rather more connected to the sun's magnetosphere than is the rest of the planet, I wonder...

    Is there no really long transmission line built across Canada because someone realized that long lines are great for picking up induced currents from an active magnetosphere (during auroras or a Carrington event)? Perhaps they decided the vulnerability to nationwide blackouts outweighed the benefits of wiring everybody together. Or not.

    On a SFF note, I occasionally wonder why no one has speculated about doing something like powering a colony on Europa, or any other place in a strong planetary magnetic field, with a bunch of long cables or other system designed to maximize induced currents, rather than avoid them. Probably some electrical engineer just snorted his coffee reading this, but it would be nice to know why harvesting electricity from ginormous magnetic fields would be a bad idea, even in science fiction.

    1259:

    Pretty sure Stephen Baxter had something like that in one of his Manifold books. "Space" maybe.

    1260:

    I disagree. It's rather easy to notice, for example, that a bitch in a yard by herself doesn't get pregnant, regardless of going into heat, but when a Purebred Fencejumper (g) male gets in, she does.

    1261:

    We have strong evidence that they intermingled over (many) thousands of years, and the fact that it's only 1% of DNA indicates that interbreeding was NOT common. The genetic calculations aren't hard! #1210 proposes three possible explanations, but is not exhaustive.

    I made no remark about consensual sex versus rape, and it's irrelevant to the above point.

    1262:

    Let me add one more consideration to the mix.

    I was at my last job, as a federal contractor, for 10 years. In that, it was the first time ever that I had been involved in getting quotes, and preparing forms for purchasing.

    Before I'd been doing it for three or four years, there were only a handful of companies I wanted to deal with, if at all possible.

  • Their prices were comparable, or cheaper, than others for the same thing.
  • THEY ACTUALLY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING, WHAT THEY WERE SELLING, AND WHERE THEIR PAYCHECKS CAME FROM. Out there are an immense number of companies, and overwhelmingly, they don't know shit from shinola about any of that. Sales critters who can't bother to get back to you in a timely manner (days? weeks?) Who wanted to pass you off to someone else, and on, and on.
  • Please note that my manager, and his, kept me doing this, because they got what they wanted, and all of them knew I treated the division's budget as if it was my personal checking account... and I did not want to bounce a check.

    1263:

    EC 1250: You actually said: I was taught bullshit about the superiority of longbows over crossbows at school (age 8) - more accurate and more penetrating? Oh, really! So, you are directly claiming that lonbows are not superior to crossbows, or are you not, really? I am saying that "circumstances alter cases" WHY do you do this every fucking time, eh? The longbow is also more portable ( lighter ) 1252: Here, though you are correct - the technical ignorance & arrogance of our "leaders" regarding sci/tech issues, which are inceasingly important ....

    David L I think RR will be able to jump through the certification hoops - money will not be a problem ...

    Nojay Very important poin there ...a slow, but continuous programme of building, not stop-start ... which is automatically (in the long run) cheaper & me=re relioable. [ See also railway electrification, of course ]

    1264:

    They start running out of options in the next month, as deadlines hit (certification, and the electoral college).

    However, I suggest that a lot of the reason for no Democratic wave was massive voter suppression, in plain sight. For example, Texas' "one ballot drop-off box per county. Ther are: Number 254 Counties Populations 134 (Loving) – 4,652,980 (Harris) Areas 149 square miles (390 km2) (Rockwall) – 6,192 square miles (16,040 km2) (Brewster)

    So, yeah, Brewster, with one drop-off box per over 6k mi^2. And Harris (Houston), with -&gtone drop-off box&lt- for over 4.5M voters. And even so, it came close.

    1265:

    What's really needed is a transmission line backbone to interconnect the provinces.

    As I recall, Canada has three largely independent geographically separated synchronized AC grids. Two of them are tied to much larger US grids. So looking at a relatively complex HVDC system to do bulk power transfers from here to there.

    1266:

    Bullshit.

    That is exactly the talking point of the ultrawealthy, to push the narrative of "so it doesn't matter if you vote, there's no difference, you're still screwed, so just keep your head down and be a good boy, and mabey we'll throw you some table scraps.

    There were a few less rulers after the French Revolution.

    1267:

    Trump did better than expected among blacks and Hispanics than expected, a significant reason why the race was close.

    Also, the Democrats made the decision not to have the usual "ground game", because of the virus. This was understandable, but it may have hurt them.

    1268:

    I haven't been closely following this thread, but the whole "it's either nice-couples or rape" argument is getting to me.

    From what I've read, Esquimos (and others up in that neck of the woods) considered it manners if a wandering hunter stayed overnight with you, for the woman to offer herself? be offered? to the hunter, explicitly for "spreading the qualities".

    I would be utterly shocked if, when humans were rare, that this was not an absolutely common practice. I'll also note that the more we learn of Neanderthals, the less the differences between them and us I see.

    At this point, I suggest you look at a pic of the current Lt. Gov of Pennsylvania and his wife....

    1269:

    The reason no big transmission line has yet been built east-west across Canada is the same reason we have next to no chance of getting an high speed rail line across the country: Canada is thinly populated, with only 38 million people spread across the 2nd biggest country on the globe.

    There's no risk of interference from solar events for future trans Canada power lines since any line would be built in the southern part of the country.

    The last time we had a solar blackout was in Québec when a solar storm zapped the ultra long north-south lines that take the power from the dams in the north to the cities in the south. It shut the lights off for 9 hours in Québec and caused lesser problems in New England.

    Of course if we had a Carrington event it would not matter where the line was placed. We would all get zapped.

    1270:

    I suspect the various offerings of more moderately sized reactors are aiming at the industrial heat, and the combined heat and power markets.

    Currently, most heating is supplied by gas, which is obviously not long term viable. For people living in detached housing, or outside cities, heatpumps are a fine solve, but doing that for apartment blocks is.. Uhm. Challenging.

    You can, however, hook a district heating system up to the cooling system of a nuclear reactor and heat every home in quite a large radius from the site, giving up only a very modest percentage of the electric power output of the reactor. People already do this.

    As a plan for not freezing your gluteus maximus solid in a Canadian winter, this works fine, It does, however require you to have a reactor quite near to every major urban center because you just cannot transport heat as far as you can electricity.

    Problem: Most cities cannot consume a gigawatt+ of power, so the typical reactor for this needs to be smaller. Or very small, and selling only heat.

    Same with industrial uses. You can set up a reactor to sell high-temperature heat by piping molten salt or high pressure steam, or heck, liquid lead to customers, but not very far, so a reactor which vastly exceeds the requirements of any industrial district is too large for this market.

    1271:

    You're right. Some of our provinces sell hydro power to the US. That's why we have all those north south links and why small incidents in Canada have led to massive blackouts in the US, and vice-versa.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

    1272:

    However, I suggest that a lot of the reason for no Democratic wave was massive voter suppression, in plain sight.

    Undoubtedly true that there was voter suppression where they could get away with it.

    But it is also true that the existing Trump voters abandoning him (either by voting Biden or staying home) that a lot of that wave was predicted on didn't happen.

    And likely more importantly (as a lesson to the Democratic Party, much like Labour got handed a lesson just under a year ago), some previous Democratic Party voters switched to Trump as the media has documented in Florida, helping to keep Biden from flipping Florida.

    1273:

    Robert van der Heide @ 1143: Whereas I’d like to see my fellow Americans stop demanding that the rest of the world dance to our culture war craziness. See #132.

    OTOH, I try not to unintentionally insult non-Americans when discussing their politics and I do try not to take offense where none was intended ... but

    I can accept y'all weren't aware of the history of how the phrase is construed before now, but now you do know. From this point going forward it's reasonable to presume such insult is intentional.

    1274:

    "Meet the new Boss, Same as the old Boss" Won't get fooled again - The Who 1971

    As to Outsourcing, it can only work in very specific situations where the cost of the activity is disproportionate for the company

    e.g. Transportation where the organisation has many part loads that can be moved more efficiently by a specialist Experts that are only used infrequently but are expensive (Pen Testing ... ) Where set up costs are high, one-off and not required thereafter ( More specialists and consultants)

    After that you are looking at an accountancy three cup shuffle given that any Outsource contract needs to cover a saving for the originator, a profit for the replacement, and (the generally ignored) management of the contract.

    I too have worked in this painful arena. One CEO's modus operandi was if necessary buy the business we will screw them in the following years. I didn't last!

    1275:

    Curiously, I worked in Local Government at the start of the Thatcher years for the Corporation of London. They, as staunch Aldermen and businessmen, thought Mrs T was an idiot; and she referred to them as the last bastion of municipal socialism (the Corporation is the bit that runs the Square Mile in London and the elected officers are generally staid citizens of wealth #Sarcasm ).

    I left there to join a bank to see the real world and discovered that most major banks were so disorganised that they couldn't find their corporate ass.

    1276:

    gasdive @ 1147:

    "There's a big problem with this, which is that the two biggest megafaunal extinctions (Australia and the Americas) happened without archery."

    I don't know about the Americas, but in Australia we had woomeras. They had a hitting power about 4 times higher than a modern compound bow and are about as accurate as you can alter the flight while throwing. Mungo man from about 43 000 years ago shows stress marks that are thought to be from using woomera.

    The megafauna extinction in North America appears to be a combination of climate change and overkill. The end of the last glacial period appears to have made megafauna more vulnerable and human hunting appears to have done the rest.

    The dominant culture in North America at that time was the Clovis culture & while I don't know if they had archery, they certainly had spears (and I think probably spear throwers). The Clovis culture appears to have disappeared shortly after the megafauna extinctions.

    1277:

    In '87-88, right after I moved to Austin, TX, I worked for the Scummy Mortgage Co* (real name upon request). I was hired at a low rate, supposed to get a $1k/yr raise after "probation" (SIX MONTHS!), and then, three months later, they froze everyone's salary.

    When I left, after a bit more than a year and a half, turnover was 10%-15%.

    A MONTH. And I knew of two depts, one of which was collections (?!) where there were exactly two people who'd been with the co more than two months.

    • I have about three pages of good and sufficient reasons to call them that.
    1278:

    From what I've read that kind of sexual encounter among the indigenous peoples of the far north was set within some complex rules. It was not as simple as you describe it.

    And, by the way, since we're into proper nomenclature these days, don't use the word that srarts with an E and ends with an O to describe them. They don't like that. Wikipedia is slightly misleading on this. There is a good Wikipedia article, "Inuit" on this, if you are in a hurry. If you have more time, go read also the section on Nomenclature in the Wikipedia article that starts with an E and ends with an O.

    Yes, Wikipedia has issues sometimes.

    1279:

    Damian @ 1155:

    With regard to "Democrat Party" (bad) vs. "Democratic Party" (Good) I would very, very strongly recommend that non-U.S. citizens very fucking carefully fucking avoid pissing on the God-Damn fucking electric fucking fence!

    Don't hold back now, tell us how you really feel. Seriously, I've been observing US politics (from a considerable distance that is still probably too close for safety) for most of my life. I was a fan of HST since my early teens and remember Carter as president. I also remember like most of the world seeing Reagan as a fairly tasteless joke. And I've picked up that the correct name is Democratic Party, I may even have noticed when some American politician said "Democrat Party" that it was wrong or that it didn't fit, but I had no idea about the insult or whatever history it has. I like to think I'll never understand the language of white supremacist dog whistling anyway, but this is the sort of thing that can blindside even relatively astute observers (not that I'm claiming to be especially astute).

    I'm so old and I've been following U.S. politics for so long I can remember when there was a Republican Party that claimed to oppose the violent overthrow of the American Government.

    I don't understand white supremacist dog whistling, but I know it exists & I'm usually able to recognize it when I encounter it.

    1280:

    Sigh. I am and always was claiming that they are NOT UNIFORMLY SUPERIOR, which is what my idiot teacher was saying. SPECIFICALLY, they are not more accurate (it depends) and they are definitely not more penetrating (the converse is generally true).

    If you would stop indicating that I have said something I haven't, and offensively contradicting me for saying it, I would not respond.

    1281:

    First of all, this is a blog posting, not an essay. Of course there were cultural rules about it. I mentioned that such existed.

    And yes, now that you mention it, Inuit is fine. However, after not hearing Inuit until I may have been over 50, a good number of years ago, Esquimo comes more readily to the mind, and the fingers on the keyboard, than Inuit does.

    Should there be an Inuit on the blog, I hereby happily apologize to them.

    1282:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1166: The word Democrat has been used for a member or supporter of the US Democratic Party since 1794, by people from both sides of the pond. I now return the thread to the flame war ....

    And no one is objecting to that usage. However when it is used in the form of Democrat Party it is a deliberate insult.

    See also: demonrat, DemoRAT, DemoCRAP, ...

    It is the same as calling someone a N***** or J**. It is intentionally demeaning and you should avoid repeating it.

    1283:

    georgiana DJT did well among Hispanic Males for the usual depressing chauviniste dominanting "reasons" I'm afraid. Depressing.

    Slightly foxed CORRECT Meanwhile "the left" want to abolish the Corporation, seeing only the outward show & ignoring the "municipal socialism" They are also a bastion of real "green" issues, as the Ministry of RoadsTransport found out to their cost when building the M25.

    1284:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1186: The usage 'the Democrat party' dates from 1836 in the USA; in 1985, the Chicago Tribune called it an 'annoying Republican habit', which is reasonable. If you want to regard it as unacceptable, I shall have to start calling out a lot of the transpondian misnomers used here as unacceptable.

    That's a bullshit argument. Just because it's an old insult doesn't make it all right to continue using it after you've been informed it's demeaning. For several hundred years people used the 'N' word to describe certain people. Does that make it acceptable to use it today?

    Go ahead and call out the "transpondian misnomers". I'm copacetic with that. I want to know what they are, so that if I use one of them thereafter, you'll know it was deliberate.

    1285:

    It's not the whole "nice couples or rape" it's that a couple of people who do know better veered towards rape, and an interesting digression into what counts as subhuman and different species.

    The problem with this whole thing is that science fiction is and has often been used as a way to metaphorically talk about hot-button issues. For instance, instead of talking about racism, we talk about contacts between alien species. Then we can get into "stimulating" arguments about whether consensual conduct is possible between different species.

    As people have become increasingly aware, especially in modern science fiction, it's really not pleasant for all those people who are not white, cisgender males hear what people like me and most of you talk about doing to their metaphorical counterparts, especially when the first thing to come out is usually about violence and subjugation, the second thing is a deflection into an irrelevancy, and the third thing is a justification for why it's okay to talk about this, and anybody who thinks otherwise is "too sensitive."

    And it's especially uncomfortable when the head of the blog, who is known as a promoter of varying sorts of diversity, slips into this problematic pattern. He, at least, figured it out really quickly. The rest of us? Not so much.

    I'd simply point out a couple of other uncomfortable facts. One is to look at who's winning awards right now in science fiction. Another thing to look at is whether they or people who are like them are active on this board. Is this a place they could be, if we weren't talking about raping others?

    1286:

    I'm sure there's something to your speculation there, however it doesn't help with the exact example I mentioned: is it hunting or agriculture when your control of the topology and structure of the land allows you to take as much kangaroo meat as you like, more or less at will? And when your land management is largely responsible for those kangaroos being in that place and in those numbers? I used kangaroo traps as an example, the fish traps at Brewarrina do something very similar and have had more internet/media exposure recently (that is a search for "Brewarrina fish traps" is more likely to yield useful hits). I think that when we consider food sources and think of hunting as variably successful but high value and "forging" as meagre, we're projecting our own lack of knowledge onto the people we're considering, not allowing for the possibility they knew quite a bit more about their world than we do.

    We also have a strong bias toward treating "wilderness" as an open-ended input, despite a century of conservationist thought telling us how it is a closed system. The parks where North American "hunters" do their thing now are really quite heavily curated museums, more a sort of theme park than wilderness: in contrast to the ideological trend, venison taken from these parks is a kind of welfare, funded by the applicable parks and wildlife budget. I think that the role of hunting as a food source in agricultural cultures is something we don't really problematise adequately when we work through how we think about it in early societies or modern societies that still have living knowledge of practices that are not like modern agriculture. If you look at it as a form of privileged amusement, I suspect most of the other trappings start to make sense...

    1287:

    David L @ 1203: Sort of a side track.

    According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are about 1 million car accidents with deer each year that kill 200 Americans, cause more than 10,000 personal injuries, and result in $1 billion in vehicle damage.

    That is from 2011

    I once saw an Elk (wapiti) dart out in front of a Volvo station wagon - neither survived the collision, although the driver was able to walk away.

    We have a huge over population of these things given that we have to take out 1 million or so a year with autos. And still have a major hunting season each year. Getting rid of wolves is the most common explanation.

    Which seems to have also led to a population explosion of coyotes. Which live in almost any area with grass/yards and eat most anything 40 pounds or smaller.

    In my edge of urban/suburban yard I've caught 6 deer at a time on my security cameras at night.

    I occasionally see deer down the street from my house. I live well inside the Beltline; just about a mile from the Capitol, and maybe a mile & a half from downtown Raleigh.

    When I was at NC State back in the late 60s we'd occasionally get black bears coming up to campus. They'd come up Walnut Creek to Rocky Branch to Pullen Park & then cross over Pullen Rd onto campus.

    Back then there was a Raleigh Landfill across Western Blvd from the Governor Morehead School & they used to come up to see if there was anything to eat. 35.775673, -78.661282 on Google Maps if anyone is interested.

    1288:

    I've checked my dictionary, and yes, this is my fault. I've been misusing the word "technocrat" to include what you call the "mandarinate" (lovely word). To me, Sir Humphrey Appleby was a technocrat, and "Yes Minister" derived its comedy from the tension between technocracy and democracy (the latter represented by Jim Hacker).

    The trouble is, I don't think the technical experts can be separated from the management hierarchy. "Technocracy" means "control by an elite of technical experts" (dictionary.com). But these experts cannot govern merely as a bunch of individuals; the sheer number of experts and areas of expertise means that to function as a government they have to have a management hierarchy. Whether you promote the experts into management or appoint managers above them (i.e. people trained and expert in the business of managing other people) you are going to get mandarins of one sort or another at the top. That is why I use the word "technocracy" to encompass the entire hierarchy, mandarins included.

    Sir Humphrey may have studied Classics at Oxford, but his entire career, as he said himself, was in the administration of government, and his post as Permanent Secretary was based on his expertise in this subject, gained over 20 years of experience. (BTW his Wikipedia entry describes him as "in many ways, the perfect technocrat").

    I've met quite a few senior managers over the years, and most of them have actually been pretty impressive people; wide rather than deep, but capable of absorbing a lot of detailed technical information where necessary. I've also met a few who were plainly over-promoted with little clue about what they were doing. I haven't seen any particular correlation between their backgrounds (ex-technical vs career manager) and their abilities.

    The trouble with any hierarchy is that it introduces dis-economies of scale. Effort gets duplicated, people misunderstand things, information known to one part doesn't filter to another part that needs it, and so on. And the people at the top lose touch with what is going on down at the bottom, because even with the best will in the world they can't keep up with everything; there is just too much happening. And of course lots of people at every level of the organisation are playing organisational games in attempts to get promoted, because that is what people do.

    Which brings me back to something I keep saying; I'd love to have a better system of government, and as soon as I find one I'll be happy to support it. But so far I haven't seen anything proposed that could actually do better than what we have today, warts and all. We can discuss tweaks; which bits should be privatised/nationalised, solutions to the Agency Problem etc. But mixed-economy capitalism with representative democracy supervising a technocratic hierarchy really does seem to be the least bad solution to the problems of government.

    (BTW I used to work in an organisation that used to be part of government but was then spun out as a private company with a regulated monopoly. All the technical people hated the change, but ten years later it had led to major improvements in how things were done. The biggest problem, sad to say, was experts from the front line who had been promoted into middle-management and couldn't imagine doing things any other way. OTOH the front line in question had good reason to select recruits who lacked imagination and did everything by the book.)

    1289:

    Rocketpjs @ 1208: DavidL #1203 Our neighbourhood has a family of deer that are quite comfortable. They are in my front yard every night around 8pm. My dog and the deer now just ignore each other completely.

    They are comfortable here because anytime a predator moves in it is killed - specifically cougars - with good reason (known to occasionally prey on children).

    We also have a neighbourhood bear, at least in the Spring and Summer. For many years it was a big sow and her cubs, but she is gone. Now there is a single young bear that (I think) lives on the ~5 lot patch of forest across the road from our house. We see him around occasionally. Nobody approaches him but nobody gets particularly excited either.

    In Colorado Springs, CO - up on the shoulder of Cheyenne Mountain - there are neighborhoods where the deer come out to feed around sundown & they're so close to the road you could roll down a window & touch them. They seem pretty habituated to having humans around because I've seen joggers run past on the sidewalks & the deer wouldn't get out of the way.

    1290:

    Is there no really long transmission line built across Canada because

    I have to wonder how much power the US and other countries transfers 1000 or more miles at a time.

    I think most of it is on the order of 100 to a few 100 miles. My father's plant had 3 long line feeds into it and could consume a giga watt or more if they wanted to. During the 70s and 80s they would switch power from way out in the great plains to places like Ohio for the power companies while cutting production during the day. And get paid nice $$$ for it.

    This plant was in far western KY. Near where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet.

    1291:

    We also have a strong bias toward treating "wilderness" as an open-ended input, despite a century of conservationist thought telling us how it is a closed system. The parks where North American "hunters" do their thing now are really quite heavily curated museums, more a sort of theme park than wilderness: in contrast to the ideological trend, venison taken from these parks is a kind of welfare, funded by the applicable parks and wildlife budget. I think that the role of hunting as a food source in agricultural cultures is something we don't really problematise adequately when we work through how we think about it in early societies or modern societies that still have living knowledge of practices that are not like modern agriculture. If you look at it as a form of privileged amusement, I suspect most of the other trappings start to make sense...

    Wow, how to alienate the ecologists really quickly.

    The simple answer is no. Just. No. In fact, I'll call total bullshit.

    Hunting doesn't happen in most national parks, which is what I assume you mean are "heavily curated museums." They happen in wildlife refuges, national forests, lands operated by the BLM, military bases, and private lands. Often these are specifically managed for hunting, especially by the distribution of water supplies (Google "gallinaceous guzzler), getting rid of chaparral to "promote deer browse," and so forth.

    Admittedly, I don't hunt, but that's because I've got some really weird allergies, and I don't want to find out that I get into anaphylaxis while skinning a deer carcass five miles from nowhere. Pulling the trigger isn't a problem for me. Here's why.

    When I did my PhD in botany on some of the rarest plant communities in the upper Midwest, in my last field season, none of the flowers bloomed that spring. It wasn't the weather, it was that they'd all been eaten by deer. My other botanist friends, who were finding that most of the forests in Wisconsin aren't regenerating because the overpopulation of deer was eating all the seedlings, many of them became avid hunters. These weren't in national parks, but in state forests.

    The problem in Wisconsin is that wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions have largely been eliminated from the lower half of the state. As a result, the white-tailed deer populations exploded. It's not the deer's intentional fault, it's just that they've spent millions of years being eaten by really efficient predators, so they reproduce a lot. Get rid of the predators, and their populations grow until they starve, something seen in Kaibab, Arizona, in the 1920s. Unfortunately, efforts to promote recreational hunting got rid of a lot of predators, and so we're stuck with inefficient recreational hunting as the only way to try to keep the deer herd from getting too big and starving. In some parks, they've even taken to hiring hunters, just to keep the parks from getting trashed.

    Speaking of Kaibab deer, back in the 1930s the owners of Catalina Island imported a bunch of mule deer from Kaibab onto Catalina, to start recreational hunting. Same problem, except that the island plants had not evolved with large herbivores, so they got really hammered. Catalina is a sucktastic place to hunt, being steep, with lots of cactus, and fairly warm all year. So unlike Wisconsin, where you hunt in the fall when it's freezing and the weather naturally refrigerates the meat, on Catalina, you've got to shoot from a long distance (it's open and the deer see you coming), hike as quickly as possible without injuring or killing yourself to get to the deer (not a joke, a friend broke a leg and a friend of a friend died in a fall), rapidly process the carcass into a cooler before the meat goes bad, then carry tens of kilos of weight up 45 degree slopes to the road. I never did get to do it, but when you see the devastation the deer bring, you realize you've got to do it.

    I've worked with a number of hunters, and the ones I know are better informed and likely more ethical environmentalists than you are. They're certainly better than the majority of urban environmentalists that I know, and I work as an environmentalist.

    The problem, especially with deer, but also somewhat with elk, is that they do better in systems where things kill and eat them regularly. It's sad, brutal, but true. When, as in Wisconsin and Catalina, there are no natural predators, they tend to proliferate wildly, graze the area down, and starve. That puts ethical environmentalists in a horrible position: we can either allow the starvation, with all the concomitant damage to other species, or we can kill the deer. Many of us who have seen the damage come to the conclusion that killing a deer with one or two bullets is a far kinder solution than setting it up to starve. And, absent something like chronic wasting disease, the hunters eat the meat or donate it to a food bank.*

    Personally, I'd like to get all the deer off Catalina and promote wolves and mountain lions in the eastern US. Unfortunately, with the politics of rural areas running the way they are, that's not going to happen.

    *Note: my friends and colleagues are ethical hunters. I have little regard for trophy hunters, poachers, or drunken idiots running around in the woods with guns. They exist too, unfortunately.

    1292:

    that a bitch in a yard by herself doesn't get pregnant

    I was asking about before 4000 years ago. Somewhere between 4000 years ago and 100,000 years ago it was noticed. And at some point became common knowledge. Long before there were corrals.

    That was my question given how we seem to be talking about deep people time.

    1293:

    I think RR will be able to jump through the certification hoops - money will not be a problem ...

    I was referring to the smaller design of the reactor units. I'm firmly convinced that a big part of our problem with nuclear power just now is that everyone tries to build them huge.

    Building big seems to be an effort to solve one set of issues but brings up an entire set of others.

    1294:

    And no one is objecting to that usage.

    Quick! Name the four main political parties in Ireland (the republic of) and tell me what their rude nicknames are.

    Or do the same for Scotland.

    The hard fact is, there are about 190 nations on this planet, more than half of them are democracies, most of them have N >> 2 political parties and/or ruling coalitions, they all have disparaging nicknames, and worse, the parties and their nicknames change over time, as do their political orientation.

    Keeping track of other folks' politics is hard enough in the current tense: expecting foreigners to remember other folks' political history is just stupid.

    Which is to say: don't assume there's an intent to be insulting when you're dealing with a foreigner -- your starting position should be to assume ignorance, not malice.

    1295:

    David L @ 1251:

    Rolls-Royce (nuclear) engineering to the rescue! - provided, of course that the fake greenies are kept at bay ...

    I think I prefer this approach.
    https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/first-modular-nuclear-reactor-design-certified-in-the-us/

    But they are running into trouble getting funding for their first plant.

    According to the dimensions given in the article, it's larger than the Westinghouse PWR out at Shearon-Harris. The Westinghouse design had the steam generators separate from the reactor vessel. This looks like it has a single steam generator integral to the reactor vessel. Larger physical size with only 5% of the power output.

    1296:

    I was referring to the smaller design of the reactor units. I'm firmly convinced that a big part of our problem with nuclear power just now is that everyone tries to build them huge.

    Building big seems to be an effort to solve one set of issues but brings up an entire set of others.

    It takes a massive and expensive amount of effort, paperwork, jumping through hoops and fighting off Greenpeace nutters to get the first spadeful of earth out of the ground to start building a reactor so building a big unit is, in the long run, actually a lot easier logistically speaking than going through the same process to build four or more smaller units to provide the same amount of energy.

    After a reactor is up and running there is, in most countries, a complicated and elaborate process to train and qualify reactor operators and legal specifications for the minimum number of operators per reactor on-site at any time. Four small reactors will need at least twice as many operators and technicians as a single large reactor required by law, in part because a reactor is seen as a barely-chained dragon that will destroy us all if not for eternal vigilance.

    The smallest land-based power reactor under construction I know of is the CAREM-25 in Argentina. It's not exactly a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) but it is designed to generate only 25MW of electricity (there are a number of small experimental reactors in various countries that co-generate electricity in that range). It started construction around 2013 but as of June 2019 it was still nowhere completion with most milestones (building, pressure vessel, ancillary equipment etc.) at the 50% level. In contrast South Korea (KEPCO) is building four APR1400 reactors at Barakh in the UAE. They started construction at about the same time the CAREM project started. The first 1400MWe reactor went critical about three months ago and the fourth and last reactor is expected to start operation late next year, being regarded as 85% complete in July this year. Total output for the four-reactor plant will be 6.4GW.

    1297:

    Charlie Stross @ 1294:

    And no one is objecting to that usage.

    Quick! Name the four main political parties in Ireland (the republic of) and tell me what their rude nicknames are.

    Or do the same for Scotland.

    I do not know.

    OTOH, IF Ireland or Scotland's political divisions were under as intense discussion as U.S. politics are in this thread, AND IF I were informed that my choice of names was offensive I would refrain from using the offensive language ... even if I didn't understand why it was giving offense.

    The hard fact is, there are about 190 nations on this planet, more than half of them are democracies, most of them have N >> 2 political parties and/or ruling coalitions, they all have disparaging nicknames, and worse, the parties and their nicknames change over time, as do their political orientation.

    Keeping track of other folks' politics is hard enough in the current tense: expecting foreigners to remember other folks' political history is just stupid.

    I don't expect foreigners to remember our political history. But, should they choose to discuss our political history, I do expect them to pay attention IF/WHEN they are informed some usage is offensive, particularly after the reason why it is offensive has been explained to them more than once, it's reasonable to believe repeated use of the offensive language is intentional.

    If I were going to participate in discussion of Ireland's or Scotland's politics, I would try to avoid using language that you would find offensive. But if I did offend inadvertently, and someone told me I had done so, I'd try to amend FUTURE comments to avoid giving further offense.

    Which is to say: don't assume there's an intent to be insulting when you're dealing with a foreigner -- your starting position should be to assume ignorance, not malice.

    My starting point was to begin with the "assumption" of ignorance. That's why I took pains to explain why some of us are offended by the usage.

    But after it's been explained more than twice, by more than two different commenters ...
    "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."

    1298:

    On the original subject ... "Everyone" is asying ... "But Trump can't do that because ..." - long list of deadlines & US-consttutional issues & spearation of powers etc. But I remember how Trump couldn't possibly be president, back in 2015, yes? I have a horrible suspicion that he ( & "they" ) are going to try something really twisted & "plausible" Ther is one small snag - for them ... they have trapped themseleves into the usual US failing, that the rest of the world either doesn't exist or doesn't matter. Meanwhile, numerous governments have effectively, recognised Biden & congratualted him. Want to bet who would actually recognise a Trump-led coup "government" or, alternatively, withdraw theor ambassadors & close off "business". Better start worrying now?

    1299:

    Ah, fake greenies. That would be me then. (speaking of insulting terms for political groups you don't agree with...)

    What's the insulting term for people who want the most complex solution to every problem no matter what the cost (and the cost is always paid in human suffering, be it an over worked teacher, someone who can't be seen by a doctor in a timely fashion or a kid knocked off a bike on a dangerous road that's been on a list to be repaired for a decade)?

    2 billion quid for 440 MW. That's their "hope" for what it will cost after they've build a few at some unstated cost. But even assuming their fantasy is real, what's the lost opportunity cost?

    A solar panel factory takes about a year to build and using figures from other developed countries, 1 USD invested gets you about 8W of completed solar panels per year.

    https://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/18638/50-Million-Solar-Panel-Factory-Opens-in-Florida.aspx

    So call it 10W per year per GBP.

    Now RR says they "could" have one up and running in 10 years. (hahahahahahaha)

    So if we invest 2 billion quid in a solar panel factory now, in 10 years time it will have been operating for 9 years. It will have produced 20 billion W per year (10W/yr/pound x 2 billion pounds) for 9 years. That's 180 GW nameplate of solar panels. Give them away to people and they'll put them up themselves.

    Even in northern climes that's an average output of over 18 GW. That's 20 times more energy per pound invested.

    But it doesn't stop there. The factory can keep churning out panels. The reactor doesn't get more powerful over time. It stays at 0.44 GW. (actually, it probably gets derated in the second half of its life). The factory's effective output doesn't stop growing until the number of panels reaching end of life equals production. That's about 30 years of production.

    600 GW of nameplate, about 60 GW of average output. 130 times more power output per pound invested.

    Of course "but storage!"

    Well to a certain extent, storage is a trade of cost vs efficiency. You could have something as cheap as dirt, like hot dirt, but the efficiency might only be 20% round trip. That still makes the solar panel factory more than 20 times more energy per pound.

    1300:

    Don't forget to also factor in the cost to de-commission a reactor (and related machinery), once it has reached the end of its useful life.

    And there's also the cost of building and maintaining a spent nuclear fuel depository, which has to remain sealed for about 100,000 years.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository

    I've got nothing against nuclear power for countries who don't have renewable energy options, but that doesn't mean I want to stay blind to the accounting.

    1301:

    Don't forget to also factor in the cost to de-commission a reactor (and related machinery), once it has reached the end of its useful life.

    Most countries with nuclear reactors require the operators to contribute to a fund for decommisssioning the reactor at end-of-life in sixty or eighty years time, using a small levy on each kWh generated. Worked examples suggest a typical 1GW reactor costs about 500 million dollars to return the site to greenfield after shutdown (The two reactors at the Zion plant, total cost $1 billin). Over a 60-year operating lifespan a 1GW reactor will produce about 400,000 GWh of electricity worth in total, at today's prices that's about $200 billion or so. Modern-build reactors have a design life expectancy for the major components like the reactor vessel of over a century so they might well last even longer than that.

    Don't forget to also factor in the cost to de-commission billions of tonnes of dead solar paels once they reach the end of their useful life. There is, as far as I know, no similar decommissioning levy for safe solar panel disposal at end-of-life required by the builders. I think they just plan to dump them in landfill, generally or simply declare bankruptcy and walk away from the site.

    1302:

    The dead solar panels aren't radioactive.

    1303:

    Barron Gorge hydro plant in northern Queensland is about 3500 km as the crow flies from their most distant "customers" (people who buy from retailers that they sell to) in Southport Tasmania. About 5000 km as the powerlines run.

    1304:

    The dead solar panels aren't radioactive.

    They do have a lot of toxic chemicals in their makeup, they have to be safely disposed of and there's an awful lot of them for the amount of electricity they generate over their lifespan (ca 25 years or so). Somebody will have to pay for that safe disposal but I don't think there's any legally required levy fund for grid solar generators to pay into to ensure they do actually clean up after themselves. I know there have been a few small 1st-generation grid solar plants that were basically abandoned by their owners when maintenance became too expensive. This isn't allowed by law for nuclear plants.

    1305:

    Impressive! The distance between the James Bay hydro complex (in northern Québec) and the city of Montréal is only 960 km as the crow flies.

    1306:

    "The problem with this whole thing is that science fiction is and has often been used as a way to metaphorically talk about hot-button issues."

    That was one of the things I paid attention to in creating my recent (finished to the point of first draft) fantasy novel. It's not hard to notice that much of fantasy refers to different species as "different races." There's a whole big chunk of undigested roughage in that practice... If Orcs are a "different race" can we compare some particular "human race" to them? I smell something pretty rank, and you're very right. It's all pretty fraught!

    I explicitly made Orcs, Elves, and Humans different species.

    1307:

    The first Google result for the phrase "solar panel weight" is "40 pounds".

    2 billion tonnes (the lowest figure that could reasonably be called "billions") divided by 40 pounds is about 110 billion.

    At 300W each and 30 years and an average of 25% of nameplate output (typical figures for modern panels in a typical place, but a place with less sunlight has a longer panel life, so it applies really anywhere) that's over 2x10^18 wh. Or in GWh, 2,000,000,000 GWh. Equivalent to 5000 one GW nuclear reactors.

    So you're not really comparing apples to apples there. The lowest possible interpretation of "billions of tonnes" is thousands of times more than a single reactor. In fact, 400 000 tonnes of solar panels equals one reactor. And at the going rate for business landfill at my local tip, that's about 16 million dollars. 1/300th of the cost you gave for remediation. (though I think the guy at the gate might have to call his boss if you turned up at the local tip with 400 000 tonnes)

    Even using your figures, it's 2.5 trillion dollars to clear 5000 reactor sites. That money has to come from somewhere, even if its dribble by dribble over the 60 years.

    Of course that's assuming that 2 billion tonnes of metals glass and silicon has no value and will go to landfill. Which seems outlandish to me.

    1308:

    Well, I'm reading DLD.

    Charlie! He converted a room to an office, circa 1990's.

    Sorry, but we had touch-tone phones by then, and at that point, my 286 that I'd bought in '87 was ready to retire. By '94? '95? I bought my first rePentium.

    I think writing too much about Case Nightmare Green is affecting your memory.... (g)

    1309:

    First Google result for "how much concrete in a nuclear power plant"

    Was:

    "Modern nuclear reactors need less than 40 metric tons of steel and 190 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt of average capacity"

    So for a 1 GW (1000 MW) reactor that's 190 000 cubic metres of concrete. At 2.4 tonnes per cubic metre that's 456 000 tonnes of concrete. Comfortably more than the weight of the equivalent solar panels. Just the concrete alone.

    1310:

    I know there have been a few small 1st-generation grid solar plants that were basically abandoned by their owners when maintenance became too expensive. This isn't allowed by law for nuclear plants.

    Look at the issue of 'orphan wells' in Alberta — leaving the taxpayers on the hook to clean up when the company owning the well goes broke, after the profits have been transferred somewhere else, of course.

    1313:

    Um. As someone who actually lives in a place that is not a National Park, not near a National Park, and has a heavy concentration of wolves (to the degree that they are delisted both at Federal and State levels), these days, outside of said National Parks, you start running into issues. Namely, that the deer and elk (fallow deer and red deer to those over you overseas) simply move into populated areas to get away from the wolves.

    Whitetail deer in this area used to be rare. They are now overpopulating cultivated land and outcompeting the native mule deer (whitetails tend to panicky run run run behavior, muleys hop a short distance, then stop to survey what is happening. Muleys also have twins at most. Whitetails frequently have triplets in this area--I've observed one doe who regularly has triplets). We also have a big herd of elk near town, hanging out between two highways. None of this was happening before the wolf population took off in this area. Additionally, the elk are moving more into open grasslands rather than forest areas because...easier to spot and escape wolves.

    The problem with deer overpopulation is more than just lack of predators, though. They've moved into urban areas and find lots of yummy forage. That supports a larger growth of population. At this point we've taken to using a squirt gun to sensitize the local deer to our presence, because several of the males with big antler racks have become aggressive in their behavior. They've lost their fear of humans. Not safe for humans or deer. The population also has several wasting diseases, depending on location, which makes them not exactly safe to hunt and consume the meat.

    And now the wolves are coming down out of the forests into cultivated lands near towns, where a lot of livestock tends to spend the winter on feeding grounds where they can be watched and supervised more closely. My horse is boarded on a 40 acre pasture two miles out of a small town, as part of a horse herd. Several years ago, during a rough winter, three wolves were observed scouting the horse herd. Others have had wolves attack a flock of geese that were penned just 25 yards from a house.

    So the reality is just not that simple.

    And as for the "nice couples or rape" discussion...how much of this has been shaped by assumptions arising from Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear? Species, sub-species, etc etc. The big key is whether subpopulations can interbreed and raise consistently fertile offspring. If you can interbreed with consistently fertile offspring, then you're the same species. Period.

    Donkeys and horses can interbreed. But the presence of fertile offspring of the product of a horse and donkey, whether the result is a mule or a hinny (mule= donkey sire, horse dam; hinny= horse sire, donkey dam), is extremely rare.

    I am not certain about the differences between North American rabbits and European rabbits, but...they are also entirely different species.

    Nonetheless, as one of the few apparently female posters on these blog posts, the continuous assumption that rape had to be involved in relations between two subspecies of humans is getting to be exceedingly tiresome. You boys can be pretty damn annoying in that respect. It would be nice to have fewer discussions of rape.

    1314:

    DJT did well among Hispanic Males for the usual depressing chauviniste dominanting "reasons" I'm afraid. Depressing.

    Sadly, no.

    Trump did well because he courted them, and dealt with the items that concerned them, for the 4 years he was in office.

    Lots of news articles online since the election about this, NBC News includes this quote:

    “Trump showed up in Florida. He asked us what our issues are and he addressed them. He didn’t take us for granted,”

    His reversal of Obama's Cuba policies played very well in south Florida, as did Bolton's attacks on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

    The Democrats waited too late to try and reverse the damage, waiting until Biden was the candidate.

    (note that the quote equally could have applied about Labour and the "red wall" in the UK election).

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-cultivated-latino-vote-florida-it-paid-n1246226

    There have also been news reports quoting Latinos elsewhere in the US who supported Trump because of his attacks on the illegal latinos crossing the southern border.

    In short, Trump's views resonated with a lot of Latinos in the US and not because of male chauvinism.

    1315:

    On the original subject ... "Everyone" is asying ... "But Trump can't do that because ..." - long list of deadlines & US-consttutional issues & spearation of powers etc.

    If Trump is going to do anything it has to be before the Electoral College makes things official - once things are official the mechanisms kick him out on January 20th.

    But I remember how Trump couldn't possibly be president, back in 2015, yes?

    Different issue - it was people's arrogance in believing the American public wouldn't be so stupid to vote him in, not because the system would prevent him.

    I have a horrible suspicion that he ( & "they" ) are going to try something really twisted & "plausible"

    Trump essentially isn't organized enough to pull off such a thing - look at how soundly his joke of a legal attack is failing, and how his lawyers in court are dancing around the fact that they have no grounds to be there and aren't willing to lie and get disbarred.

    As some of the Republicans who were involved in the Bush/Gore fight in 2000 in Florida have stated to the media, it takes a lot of organization and resources to launch the sort of challenge they did in 2000 - and Trump has demonstrated neither.

    Better start worrying now?

    Nope.

    If something actually happens, then worry.

    But for now it is all a lot of noise with no substance behind it, and no real indication that there ever will be any substance.

    One of the side effects of surrounding yourself with idiots whose only qualification is to be loyal is that you don't have the competence to come up with anything clever.

    1316:

    Y'know, a lot of folks are worried as to what Trumpolini's going to try. Thing is, that's it: try.

    And the other thing is that there actually are people, not just us here, who put country over party, and who actually understand what the Oath of Office means.

    Among the things Trumpolini's not doing is opening the case flow and the office space, etc, for the transition. He's also NOT giving Biden the required daily security briefings.

    A Republican - I'll call him that - Congressman announced today that if Trumpolini doesn't start that by Friday, he will.

    1317:

    I'll also note that the more we learn of Neanderthals, the less the differences between them and us I see. Some good points, thanks. There was this from 2016 (98 citations), that hypothesized a gestational incompatibility between Homo Sapiens females and male foetuses from fertilization by male Neanderthals. One could speculate wildly. (grepping, I linked this in 2016.) The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes (April 07, 2016, Fernando L. Mendez, G. David Poznik, Sergi Castellano, Carlos D. Bustamante) The fact that the Neandertal Y we describe has never been observed in modern humans suggests that the lineage is most likely extinct. We identify protein-coding differences between Neandertal and modern human Y chromosomes, including potentially damaging changes to PCDH11Y, TMSB4Y, USP9Y, and KDM5D. Three of these changes are missense mutations in genes that produce male-specific minor histocompatibility (H-Y) antigens. Antigens derived from KDM5D, for example, are thought to elicit a maternal immune response during gestation. It is possible that incompatibilities at one or more of these genes played a role in the reproductive isolation of the two group.

    1318:

    Barron Gorge hydro plant in northern Queensland is about 3500 km as the crow flies from their most distant "customers"

    Sure. I was talking in general. Auztrailia has an interesting geography that leads to all kinds of unique situations that don't exist in other places.

    In most of North America the long lines seem to go from power station to power station plus large switch yards. If you have lots of concentrations of users all over why not just use the interconnects.

    Northern Canada is an interesting case. But as others have mentioned they seem to tie north south into the US in the east. And I have to wonder if not on the west coast also.

    I did use the word "most".

    1319:

    Auztrailia

    Missed that one. Sorry. Don't want to get flamed for being totally insensitive to another country.

    1320:

    Thanks! I hadn't thought about the problems of wolves and townie deer, but that makes perfect sense. Am I right in guessing that hunting is not permitted in town? If so, the deer figured this out too. I agree about the predators and the problems of wasting diseases getting in the way of hunting, too. It's a mess. But the idea of hunting being about killing bambi's mother really isn't useful, despite the perfectly normal emotions that inspire it. Living with wild animals takes a lot of negotiating.

    One thing I've used on mule deer with some success was two flashlights. The modern LEDs often have a couple of extra settings, strobe and SOS. If you light up the deer with one light strobing and the other flashing SOS or strobing out of synch, it's really disorienting and the deer hate it. Couple the light show with yelling and they leave. Admittedly the yard I used this in had a steep slope and a fence that the deer had to jump while being strobed, but I'm hopeful it will work more broadly.

    As for the nice couples or rape thing, I think it's worth staying away from the labels on human diversity. After all, this is the crew that had no problem with a alfar who is definitely a different species of hominid getting it on with a nice human vampire, so it's perfectly obvious that the sex is perfectly consensual as long as the psychopathic partner is a cute, slender blonde and the lucky nerd turns out to be a reasonable human being. Moreover, I'll bet that at least a few of us, if given a choice of moving to Innsmouth and having immortal children, would take it, even if it was a bit fishy and meant converting to that old time religion. That's what makes the whole "nice couples or rape" thing so annoying. It's not about genetics, it's about double standards and trying to justify the contradictions we trip over, rather than admitting the mistake, laughing at our silliness, and getting on with life.

    1321:

    Who says solar panels will only last 25 years? I know a guy in NE US whose has a 35 y.o. set he’s been carefully logging that whole time. He says they’re actually producing more power than when new. Who says nobody is going to recycle them? If there’s expensive materials there I rather suspect someone will find a way to retrieve it. Certainly likely to be more doable than making any use of 45,000 tonnes of glow in the dark concrete.

    1322:

    But the idea of hunting being about killing bambi's mother really isn't useful, despite the perfectly normal emotions that inspire it.

    A few months ago someone in my neighborhood asked about the best way to relocate a mouse nest she had found in her yard. Somewhere in the country where they could be free. She didn't want a cat or bird to get them.

    It was hard but I resisted making any comments.

    What I wanted to say was that mice, rabbits, chipmunks, etc... mainly exist around here to feed the bigger animals. Oh, yeah, with a side comment that I doubt the number of mice around here that die a natural death would exceed the number of fingers and toes on my body. But I let the moment pass.

    As a side note my security cameras often go off a night. Mostly for one cat that I think once got a baby rabbit or chipmunk and now thinks it will find one every night. But last night a minute or so after I got the alert (I had woken up in the middle of the night as usual) I actually heard something out the window. So I looked and a raccoon was trying to open up an extra bird feeder I have on my back paitio that needed cleaning and it was making a racket.

    1323:

    There are a couple of interesting ideas out there that might be useful:

    One is that the Trumpian party is one of ingrained grievance, so stoking that sense of grievance gives him power, even if he doesn't use it right now (maybe in 2024?). Another is that he tries to sow chaos and then take advantage of whatever develops, rather than necessarily going in with a plan.

    A third idea is that the Republican Party is a failed state and Trump's the "war"lord who took it over. This one's been around since 2016, and I think it's still current. Certainly the craven caving to Trump seems to be in line with a group that believes they have lost control of the reins of power.

    All three could easily be true.

    Anyway, if these are a problem, there are some reasonable suggestions for countermeasures at https://wagingnonviolence.org/2020/11/trump-stolen-election-claim-coup/

    1324:

    most of them have N >> 2 political parties and/or ruling coalitions, they all have disparaging nicknames, and worse, the parties and their nicknames change over time, as do their political orientation

    In 1970s Australia, the Country Party, one of the partners in the conservative coalition*, changed its name to the National Party. Since then, it's been known by its own people, its allies and its detractors as the Nats. Oddly, before the name change only the detractors used a similar contraction. Some of us possibly still do, of course. There's a famous (although totally manufactured, sadly) picture of Tony Abbot (of the Liberal Party) standing in front of a sign with the word COUNT (possibly -RY is missing, possibly the word is part of a larger sentence)... except that he is in front of and occluding the letter O.

    • Except in Queensland where the Liberal Party and National Party merged to form the Liberal National Party (LNP). Sometimes LNP is used to refer to the coalition outside Queensland.
    1325:

    It would be negligent for me to omit mention of an additional incident regarding the Country Party. An MP from a rural seat was said to have started some remarks in the House of Representatives with "I am a Country Member", to which Gough Whitlam, then the leader of the opposition but later PM from 1973 to 1975, quipped "Yes, we remember!".

    1326:

    Ah, fake greenies. That would be me then.

    At least this time around he isn't calling for our summary execution.

    1327:

    We're winning him over!

    1328:

    We just like to be noticed. Anyone who can identify that we're the one that doesn't have the Vienna Boy's Choir is fine by us.

    1329:

    gasdive No I have a great deal of sympathy & support for actual "green" ideas & action. We desperately need a carbon lower/free future, a.s.a.p.. For which, certainly in the next 50-100 years nuclear power is absolutely essential. Now look at Germany, where fake greenies have produced an INCREASE in coal-burning, because the nuke stations have closed. I & the planet can do without this level of stupid. [ Like "ER" stopping ELECTRIC trains, so clever ... ]

    And to all the objectors to nuclear power & why it can't possibly work, there's a one-word answer: France

    mdive If Trump is going to do anything it has to be before the Electoral College makes things official - once things are official the mechanisms kick him out on January 20th. Oh, really? You actually believe that? If something actually happens, then worryIt's too late.

    whitroth & others Where did all those violent goons who showed up in Portland come from? Trump was directly in charge of them, wasn't he? Are there enough to at least attempt a coup?

    1330:

    Wow, how to alienate the ecologists really quickly. The simple answer is no. Just. No. In fact, I'll call total bullshit.

    Whoa Nelly! I mean, steady on old chap, I'm pretty sure that (saving terminological clumsiness on my part, something I'm always ready to own up to) we're in furious agreement on most of what you have to say here. Where we are not is most likely nothing to do with ecology, at worst some parts relate to environmental ethics.

    Often these are specifically managed for hunting, especially by the distribution of water supplies (Google "gallinaceous guzzler), getting rid of chaparral to "promote deer browse," and so forth.

    That's largely my point. Specifically managed for hunting, mostly at public expense. Public money goes in, food that can be obtained recreationally comes out. Sure it's an oversimplification to call that "welfare", but I'm tired and lack the patience to unravel those details. I totally accept that culling (that is, killing for population reduction) is sometimes required and forms an unpleasant but important part of management.

    As you're probably aware, we have a similar problem with kangaroo numbers in Australia. Here it's mostly land clearing for pasture that is the cause. People do "hunt" kangaroos, though mostly where there's a serious problem professional shooters are used to cull specific numbers. This feeds into a kangaroo meat industry. But it's culturally and ideologically very different to the sort of thing that you're talking about.

    Unfortunately, efforts to promote recreational hunting got rid of a lot of predators, and so we're stuck with inefficient recreational hunting as the only way to try to keep the deer herd from getting too big and starving. In some parks, they've even taken to hiring hunters, just to keep the parks from getting trashed.

    Backing up a little, what I'm hearing is that a large number of the problems that recreational hunting in North America helps to alleviate are actually outcomes of recreational hunting, and land management designed to support it. And that was also part of the point I was trying to make, although it was a side point to my main argument that hunting as we know it did not play the part we usually are supposed to think it did in earlier times, especially in pre-contact cultures. In particular I'm trying to say that driving a group of animals through a bottleneck and slaughtering a number of them as needed is closer to agriculture than it is to hunting, although I accept I haven't defined terms and may not be working with consensus definitions of these terms.

    I've worked with a number of hunters, and the ones I know are better informed and likely more ethical environmentalists than you are. They're certainly better than the majority of urban environmentalists that I know, and I work as an environmentalist.

    Well sure. I don't make any claim to being an especially good environmentalist. I mostly think we need societal level solutions and that a lot of individual action falls into the category of being better than doing nothing. I've achieved quite a few, albeit disparate and maybe random things in my life, although I've gone to some lengths to ensure my own work contributes to the greater good (and for a long time was happy to accept a lower income for that reason). I'm not much of an activist, but I've campaigned for the Greens here and I like to think have helped in a small way build their modest success. My current process of self-reinvention has actually involved studying ethics, but my own (late in life) PhD which I am just now starting will be largely focused on efficacy and in any case is in quite a different area to this discussion.

    On the other hand if we are seriously talking about people who delight in killing, for whom that moment of squeezing the trigger and the resulting effect is a kind of thrill, a rewarding component of the exercise, then no matter what their credentials or motives, they need a ladder to see the sole of my shoe. I believe this is not the sort of person you are talking about, although it is the sort of person I was talking about in my earlier comment to which you were responding. There can certainly be a pleasure taken in performing a complex operation well, and hunting-for-culling could fall into that category.

    I accept that perhaps my understanding of "culling" as it applies in your part of the world cannot be readily distinguished from "hunting". I think though that there is value in making a distinction terminologically otherwise we'll keep getting into this sort of digression. I accept that human hunting can be encouraged for population management purposes the same way that natural predation can be encouraged. But that does not mean that hunting, natural predation and population management are the same things.

    we can either allow the starvation, with all the concomitant damage to other species, or we can kill the deer. Many of us who have seen the damage come to the conclusion that killing a deer with one or two bullets is a far kinder solution than setting it up to starve. And, absent something like chronic wasting disease, the hunters eat the meat or donate it to a food bank.*

    This is a very familiar dilemma, and I completely agree. Where I disagree is with the characterisation of "hunting" that is prevalent in Western culture, although apparently far more so in the USA than Aus. This is one where an infinity of natural resources are there for the taking by the industrious, which means that if you are starving or poor it is your own fault. Where all non-human life is for human use and has no intrinsic value.

    Personally, I'd like to get all the deer off Catalina and promote wolves and mountain lions in the eastern US. Unfortunately, with the politics of rural areas running the way they are, that's not going to happen.

    I have little regard for trophy hunters, poachers, or drunken idiots running around in the woods with guns. They exist too, unfortunately.

    Well since these are largely the people I have been considering, in the absence of your argument that there are very different types involved, we're probably on the same page in that regard. Like I said, furious agreement.

    1331:

    I just assumed it was a reference I didn't get, and kept reading. While I am generally curious and typically do pursue knowledge for its own sake, I long ago gave up on the need to understand All The Things. I think it sort of goes along with the need to be right.

    1332:

    "France"

    I didn't say nuclear won't work.

    You could restart the Concorde production and use them for crop dusting. That would also work.

    The set of things that work, and the set of things that are utterly daft have an overlap, and in that overlap you'll find nuclear.

    Actually, that got me to thinking. An Air Tractor costs about 3.25 million. Concorde cost 160 million each in 2019 dollars. So 50 times more.

    If you have a look at my calculation, the one that you're replying to, you'll note that the RR nuclear option is 130 times more expensive per unit energy.

    Which means that the most excessively costly, daft and complex solution I could think of, that I thought was actually hyperbole, it's actually more than twice as sensible as nuclear. I literally couldn't think of something more absurd than using nuclear for electricity.

    As for using nuclear for low grade heat... (I can't claim to have thought of that one though)

    1333:

    You're returning again to the price argument for energy -- it has to be cheap. That's why fossil gas is the current king for electricity generation now and for the next few decades, probably till the end of the century. Because it's cheap. Green Germany is gradually weaning itself off lignite, supposedly, some time maybe if they ever get round to it but they're pushing for the construction of the Nord Stream II pipeline down the Baltic Sea to double their imports of cheap Russian natural gas, guaranteeing their energy needs for the next thirty years and more. The US increased its own consumption of natural gas by 3% in 2019 to an all-time high. On Wednesday this week during a wind lull Britain was generating 20GW of electricity from gas -- right now the wind has picked up and it's only about 10GW.

    If you insist on energy being cheap and expect renewables to meet the demand then the world will burn.

    1334:

    Unclean glass has essentially no value, except as landfill, however you cost it; it takes nearly as much energy to recycle it as to make new glass. However, most glass is a perfectly adequate substitute for sand in soil, so who cares?

    1335:

    The small deer problem is really bad in lowland Britain (*), and the same is happening to woodland plants. You may have seen me say how badly we need to reintroduce lynx.

    (*) The Highlands have a serious problem with red deer, but this is being controlled by culling in some areas.

    1336:

    "It is the same as calling someone a N or J*. It is intentionally demeaning and you should avoid repeating it."

    I can hope J** doesn't mean Jew, though I don't know what else it might be.

    In any case, I've noticed people (all of them non-Jews, I think) getting jittery about whether "Jew" is offensive. I hate this. Jew is a respectable noun.

    I've found myself thinking "Jewish people" instead of "Jews", and I am not pleased, even though I don't think there's anything wrong with "Jewish people".

    It's just that it took a lot of improvement for "Jew" to not be an insult, and I want it to stay that way.

    * replies to other comments *

    As for hunting, I've seen enough accounts from people who have so little money that killing an occasional deer (not in a national forest) is a crucial part of the food budget. I believe them.

    I don't hate capitalism, but I can't see that the world would be a better place if they weren't allowed to hunt and had to buy their meat.

    Part of the situation for suburban hunting is that any weapon which can kill a deer can kill a human, and I'm reasonably sure that suburban hunters would kill some people.

    Rape and early human history: I was bewildered when I saw the claim that human/Neanderthal/Denisovan crosses had to be the result of rape. I tentatively thought it was a feminist reflex of mistrusting the likelihood of consensual sex, and I didn't want to step in that mess.

    Then there were accusations that it was actually based on racist premises, and I can kind of see that, though I can't quite construct a logical chain than feels right to me.

    Speaking only for myself, I wasn't there when those early crosses happened. I consider it extremely unlikely that we will ever find out anything about the degree of consent, though in a world where we can be sure in what season Stonehenge was set up, I'm willing to be surprised.

    I'm also dubious about the process of assuming the worst about other people's motivations, and I don't especially like living in a world where it takes some courage to say this in public.

    1337:

    Sorry, but we had touch-tone phones by then, and at that point, my 286 that I'd bought in '87 was ready to retire. By '94? '95? I bought my first rePentium.

    You're American, and you're an IT guy.

    Trust me, 286s were still in use in British offices -- in non-technical roles -- as late as 93-95. (By 95 they were going to landfill ... mostly.)

    The GPO didn't permit non-GPO telephony equipment to be connected to their network before about 1980 and didn't do touch-tone dialing until the early 80s; a lot of houses still ran on hard-wired pulse dialing phones through the late 80s. (British Telecom, formerly the GPO, had a legal monopoly on answering machines until 1985.)

    UK office spaces did a huge amount of catch-up in the 1990s, but through about 1985-1989 were quite backward by US standards. You know about the legal quirk of us having to wire our own mains plugs onto domestic appliances until the late 1990s, right? (That's 240 volt gear that needed an earth pin hook up and an appropriate fuse for a ring main putting in the plug: this was normal on everything from record players to toasters and lawn mowers.)

    Other backwardness: my parents didn't get a colour TV until I gave them my (old, second hand) one when I got home from university, circa 1986-87. And I don't think they ever had a VCR. Cable TV? Late 1990s. Modems? Because we paid per minute for phone calls they didn't catch on until the late 1990s; there was very little BBS culture in the UK. Computers cost roughly twice as much in relation to per capita income as they did in the US. And so on.

    The office in question belonged to a not-technologically-ept accountant (and part-time sorcerer), not proto-Bob Howard.

    1338:

    I'm not following your reasoning.

    You sound like you're arguing that only cheap energy has a chance. Yet you argue for nuclear over renewables despite nuclear being at least 2, possibly 3 orders of magnitude more expensive.

    If we can't have renewables because they're too expensive, then why do you think we can have nuclear at 100 times the price?

    1339:

    There are many species that can interbreed, but don't, or don't in the wild - e.g. the members of genus Cervus - the red/sika problem in the UK is because they bred in artificial conditions in captivity, and the hybrids do interbreed in the wild. As Bill Arnold linked in #1317, even interfertility is not a simple concept. And, for a really clear example of why the absolutist definition is self-inconsistent, consider ring species.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

    Cottontail and European rabbits are not closely related.

    For completely inter-fertile (sub-)species, if two live together for a thousand generations and the result is only 1% genetic transfer, about one fertile progeny in a hundred thousand was the result of inter-specific breeding. Whether you call those species or sub-species is a matter of arbitrary definition.

    We have reasonably good evidence that all three hominids being described were fairly similar physically, technically and probably culturally. But we have damn-all idea whether the more subtle differences (such as scent) were similar or different. There is some evidence (not just #1317) that neanderthal/human progeny was partially infertile, which means that there might have been a lot more interbreeding, but the genes have not survived. I can't be bothered to chase up a more authoritative link:

    https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/which-parts-us-are-neanderthal-genes-point-skin-hair-n18701

    The simple fact is that whether you call us three separate species or sub-species is a matter of debate. Claiming that one definition is right is a religious rather than scientific position.

    1340:

    Dammit! I should have guessed the fourth one in Eire, but I am completely at a loss to know what their rude names are in the countries of origin (*). Please educate me :-)

    (*) I assume Nats, but Tories isn't rude.

    1341:

    On hunting: Some weeks ago in Finland one person was killed in a hunting accident. The hunter was hunting birds with a rifle, missed, and hit a biker some kilometers away. It was a very rare accident, of course, but even in relatively empty areas shooting is dangerous. There's yet no conclusion for the case, but in my opinion it's clear it was an accident. We'll see if some laws will be changed.

    Also we seem to have a problem with deer and elk - I have the impression that there are "too many" of them and they are a big cause of traffic accidents. I don't own a car and rarely drive outside of urban areas, so I'm not up to date with this. However, we have a different problem with predators: we have perhaps 200 wolves in Finland, which is not that much, but there's a lot of opinions that even that is too much. If we had more the wolves could perhaps eat some of the deer, but apparently that's not an acceptable solution (I've heard opinions that then there wouldn't be enough deer to hunt...)

    I don't hunt myself, so I don't really have insider information there, either. I think there are a lot of reasonable people, but also some not reasonable ones. The wolf hate seems to be very strong in places.

    1342:

    gasdive Still wrong Nuclear works is still working & will continue to work - FRANCE, remember? See also Nojay on "cheap" .... Renewables depend on wind or sunshine, you still nead base load ( And "storage", um - see recent discussion on that. )

    EC Pretty pussy-cats. Lynx are beautiful & can certainly be semi-domesticated from kittens ... They love being combed & stroked See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC2B3CT1PlQ

    1343:

    OTOH, IF Ireland or Scotland's political divisions were under as intense discussion as U.S. politics are in this thread

    You know how shitty US newspaper/TV news coverage is when it comes to giving you a clear picture of what's going on in, say, Belarus or Hungary or Kenya?

    You might see news coverage of the US election in The Guardian or the Daily Mail on the web. But those are web editions tuned for a global audience and selling ads to US readers -- so their US news coverage is massively more in-depth than the version presented to their UK (or non-US) readers. Which is more along the lines of the same "whacky people in funny place squabble over ballot boxes, look at their quaint foreign habits" you get wrt. Belarus, Hungary, or Kenya -- only with names of leading presidential candidate level politicians attached, because they're a bit more familiar/pronouncable to Brits.

    Upshot: if you're talking US politics with foreigners on this blog, you're dealing with weird outliers who know way more about your country than most of their fellow nationals -- and they come from a media environment that frequently gets stuff wrong, because: you know the way US media handles the rest of the world like it's happening on another planet? Back atcha.

    1344:

    And I might add: Some of us foreigners have actually lived in United Bluff with open eyes.

    1345:

    In case the lynx video wasn't enough to get your mind off of things, have an extended linguistic, philosophical, and mathematical discussion of holes.

    1346:

    Ah! Topology. Any subject that has the Furry Ball Theorem and the Generalised Ham Sandwich Theorem is always good for amusement.

    Q: How do you know someone is a topologist? A: He can't tell the coffee-cup from the doughnut.

    1347:

    It's you that is saying that energy has to be cheap, not me. Renewables here in the UK are actually very expensive -- earlier in the year the press was full of puff-pieces about an large offshore wind turbine farm being connected to the grid, the Hornsea 1 array in the North Sea. 2.1GW of generating capacity, enough for a million homes! No mention that it would never ever produce that amount of electricity and only half that for a few days a year because it depends on the weather co-operating (for several days last week the entire British fleet of wind turbines, onshore and offshore was producing less than 2GW total). What got lost in the fellating press reports was the Contract for Difference agreement for the Hornsea 1 array, basically the base price the operators can charge the grid for their electricity which is £162.50 per MWh. The successor wind farm projects, Hornsea 2 and Hornsea 3 have negotiated the same CfD agreements, assuming they actually get built.

    https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/cfds/hornsea-offshore-wind-farm-phase-1

    You can find the CfD strike price for the "three-orders-of-magnitude-more-expensive" Hinkley EPR nuclear reactors on the same webpage, by the way. It's £104.48 per MWh, or two-thirds the cost of cheap renewable wind power.

    1348:

    Concerning rude names for political parties, donkeys are associated with The Democratic party because they were called jack asses in the early 19th century and Andrew Jackson* was a big enough asshole to run with it.

    *Earlier this month Jackson County, Missouri voted to keep his statue in front of the Court House. A smaller replica is on the west side of the old Court House in Independence, the east side has a statue of Harry S Truman.

    1349:

    In the late 90s I was replacing the call centre's 386s with something more modern (I forget whether they got new ones, or another team got new ones and the call centre got their hand-me-downs). Then I was inflicting the 386s on the data entry team, replacing their WYSE terminals with a terminal emulator, alongside the new records management app. This downgraded their performance, because the emulators would buffer keyboard input in situations where the serial terminals did everything real time, so they would have to constantly stop and wait for the screen to catch up. The body responsible for the plan (which had been hatched by a vendor) insisted that IT couldn't cater to the freakishly fast typing the data entry folks were doing, or something. They must have switched to a GUI client for the database eventually, but I'd moved on by then.

    1350:

    You: good news .. Rolls-Royce (nuclear) engineering to the rescue!

    Me: nuclear option is 130 times more expensive per unit energy.

    You: to all the objectors to nuclear power & why it can't possibly work, there's a one-word answer: France

    Me: I didn't say nuclear won't work.

    You: Still wrong Nuclear works is still working & will continue to work - FRANCE, remember?

    Me:??? I fucking give up.

    1351:

    Amidst discussions of where the UK gets its electricity, there's a site that has the current situation in a handy format.

    https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

    G.B. National Grid Status [2020-11-12T12:15Z] CCGT 9.14GW (31.84%) Wind 7.97GW (27.77%) Biomass 1.97GW (6.86%) Nuclear 5.42GW (18.88%) Solar 3.38 GW (11.78%) Pumped + Hydro 0.69 GW (2.41%)

    I was somewhat surprised to see solar that high.

    1352:

    Nuclear works is still working & will continue to work - FRANCE, remember?

    France ran into problems with their nuclear fleet. Post-Fukushima they had an enquiry into disaster readiness and concluded that there existed not-implausible edge conditions in which their on-site response teams could be wiped out and an unattended reactor left in meltdown -- and this failure mode was common to most of their fleet due to design issues that couldn't be fixed.

    AIUI they switched to a response model where trained emergency teams would emerge from end-of-the-world bunkers and fly to any disaster-stricken reactor site in helicopters (consider how Fukushima Daichii went bad because of blocked roads, post-quake/tsunami).

    Not that they've had any disasters to deal with this way, but it should give pause for consideration.

    Meanwhile France peaked at about 90% nuclear (no local coal, oil, or gas fields, remember) but has now declined to about 60% as first-gen reactors aged out without being rebuilt.

    1353:

    Yes, I admit I too have brought up France as an example of how to do it right in the nuclear power area.

    Et c'est en grande partie parce que je peux lire leurs documents, en français.

    However, France has not quite finished doing it really right. They still haven't solved the nuclear waste disposal problem.

    They tried very hard with their Super-Phénix fast breeder reactor, but it was a failure. And now the have recently given up on their ASTRID fast breeder project, which they were going to do with Japan.

    1354:

    He's also NOT giving Biden the required daily security briefings.

    It's traditional and a good idea, but it isn't required.

    1355:

    France is still producing 80%-plus of its electricity demand from nuclear -- it varies across the year depending on reactors shut down for refuelling, inspection, upgrades etc. usually during the summer and the increased demand in the winter. Remember that France uses a lot of electricity for home heating, displacing gas to a significant extent so its per-capita electricity use is about 150% that of the UK. Right now as I type this Britain's electricity demand is 35GW while France's demand is 56GW. The French also export several GW of electrical power to various countries most of the time -- Britain takes 2GW of that export for most of the year.

    The French were replacing the steam generators in their reactor fleet a few years back. Since they had built mostly similar reactors, the M910 series with later units enlarged to produce more power, they ordered 50 or so identical steam generators on a rolling contract. Once they're all done most of the reactors will be good for another twenty years or more. The long-term plan though is to replace them with gas-burning generators in the 2040s and 2050s because Russian gas is cheap and readily available and no-one cares about global warming.

    1356:

    Which is precisely why many of us oppose nuclear power in the UK! France's government is far more 'in-house' than ours is.

    The British gummint's response would be to bury the report, and ensure that all responsibility was properly outsourced for deniability (preferably to a foreign company, who could then say "stuff you" to any victims). Abusing the Official Secrets Act has been SOP for its nuclear fuck-ups since day one, and it's what Jeremy the Cunt did with Exercise Cygnus, after all.

    1357:

    They still haven't solved the nuclear waste disposal problem.

    Actually "they" did, a long time back. It's easy since there is so little of it, just bury it deep. Right now there's very little nuclear waste to get rid of -- France's entire high-level waste "mountain" would perhaps fill a large gymnasium after forty years of intensive reactor operation since they recycle spent fuel to recover the 90%-plus of reusable uranium it contains. They've got plans to start digging a waste disposal facility some time in the 2030s or 2040s when it's actually needed. The Finns have already dug a long-term depository which is good for about a hundred years of reactor waste fuel. The Finns don't reprocess spent fuel so it's much bulkier but a bit easier to handle. Etc., etc.

    In contrast, "they" still haven't solved the fossil fuel waste disposal problem. It's not safely sequestered from the environment like spent nuclear fuel, it's dumped into the atmosphere as CO2 and into the rivers as ash and toxic chemicals, about ten billion tonnes a year and increasing. There's no serious effort going in to control or even reduce that rolling disaster because fossil fuel is cheap and, like Gasdive explains above, people want cheap energy at all costs.

    1358:

    whitroth & others Where did all those violent goons who showed up in Portland come from? Trump was directly in charge of them, wasn't he? Are there enough to at least attempt a coup?

    No coup.

    Yes, one of Trump's loyalists found a way to get a bunch of law enforcement to Portland to stir up trouble and make Trump feel like the powerful dictator he seems to think he is.

    But despite his threats to do it elsewhere it never happened - because he simply doesn't have enough goons in the various law enforcement agencies.

    And part of the key to Portland was that it was against civilians, and not against law enforcement/authority, and was close enough to legal that the valid law enforcement couldn't to much to end it.

    A coup is an entirely different thing, with serious consequences when it fails.

    1359:

    Yes, I know about the underground installation in Onkalo, Finland. In fact I posted a link to a Wikipedia article on it right in this blog at 1300.

    I also know about the experimental ANDRA site at Bure, France, 500m underground.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_Research_Laboratory

    They're very much in the testing phase, not sure yet if a clay soil is the best answer for piles of hot radioactive materials.

    1360:

    Agreed. Even in leading-edge IT, ten year old computers were and are common for non-leading-edge uses. Cambridge certainly allowed pulse-code dialling until well-into the 1980s - I remember the engineer switching our handsets over, aying pulse-code was going to be withdrawn shortly! While we didn't use a rotary telephone, if we had had one, we would have done (they were better, acoustically).

    I was going to wait for a spoiler thread, but there was a point which slightly grated because it was made more than once and did not quite match the character - for precisely the opposite reason! Round pin plugs did NOT go out of use in the 1940s and, in older houses (such as that one), outnumbered square pin until the 1960s and were still common in the 1970s. The reason is this:

    The square pin standard was introduced only in 1948 - I don't know when new builds started to use it, but it was installed in older houses only as they were totally rewired and not always then. Yes, I have seen houses with PVC wiring (introduced c. 1960) and round pin sockets, possibly because the householder didn't want the inconvenience and cost of replacing every socket and every plug. Or possibly because not all circuits were rewired at the same time.

    On the other hand, I can easily believe a youngster making that mistake, as they would never have seen one, though I would have thought an infogeek would have known a bit more.

    1361:

    the idea of hunting being about killing bambi's mother

    Cue The Frantics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmasGwz3iXk

    On a more serious note, this is a serious look at hunting: http://thelasthunt.nfb.ca/#/thelasthunt

    Equal parts tenderness, brutality, love and death, The Last Hunt is an interactive reading and photography experience for the web, created by the National Film Board of Canada's Digital Studio. The content deals with the strength of family bonds, and the implicit spirituality within the pragmatic act of hunting.

    Requires Flash, so I'm not certain how many of you can see it. I really hope the NFB converts this to HTML5 or whatever the new standard is. If anyone here knows how to download it and convert it to a more modern format I'd gratefully appreciate learning…

    1362:

    This just in from 538.

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/2020-election-uncalled-races/ Last night, Maricopa County, Arizona, released 13,143 more ballots, and Trump won them 53 percent to 44 percent — well behind the pace he needed. There are now, at most, 25,000 ballots remaining to be counted statewide, and Biden leads Arizona by 11,635. While ABC News has not yet projected a winner, last night Decision Desk HQ joined Fox News and the Associated Press in doing so.

    There's a link to the AZ Secretary of State ballot page that shows Pima County has 10,700 of the 24,738 remaining. Pima (Tucson) is quite blue.

    1363:

    Haute Marne is a research project. The evidence is that the clay strata being investigated hasn't changed significantly in dozens if not hundreds of millions of years which bodes well for eons-long storage of SCARY! nuclear waste in such underground structures. Clay being a softer material than granite it's easier to excavate and can be backfilled after deposition of the waste with excellent sealing expected. The US military WIPP facility is based in a salt mine where the geology self-seals the tunnels due to movement of the salt after the waste storage chambers are filled.

    As for radioactive waste being hot, spent fuel is warm rather than hot after ten to twenty years in above-ground pool storage. Such spent fuel would make an excellent non-carbon heating solution for large buildings but Godzilla movies have put paid to that ecological possibility. Dry-casking is being implemented for older spent fuel. The fuel rods are encased in gas-tight steel and concrete containers and either buried in surface pits or simply positioned in "fields". It's more expensive than geological burial and less safe but it will suffice until the irrational fears of Chicken Littles die down far enough for proper disposal to be permitted.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage

    As an outlier there's the Waste Eater fast-spectrum reactor concept which has a sufficiently high neutron economy that it can fission problematic radioactive isotopes as well as doing a number of other tricks like burning spent fuel directly with minimum reprocessing required, burn surplus weapons-grade plutonium etc. The Russians have built several of these over the years with the most recent, the BN-800 coming into operation a few years back. The Chinese are also building a similar reactor with Russian help for experimenting with waste isotope destruction and the like. They already have a small (65MWth) fast-spectrum reactor, the CEFR in operation. Early days though.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600

    1364:

    but there was a point which slightly grated because it was made more than once and did not quite match the character

    The house I grew up in was built in 1922, and rewired using modern (ring mains/square pin) sockets in 1972-75 (I can't remember exactly when, but I recall the right end of the decade). Again: the Starkeys lived in a chunk of London suburbia out towards Heathrow that was largely built around that time, so I was going ofr a 40-60 year rewiring in their dwelling's history.

    (I have just reached the point in book 3 of the trilogy where I must immediately down tools and watch the first episode of "The Prisoner" again, because Reasons. Hint: what if Portmeiron was a 1920s recreation built to roughly-original blueprints for a much earlier Invisible College facility located elsewhere that mysteriously burned down in 1817? Say, an internment camp for French sorcerors captured during the revolutionary/Napoleonic era -- mostly aristocrats, so handle with kid gloves, but also dangerous, so requiring isolation ...)

    1365:

    Pima (Tucson) is quite blue.

    Current Pima numbers as given by the WP are

    Biden: 300,743 58.8% Trump: 202,928 39.7%

    I think the ratio will probably hold up for the remaining 10,700 ballots.

    1366:

    I too first thought that J** meant Jew. However, on reflection, I suspect it refers to people of presumed Japanese ancestry. While it was allowable in WW2, the level of anti-Asian racism on the US West Coast, starting with the Chinese and chilling out a bit in the 1980s, makes calling someone a 3-letter contraction of Japanese rather insulting, as would be Chink, Gook, Slant-eyes, Yellow Peril, and all the others.

    1367:

    I guess the problem is that for every Haute Marne you've got a San Onofre where they're burying waste canisters on the effing beach, in preparation for eventually hauling them uphill across the highway.

    Now I happen to agree that deep storage in various places is probably safe, even if we get into Yucca Mountain levels of investigation. The problem, though, is the idiots at places like San Onofre. One reason I like solar and wind is because you can be that stupid about managing them and not accidentally decommission the plant and screw up the shut down.

    1368:

    So, who's number one?

    1369:

    That's entirely realistic. But it was the remarks by Doc (p. 72? and another remark on p. 228?) that I was remarking on. fbreader's search facility is totally buggered, so I can't be certain.

    I am a bad reader in this respect, as I have been working on home wiring since the 1960s, all in older houses!

    1370:

    Portmerion has changed a bit since The Prisoner was filmed. All the buildings from the series are still there, but a few more have gone up.

    1371:

    Yeah... lynx.

    By the way, most people don't realize that the American bobcat is basically a southern version of the northern lynx, and cats like the Eurasian and Iberian lynxes are structurally more like American bobcats than like those Canadian lynx snowcats.

    Anyway, my mom got presented a little bobcat kitten one evening, because she was the local wildlife rescuer and someone had found it on the side of the road. The idiot should have left it alone, but too late. Anyway, my mom tried to nurse it with what she had (cow's milk, not very good for kitty). While my mom and the kitten were trying to figure out how to feed the kitten, the little monster bit through my mom's leather glove and ended up sucking some of her blood. That didn't help much either. Its claws went through the glove too.

    My mom's two domestic cats (each at least twice the size of the bobcat) stayed at the far end of the house from the baby bobcat, who cried all night. By the next morning, the local mockingbirds had all picked up "baby bobcat howl" in their repertoire. My mom found a wildlife rehab station that had a bobcat mother with a litter of kittens, so they got the kitten. The problem with cats, especially bobcats, is that they're not born competent hunters. Mom has to teach them how to hunt. That's why you get all these videos of cats not knowing how to kill rats or even mice--they never learned from an adult. So without the rehab bobcat mom, that little kitten was destined for a zoo somewhere.

    Anyway, that's the joy of dealing with a pet in the genus Lynx. I prefer domestic cats.

    1372:

    They are actually moving the canisters up the hill, there's a Youtube video showing the process that I saw a short while back. Legally though they can't move the canisters "off the beach" until hoops are jumped through and approval is granted since the San Onofre site is under nuclear regulation and any movements of radioactive material off-site are tightly regulated. The storage site up the hill isn't legally part of the San Onofre site so delays can be expected.

    Oh, and when you say they're being stored "on the beach" it's worth pointing out it's a field of concrete-lined sub-surface pits, not sand-castles. There's a reason they went for temporary sub-surface pits, the threat of a tsunami.

    1373:

    Yes, I agree that people freak out about wolves. Although I also agree with jreynoldsward that having them stalking horses isn't a trivial problem either.

    That said, I remember in Wisconsin that the #1 predator on deer was cars, and probably still is. I remember a field trip in grad school where one student never showed up at the campsite (we were all driving separately). Turned out he was on a motorcycle, hit a deer, and ended up in the hospital. I've come within a meter or two of the same fate.

    So anyway, the Wisconsin legislature, in their wisdom in the 1980s (this was before they became the Trump-enthralled wackaloons they have now) passed a law saying that anyone who killed a deer in a car collision and had a valid hunting license could keep the deer. The idea was that you were paying thousands of dollars rebuilding the car after the collision, why not get something out of it.

    Unfortunately...some dudes in Wisconsin started putting reinforced front grilles on their trucks and cruising the roads to kill deer for free. That got the law repealed.

    And this gets into the complexities of hunting and wildlife management. This is the western version of what the Australian aborigines were doing when they made kangaroo habitat that they could readily hunt, except in the north, we're fussing with deer species and their predators.

    One problem we got into in the late 19th and early 20th century was market hunting, which did almost wipe out deer, ducks, and other wildlife. It was comparable to the African bushmeat trade of today. This led to a crackdown on commercial hunting and promoting recreational hunting run by governments, and this led in turn to predator removals in the 1920s (Leopold's Sand County Almanac touches on this). This led in turn to problems like the Kaibab deer herd starving, and we've been fussing ever since, trying to get it right, with decreasing numbers of recreational hunters, the rise of anti-hunting ethics, and now spreading diseases (from wildlife ranches moving infected animals around) and climate change.

    In contrast to Damian, I'm not bothered by people who thrill in the kill. What I am bothered by is incompetence (my own and others), and lack of connection. The problem with market hunting was basically it was resource stripping, while the problem with a place like Catalina stocking exotic game animals for pleasure hunting was all the damage caused. In both cases, the underlying problem is lack of consideration of the consequences of hunting. That's what I mean when I say it's complicated.

    If you get into Dark Emu, the Australian Aborigines figured this out. What they were doing in land management isn't very different than what modern land managers do. They just did it better, because everyone was involved, the knew full well that they had to do a decent job or starve,* and they had to ritualize it because they couldn't cart a library of textbooks around to help them remember, and people tend to remember songs, dances, and rituals better than complex stories.

    *One critical problem with land management and recreational hunting is that the managers are salaried, while the hunters are out recreating. In both cases, they can screw up massively and not go hungry. This lack of consequence breeds a lot of carelessness, and it's one of the central and under-appreciated problems in land management right now.

    1374:

    Fair point. I stand corrected.

    I'm still pissed about San Onofre screwing up the upgrade so badly that the ended up shuttering the plant, then tried to pass on the costs of the screwup to us ratepayers. That definitely makes me a biased witness, but it was a big screwup, even compared with something spectacular like blade jump in a large wind turbine (one of the things that can happen when the transmission fails in those things).

    1375:

    Speaking of statues I just saw this one on twitter :

    https://twitter.com/p_zalewski/status/1326808434281418752

    "Turkmenistan’s president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has just unveiled a giant statue of his favorite dog"

    Does Ivanka have a favorite dog ? (in 4 years ?)

    1376:

    EC @ 1346 😁

    Nuclear Power I understand that, also, Canada has a successful "Nuke" programme, yes?

    Rbt Prior - repeat ... HOW can I watch my steam-locomotive valve-motion porn if I don't have flash any more?

    1377:

    It's successful in the province of Ontario and to a lesser extent in the province of New Brunswick and that's why they're going together towards a SMR version of the CANDU reactors.

    But in the rest of the country the CANDU reactors have been shut down and properly decommissioned. The other provinces are not lacking in other kinds of less finicky resources. British Columbia, Québec and Newfoudland and Labrador are overflowing with hydro power and sell the surplus to neighbors.

    One overlooked factoid about Canada's nuclear industry is that it is responsible for a lot of the world's medical isotopes: Molybdenum-99 for diagnostic tests, and cobalt-60 for cancer therapy.

    The story of Canada's nuclear industry is the story of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. and vice-versa. The Wkipedia article on it is rather good and it has the links to the right places:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Energy_of_Canada_Limited

    1378:

    Nuclear Power I understand that, also, Canada has a successful "Nuke" programme, yes?

    More I suspect had, attempts to modernize Candu haven't had much success and Ontario hasn't built anything new since Darlington came online in 92/93 (and Ontario has 3 of the 4 nuclear plants in Canada).

    Various new builds have been proposed but have never proceeded since then, in part because of cost.

    HOW can I watch my steam-locomotive valve-motion porn if I don't have flash any more?

    Only hope is an open source attempt at implementing Flash, perhaps Lightspark - https://lightspark.github.io/

    Better might be to attempt to convert from Flash to say mp4, a search will reveal some possible options.

    1379:

    Further re: nuclear in Canada

    New Brunswick has 1 reactor.

    Ontario went big, with Pickering(8), Bruce(8) and Darlington(4) though Pickering is now down to 6 reactors with 2 permanently shut down.

    1380:

    The GOP as a "failed state" and Trumpolini the warlord that took them over.... That's a fascinating view, and one I really need to think about.

    Another possibility that comes to me as I type is a hostile leveraged takeover. And all of those are intended to end by shredding the organization taken over, selling it for parts.

    1381:

    A lot of folks in rural areas, and a lot who wish they were in rural areas, but are in exurbs, are preppers, and they're the core of the ones screaming about "2nd Amendment" because they're sure - I'm not making this up, not only will the gummint come for their guns, but brainwash them, and barcode their foreheads with 666.

    Oh, and immensely bigoted racists who HATE LIB'RULS because they're all n**r-lovers and some go on to "race traitors".

    They work as a armed mob. They don't work well as a gang.

    1382:

    Except that it's not "unclean glass", it's very high quality pure glass. I understand there are places they explicitly mine sand for the glass, so recycling it would be worth at least as much as getting the gold off electronics, if not more.

    1383:

    Whacks self on head. Of course. The EXPEN$$$IVE 386 that we got at the Scummy Mortgage Co was in '87 or 88, so with austerityites in charge, of course they'd stay.

    And I well remember switches on phones that flipped between pulse and digital. Why the cordless phone I bout about 8 years ago dials with the speed of pulse, I have no clue.

    On the other hand, a SCSI drive? Nah, it would have been IDE. Hmmm, then there's the question of what kind of hard drive. The original ones, you had to format the H/D, then, in the early nineties, we started getting the factory pre-formatted drives, that you couldn't format....

    1384:

    Portmeiron? The Prisoner?

    ROTFLMAO!!!! I'm looking forward to that.

    Btw, Ellen's urging me to consider something to d/l and read books to replace my Nook. She's encouraging me to think about a book-sized tablet running Android, perhaps, and buy the &lt$20 covers-with-keyboards. (Apple is Right Out.)

    1385:

    Part of the situation for suburban hunting is that any weapon which can kill a deer can kill a human, and I'm reasonably sure that suburban hunters would kill some people.

    Suburban in most of the US means lot widths of 100' or less in most places. 50' for a lot of more recent stock. Firearms in such area are just insane. It would be rare that a bullet from a rifle would NOT hit a car or house unless it hits a tree first.

    We recently had someone killed due to hunting. It was all legal but the shot traveled way outside of the hunting area into a suburban neighborhood of houses.

    Now a friend who lives on a 1/4 mile or so dead end lane with about a dozen houses also has 30 acres are so off his end of the property. His son target shoots ever now and then. Hilly area and he shoots at targets set up against 50' hills. Neighbor doesn't like it and calls the cops at times. But he's outside of the city and it is all legal. One time neighbor said his son was shooting at his house and barely missed. My friend thought his was amusing and told the neighbor so. His son was a Marine sniper with a good rating who did a tour in Afghanistan. He said basically he hits what he intends to hit.

    1386:

    I was using SCSI drives as late as, ah, 1997? 1998? IDE wasn't a thing before the early 90s; it was MFM or RLL formatted ST506 controllers that could only handle 2 drives. If you wanted a stack of drives hooked up to a single PC (for, say, tape backup of all the businesses you were managing accounts for) you ran out of controller slots really fast.

    1387:

    Do NOT buy an Onyx Boox Poke 3 (which came out last month), at least not until they update their firmware. It's an e-ink device that runs Android 10 and comes with Google Play. This sounds good, right? Except the firmware on the shipping machine isn't Play Protect Certified so google refuses to let you link your account to it and do, well, anything. Am waiting for an eventual firmware update, fuming.

    1388:

    Are you sure that it is easy to separate from the other stuff, and other glass, essentially perfectly? If not, it's unclean.

    1389:

    I think you mean "as early as". And thanks, yeah, I was thinking of Bernard's h/d being either MFM or maybe RLL - I couldn't remember what preceded IDE.

    1390:

    Geez. But I wasn't planning on buying anything that Just Came Out. The same way that I don't use 1.0 software, but wait for 1.1 or 1.1.5....

    And I was thinking inexpensive.

    1391:

    To clarify, in most of southern Wisconsin, the only hunting allowed is bow and arrow or shotguns with slugs, because the range is short enough to not go through houses. This is primarily hunting in woodlots and along the edges of cornfields, but the properties are not that large.

    This contrasts with rifles, where a bullet on the right trajectory can go for miles. Rifle hunting is the default in the open parts of the western US, and in hunter safety out here you get warned, with bloody examples, to never, ever shoot a rifle at an animal silhouetted above you on a ridge. You really shouldn't take any shot in this situation, but the long trajectory on rifle bullets means that (to pick a real example), a bullet fired on one side of an island can hit a bunk bed in a school camp on the other side of the island. Fortunately no one was in the bed at the time.

    1392:

    whitroth They work as a armed mob. They don't work well as a gang. Even as a "gang" they would not last more than a few minutes against properly trained prfessional troops, in other words? Could they mount a gureilla operation? I must admit I doubt it ...

    1393:
    Pretty pussy-cats. Lynx are beautiful & can certainly be semi-domesticated from kittens

    In my youth we lived in a pretty rural area. I had a cat which was probably one-quarter bobcat, aka lynx. In coloration and markings he looked just like a classic yellow tabby. It wasn't until you got close that you realized he wasn't just a big domestic cat. Giant feet and claws, thick legs, and incredibly muscled - petting him was like petting a fur-covered brick.

    After he hit adulthood he didn't much care for anyone except me, but his behavior with me was always affectionate. My family he'd tolerate, others . . . not so much. One day a local dog decided to teach him who was boss. The result was not to the dog's liking.

    So when I see something like those admittedly lovely videos, I think of that cat and wonder about how much more aggressive a full-blooded bobcat would be.

    1394:

    I'm not bothered by people who thrill in the kill.

    I'm not bothered that people should experience this (cue Catherine Tate: "Do I look bovvered?"). People feel what they feel, you can't police that or hate someone for it. There's no moral agency in how you respond on an emotional level. And if we can make use of that sort of motivation as a cog in the wheel of the mechanism that balances population levels, then we might as well. But where there is someone performing the resulting complex series of tasks with a high proficiency barrier, where the emotional payoff is that thrill, then I refuse to be lectured about that person's supposed moral superiority. I grok that your friends are doing the right thing in the scheme of things and that consumption of resources in general is inherently problematic for everyone; I'm also wary of privileging this sort of individual action: not everyone can do it.

    What I am bothered by is incompetence (my own and others), and lack of connection.

    Plans that depend on widespread competence require widespread technical education, and rules that make it mandatory for the activities where proficiency is important. That's just basic, surely? (Okay I'll stop calling you Shirley in a minute; well maybe in a minute and a huff). So I am wary of such plans: incompetence is always with us. We (my wife and I) recently bought an inflatable floating drinks cooler for the pool, which came with a label: "Warning! Use only under competent supervision". We feel this means we can't use it at all (where are we going to find someone competent?), but in practice we feel safe enough ignoring that. We (society in general) just barely scrape by with mandatory training and licensing for motor vehicle operations, and still get evanescent incompetence turning deadly with a certain frequency. The proficiency requirements for unleashing supersonic projectiles just intuitively seem higher, but I guess that's just crazy Australian talk that has no bearing on the Northern hemisphere.

    The problem with market hunting was basically it was resource stripping [...] the underlying problem is lack of consideration of the consequences of hunting. That's what I mean when I say it's complicated.

    I agree it's complicated, but I think that there are probably better ways to use the market as a mechanism (or not) that don't have this outcome. For instance you can decouple the shooters from the market, just by hiring them as seasonal employees of the service. This gives more control over ensuring competence.

    If you get into Dark Emu, the Australian Aborigines figured this out. What they were doing in land management isn't very different than what modern land managers do. They just did it better, because everyone was involved, the knew full well that they had to do a decent job or starve,* and they had to ritualize it because they couldn't cart a library of textbooks around to help them remember, and people tend to remember songs, dances, and rituals better than complex stories.

    It's mostly Dark Emu I'm referring to above (possibly Gammage also). Part of Pascoe's overarching thesis is to debunk the claim that pre-contact Aboriginal people did not manage the land or practice agriculture. He is quite explicit that he sees taking kangaroos in the sort of kangaroo traps I describe above as harvesting rather than hunting, and the same thing with the fish traps. I'm not sure I agree that modern Western land management is quite the same thing, per the distinctions I made above.

    For me the ethics come in with questions like: can everyone do this? What would happen if everyone did it? Can this form of resource use replace some agriculture, is it a sort of windfall, can it be managed long term?

    1395:

    I used SCSI drives at home long after most home users switched, in no small part due to getting amazingly high-performance drives discarded from servers at work. Ah, the joys of 14400-rpm drives with low seek times and caching controllers . . . back when geometry mattered.

    Contrary to general belief, install of scsi components didn't require the sacrifice of a goat; any large herbivore would do. SATA is a helluva lot easier to deal with. Solid-state drives make for wonderful performance, but I do all my backups to removable SATA disks.

    1397:

    Maybe they could. The problem is, who's going to lead them? I can see all of them saying, "you're not the boss of me!".

    Gangs, like inner-city gangs, have power structures, and leaders. This, as I said, is just an armed mob. No, real troops would deal with them in no time at all.

    1398:

    Not interested in SSD, at least yet. I've got just fine response with, say, the pair of 1TB spinning drives that make up a RAID 1 for my root filesystem. And I back /home and /etc onto a second drive. And then, as I did for those years at work, I shove a 4TB WD Red into my eSATA external drive bay, and back that up. Then unmount it, power it down, and pull it out of the bay. Not gonna get that with anything.

    1399:

    Back in the 80s when I was working for BNR on Ottawa, one of my colleagues and his girlfriend had a small cabin in the Gatineau. They loved going there, but avoided it during hunting season. When hunting season was over they returned to the cabin and spent time patching the bullet holes in the walls, and sometimes sewing up the bullet holes in the furniture.

    Apparently firearm safety wasn't a priority for the local rednecks. (He used a Quebecois term, but I've forgotten it — redneck comes close but isn't quite right.)

    The Arrogant Worms sum up the yahoos nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBU4lcmbh-c

    1400:

    The San Onofre operators bought replacement steam generators from a company (Mitsubishi?) that had a good track record of building such units and which were qualified builders of N-stamp components in the NRC's approved list. It turned out there was a design flaw and the steam generators were prone to failure at a higher rate than specified (All steam generators leak eventually. The failed tubes are plugged during outages, they are over-specified with "spare" tubes from new). The plant operators came up with a plan to keep the reactors running at reduced power (70% I think) which would reduce the load on the faulty steam generators and reduce the number of tube failures until new replacement steam generators could be built and installed.

    Nuclear energy being regulated up the wazoo this change to operating procedures with partially-defective equipment needed to be approved by the NRC, they couldn't simply do it under the terms of their operating licence. The modified operation request sat on the NRC's desk for about two years while the reactors were idled with no answer, yea or nay. Eventually the San Onofre managers figured they'd be better off, financially speaking, shutting down operations completely and beginning the decommissioning process rather than paying to keep the plant open with no revenue from carbon-free electricity generation coming in.

    1401:

    This is where I differ. The version I heard, from people much closer to the plant, is that Mitsubishi had precisely no experience with this kind of generator.
    This was compounded by the plant operators wanting to up their power output, probably beyond where they should have, because the generation part of the facility got overcrowded (to put it in simple terms)

    The mistake with the steam generators (they cracked under vibration at high pressure) has been well known in the industry since the 1950s, when it was first seen at Santa Susanna (This from someone who's working on cleaning up Santa Susanna). Mitsubishi should not have made the mistake. That error meant all the generators had to be replaced. Coupled with the overcrowding, it meant that it was cheaper to shut down the facility than to fix it..

    Then the plant operators decided to try to offload the decommissioning costs onto rate-payers, through a backroom deal with their regulators that took place at a hotel in Poland and which landed everybody involved in hot water. This was all over the news here when it was uncovered.

    There have been sundry goofs since then, but those were the most serious ones.

    1402:

    Been through this before with you but Mitsubishi had made a lot of parts for Japanese nuclear reactors, INCLUDING STEAM GENERATORS. They were (and still are) qualified builders of components for nuclear reactors for many countries including with the NRC in the US. This "qualified supplier" status is not something the NRC hands out to Joe's Welding and Muffler Repair, it requires facility inspections and expensive training of workers and specialist equipment and QA testing gear and paper trails etc.

    Vibration in steam equipment including steam generators is a well-known issue, it can't really be avoided. Steam generators break tubes regularly in both fossil steam plant as well as nuclear with an accepted fix process of overspecifying the number of internal tubes to start with and plugging leaking tubes during downtimes. The Mitsubishi steam generators damaged tubes faster than they should have (it seems to have been a harmonic vibration problem), the operators came up with a partial solution to give them time to get new generators manufactured and installed (they're not off-the-shelf parts, obviously) but the operation plan wasn't approved or rejected after a couple of years waiting for an answer.

    The San Onofre operators knew that even with new steam generators the reactors only had maybe 20 years or so future operating life even if they did get an agreement to run at reduced capacity then swap generators. The clock was ticking and they finally gave up.

    1403:

    There are still a number of misconceptions here. In California and elsewhere, you do have to take a hunter safety class before you can buy a gun or get a hunting license. It's simply a day-long class. Anybody with a brain gets lessons in how to shoot, because it's not that easy. These lessons come from family or friends more than teachers, just as with driving. But having done both, yes, learning to shoot a gun is easier than learning to drive a car.

    The problem with moving traditional management to modern society, let alone linking it to market forces is simply a numbers game. To pick on Budj Bim, which, full disclosure, I intend to copy for a fantasy story if I can ever get out of all the developments I'm fighting, is considered one of the most sophisticated fishing setups ("aquaculture") in aboriginal Australia. And for someone like me, it's extremely cool. But this big, relatively permanent settlement only hosted a few hundred people. That's the "problem" with aboriginal Australia: the density of Aborigines was 10-100 times lower than in modern Australia. Modern California has the same problem, with 39 million people currently living in a space that 200 years ago held maybe 100,000 Indians. We can't go back to Indian Country management without killing off 99% of our population.

    Management practices that work at low human numbers, like setting up harvest systems for deer or kangaroos, are insufficient to feed the number of mouths currently on the land, and this is our huge, worldwide problem. It doesn't matter if it's bushmeat in Africa, fishing worldwide, or raising kangaroos in the north paddock. There are very few wild systems that produce as much food as we can eat. The few exceptions are things like perhaps bison ranching in North Dakota, but you can google "buffalo commons" if you want to dig into that mess.

    That's what got us into trouble with market hunting: too much demand. It also easily leads to poaching or other illicit practices. We've seen similar problems with the recreational cannabis market, where people growing cheap, illegal pot are still quite active. With wild foods, there's tremendous poaching of fish going on on the high seas, and it's difficult to stop.

    None of this means that we shouldn't see if we can adopt some old-school management practices. However, we have to be careful, again because of the number of people living on Earth now.

    As for the Australian aboriginal system, if you substitute mystical terms like "power spot" for wildlife management terms like "Core habitat," "Critical habitat," or "source population," they're identical. I thoroughly approve of the idea that, where species operate in a source-sink population model (e.g. there's a stable source population, and individuals who can't make it there spread out into marginal habitats, where they tend not to reproduce), then I'm all for harvesting the individuals in the sink population area and leaving the source alone. That's basically sustainable...provided that you can keep the demand under control. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure this out, but it does take people who devote their lives to understanding particular species and/or particular areas, who help others figure out where to harvest, when, and protect things otherwise.

    Instead of saying someone has a totem, say that they're an expert on a species, and instead of sacred sites and songlines, talk about the distribution of core habitats for particular species across the landscape and the trails that link them, and you've got a decent match between traditional Aboriginal practices and wildlife management. The problem with modern wildlife management, as noted above, is that I don't starve if I screw up, so I have less incentive to get as good as a traditional land manager. This is true for most land managers. And it shows, unfortunately, with badly kept parks, the spread of weeds, and too many species just hanging on instead of thriving. But it's what we have to work with at the moment.

    1404:

    One critical problem with land management and recreational hunting is that the managers are salaried, while the hunters are out recreating. In both cases, they can screw up massively and not go hungry. This lack of consequence breeds a lot of carelessness, and it's one of the central and under-appreciated problems in land management right now.

    Actually this paragraph neatly summarises the main thrust of my objections. I'd actually go further and say that where these conditions don't apply, that is the resource use is a major food source, we're not talking about the same concept of "hunting". A subsistence activity is categorically different to a recreational activity, even if people who do it for substance enjoy doing it. More complexity I guess - though I'm pretty sure I said the same thing above in different words.

    Look I eat meat but I've been taking a long time coming around to the view that we probably shouldn't, even leaving aside environmental or human-centred utilitarian arguments. Maybe as "predation" for population management is the only ethical way to continue? I can't see that working out for myself, though I accept it might for others. We are used to a binary logic that says all human beings are ends in themselves, moral agents whose amenity we should promote, and all non-humans are not, are means rather than ends and available for exploitation in the absence of any prior claim by another human. I personally can't see myself supporting that dualism indefinitely, but there are many deeply fraught issues once you open that door and it's not something to do lightly.

    1405:

    Whitroth This has also made the UK press .... re. DLD How about this ... OK It's a "Telegraph headline, but the small amount of information suggests both a monumental screw-up & an intersection with "DLD" Um, err - please stop doing this, I'm not sure that what we laughingly call "reality" can take much more.

    Heteromeles The mistake with the steam generators (they cracked under vibration at high pressure) Otherwise known as ... a steam locomotive, oops. Leaking piston or valve glands ... we have them etc, Ad nuaseam

    [[ fixed link - mod ]]

    1406:

    You can't take much more of this "reality"?

    To paraphrase someone, yes, well, your own private reality is all fun and games until Coyote looks down from 10m past the edge of the cliff, and the falling starts.

    1407:

    Re: 'Certainly the craven caving to Trump seems to be in line with a group that believes they have lost control of the reins of power.'

    DT is a convenient way of focusing attention away from whatever the GOP (esp. MM and ilk) are up to. The classic question remains: who benefits? Right now, at the top of the list: it's anyone who's not paying their fair share of taxes. (Shrub Jr was similarly convenient.)

    Haven't checked but wonder whether any lawyer types (JDs) have done a comprehensive survey of legislation that's been blocked vs. passed vs. died in waiting. A list of 'Names of Bills' wouldn't do it because there have been instances where the original 'Bill' was amended into its opposite. Spreadsheets would come in handy too - showing a pre vs. post of affected parties/industries. It's absurd that every piece of legislation doesn't automatically include a spreadsheet as part of its package esp. considering that many Pols consider themselves astute finance whizzes.

    1408:

    Today I saw this shoggoth coup described as "the Fyre Festival of coups."

    There is nothing he doesn't turn into failure. Next will be his own broadcast network to be financed by the donations to his PAC for 2024.

    As far as people getting shot or killed by hunters -- happens ALL the time, every season, and has my entire life. All conversation during the fall hunting season where I grew up included talk about the more recent 'hunting accident' which is what they were / are called on the radio, tv and in the paper and in the community.

    1409:

    Not a minimization, more of a hope. Poll taxes, unevenly applied test, rifles, et cetera are all strong enough legal/societal constraints that encouraging turnout is nearly hopeless. The costs of, eg, hiring bodyguards for people going to the polls are quite high on a per-vote basis.

    On the other hand, if, eg, Georgia, a lot of the turnout issues are driven by the government purging voter rolls, it seems possible (and, I think, turned out to be) to significantly impact voter turnout with relatively cost-effective interventions. The Republicans seem to be somewhat reliant on making voting inconvenient rather than impossible. (Albeit, I can't help suspecting that some are quite nervous about anyone investigating voter fraud. Florida was a bit odd.)

    I'd wondering how effective and scalable organizations like fairfight.com are likely to be.

    This comes from the perspective of a socially inept recluse with fairly limited time who absolutely detests the Republican party and would like to help eliminate them as a viable political organization. I'm wondering what efforts would be most effective. Eg, I suspect contributing to candidates is meh, given that political advertisement past a certain point seems increasingly ineffective.

    @1400 I think there's a disconnect between some green and nuclear advocates. Green perspective:

    Nuclear is way too expensive to be viable. And unsafe.

    Nuclear perspective:

    Nuclear is way too expensive to be viable, but most of the cost is driven by unnecessary regulations encouraged by the green lobby. It isn't simply the cost of compliance, but the difficulty of innovation in reactor design. Imagine that we'd added a billion dollar cost to every new model of car. The nuke people do bear grudges - and those grudges aren't unmerited. Overall, nuclear reactors kill fewer people per GWHr than coal plants - which we have been living with.

    I'd agree with both to some extent. Nuclear plants are currently expensive.

    My opinion is that, for most of the last 40 years, nuclear was the only viable path to decarbonization. The fact that we missed that opportunity carries significant environmental costs.

    But, nowadays, solar + storage does appear to be cheaper overall, at least in sunny climates. There will be some economic costs, but, meh. The case for nuclear seems to be weakening.

    And, it wasn't just the greens - ordinary people, overall, seem to have a significant double standard regarding nuclear technology. IE, costs in China are lower, but not that much lower. And, sure, I can complain about rationality and education, but that sort of persuasion usually fails, so maybe it is best to just take it as a product of human nature.

    1410:

    "Nuclear is way too expensive to be viable, but most of the cost is driven by unnecessary regulations encouraged by the green lobby....ordinary people, overall, seem to have a significant double standard regarding nuclear technology. IE, costs in China are lower, but not that much lower."

    I'm not following your reasoning. The greens say its too expensive, the Nuclear lobby say that's because of regulations from the Greens, the fact that nuclear costs the same in dictatorships as it does in democracies proves that the nuclear lobby is lying about the regulations driving up costs... That much I follow, but how does that follow on from ordinary people's double standards?

    1411:

    One could assume that the CCP would be quite practical and not subject to the will of the people. The issue is that China isn't really much of a dictatorship. The CCP is quite popular and probably institutionally disinclined to risk any sort of significant disaster. So, if people are nervous about nuclear power, meh, you still get similar safety regulations and overregulation. Even then, China has shown significant cost savings relative to western countries, but only in the neighborhood of 30%-200+%. The higher range is presumably driven by protests or risk aversion. (People would rather accept a fairly large ongoing increase to cancer and respiratory disorders than the risk of a meltdown that would kill fewer people randomly.)

    For the confusing part, oops sorry, under current regulations, nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than coal power for the same energy output. This, to some extent, implies that we significantly over-regulate nuclear power, probably to a point that safety decreases. (Eg, fixing a known design issue in a steam system would probably be delayed indefinitely by the need for regulatory approval.) IE, we could relax regulations on nuclear power, build less safe nuclear plants, replace coal plants, and still kill fewer people. Would it have been cost effective? Probably. That is also consistent, to some extent, with the observation that reactor costs roughly tripled over time in the US in fixed dollars. Now, there's also an argument that people are just poor at estimating the cost of large projects, but that probably isn't a full explanation. It is also consistent with my reading of the regulations, particularly the design approval process, for nuclear plant designs. They are quite cumbersome. From lazy inspection, something like 80-90% of applications are abandoned, probably not for technical reasons.

    Now, if global warming was an issue, we clearly could have pushed for research into cheaper nuclear power, simplified the regulatory approval process, accomodated novel reactor designs, educated people on particulate and radiation risks from coal, and eventually just built a lot of nuclear plants (economies of scale). Nuclear is almost entirely upfront capital cost, so economies of scale probably apply and the energy costs were close enough even for a few nuclear plants that it could have been done. (France is an example.) But, the time for that was 20+ years past. I sort of suspect there were strategic and business interests snarling things up (well, know that was true), but don't know how much of a role they played. I don't favor the fake greenies thing - seems like an oversimplification - but - do respect a friend who marched to close a nuclear power plant and later went 'oops, that probably wasn't great in terms of carbon cost.'

    Still, even though solar + storage is probably quite a bit better than nuclear in, eg, Arizona today, I have some doubts about viability in desolate, gloomy holes where the sun rarely shines. (Eg, UK. :)) This may explain some of the irritation on the part of some UK-based commentators. Solar does appear less feasible in high latitude regions with high seasonal variation.

    1412:

    Thanks for that!

    I think we're in nearly full agreement.

    The only thing I might not have said was the last bit about high latitude feasibility. I suspect the annoyance comes more from solar lacking steam and boilers and valves and big spinning kit.

    Looked at objectively, the big loads are heating in the winter, and seasonal storage of heat is absurdly easy and cheap. Literally dirt cheap. There's plenty of hours of sunlight in the summer, so the actual annual energy output isn't much different. They always like to calculate insolation with the panels flat on the ground, which is disingenuous at best. Likewise with snow obscuring the panels, a definite problem, if you lie the panels flat, which no one does.

    I did consider most of the posters here pretty reasonable, but on this subject, between exaggerations of solar's disadvantages by a factor of over 5000 and the constant "solar doesn't work in the UK" despite it actually and obviously working, I'm reconsidering.

    1413:

    If I might highlight a couple of other issues with the risks of nuclear, meaning at present fission.

    We (humanity in general) do not really have a good handle on how to think about events which are very unlikely, but will be horrendous if they occur. This isn't just stupidity, or ignorance, but something to which we don't have good answers, and indeed there may not be good answers.

    Nuclear offers the prospect of our having to think about such.

    This is of course exacerbated by the near certainty that ordinary safety precautions will be disregarded to save money, or to meet a deadline (they didn't want it good, they wanted it Wednesday), or because a political appointee didn't understand why it was necessary (add further excuses to taste).

    I may be fortunate to live in a country where nuclear is just silly, no matter what you might think about the issues.

    JHomes

    1414:

    We (humanity in general) do not really have a good handle on how to think about events which are very unlikely, but will be horrendous if they occur. We are also bad about things that are extremely probable, and will be horrendous when they occur but won't occur right away, like global heating. A proper carbon tax would be on the order of $500 per ton of carbon, if we use a 3d-world value for a human lifespan (VSL) of $125,000 [1] and a RCP 6-caused reduction of human global population of 4 billion. Nuclear, or any non-fossil carbon sources of power, can compete against that level of tax, and their expected human death toll even with nuclear power (and hydro) large accidents in the mix is small noise compared with the toll from increased global heating.

    [1] Income Elasticity and the Global Value of a Statistical Life (10 May 2017 W. Kip Viscusi, Clayton Masterman)

    1415:

    20 years ago I'd have agreed that 500/ton would be enough.

    Now simply redirecting the current 5,200,000,000,000/Yr subsidy on Fossil Fuel would be enough.

    Even buying solar panels at retail. Let alone using the money to build solar panel factories.

    1416:

    Today I saw this shoggoth coup described as "the Fyre Festival of coups." There is nothing he doesn't turn into failure. Next will be his own broadcast network to be financed by the donations to his PAC for 2024.

    That's what it is! That's what's bothering me about your use! He's not a shoggoth, because shoggoths are useful. And he, most definitely, is not.

    Instead, he's an avatar of Discordia: the Erisian Orange Doomscroll, Sidam Gnik. Trouble is, he sucks all the fun out of chaos for everyone else.

    1417:

    "the Fyre Festival of coups." DJT stealing from his fans is fine with me. The Four Seasons Total Landscaping episode got mixed reviews from the critics. (Giuliani has been fun. :-) The election challenges legal team's work has also been amusingly incompetent and mocked in the legal community.
    I'm still worried (too many insane (and arrogant) people both in government and not) but mainly about the wrecking ball that will be wielded (hopefully ineptly) the next few months, and about M. McConnell's potential continuation of power, and about the COVID-19 pandemic in the absence of a federal government that cares about controlling it or softening its severe economic impacts.

    1418:

    20 years ago I'd have agreed that 500/ton would be enough. When I last did the back-of-the-envelope calculation, a developed-world VSL (Value of a Statistical Life) of $5.7 million for upper-income economies resulted in a carbon tax of $21523 per ton. That plus redirecting fossil fuel subsidies would be acceptable for the market-based approaches.

    1419:

    There's still the problem that in some countries individual installations of solar panels are not efficient and collective panel farms are too complex. But in those countries regional installations of wind farms would do the same with just a little redirect of the current subsidy on fossil fuels.

    1420:

    Efficiency matters when panels are $100 per watt, which is what they were in 1975 when the opinions espoused here apparently solidified.

    In the same way that storing a date as 2 digits is more efficient, and understandable in 1975 when RAM was 450 000 dollars a megabyte, but completely crazy in 1999 when it was 75 cents a megabyte, efficiency isn't all that important in 2020 when solar panels are 10 cents per watt. Efficiency is nice. But it's not essential anymore.

    The world has moved on. The opinions here are more or less the same as mine were in 1975. Nuclear is expensive but well worth it. Electricity has to be made and used within 1000 km, but within 100 is better. Solar is OK for low grade heat in sunny places, but you can't run industry on it. Holding on to those ideas makes as much sense as refusing to believe that data can be transmitted faster than a teletype, punch tape makes a great short term data store and microfiche is the absolute limit of data storage.

    1421:

    Erwin The fake greenies ALWAYS associate "Nuclear" with "WEAPONS" - its a quite deliberate lie, born of an almost-religious fervour. In terms of deaths, coal is waaaaaaaay ahead of just about everything else & renewables are very nice to have, but ... unreliable, & unless & until we get serious & sensible methods of mass power storage we are going to need that base-load power.

    gasdive Sorry, but solar + wind will not do for the UK - on their own. Base-load + storage are necessary, even given the amazing drop in price for the renewables. I have certainly noted the changes, but - consider ... It's early January in England & Scotland. There's a blocking high over southern Norway ( quite a common condition ) Temperature is hovering around zero near the coasts, it fairly bright & clear & virtually no wind. During the daytime ( LESS than 8 hours of the Sun being visible over the horizon at all ) there will be some solar input, but not a lot. There will be virtually zero wind power. Right, where is all the power for industry heating & cooking going to come from, then?

    1422:

    Likewise with snow obscuring the panels, a definite problem, if you lie the panels flat, which no one does.

    Just tilting the panels does not cure the snow issues. Ask anyone who lives with regular snow. Ice dams are also an issue. This is a solvable problem but is is more than just tilting the panels.

    1423:

    "January... Where is all the power going to come from"

    Well to start off, where it comes from right now. The initial build will cover summer use. Then spring and autumn. Then winter. Finally, the dreaded blocking high. Maybe. The question should be: is it even worth it? If you're getting 95% of your energy carbon free, do you hunt out the last 5% which is obviously the hardest. Or do you something like giving away solar to the 3rd world?

    But assuming you want to ignore the low hanging fruit, and get the fruit from the very top of the tree.

    There have been several long books written to answer this question. But here's a range of possible solutions.

    And, note I'm not saying there's no place for storage, but what I am saying is that if you make energy cheap enough, then even cheap but inefficient storage becomes useful. As does inefficient long distance transmission. As well, the cheaper the generation is, the more you can have, and the less storage you need.

    So, solutions;

    Australian solar. UHVDC has been increasing in power and voltage pretty steadily. At the moment it's about 12GW. 10 cables would do the trick. About equivalent cost to 100 RR reactors, but with twice the output. Australia will happily give away any natural resources to anyone who can be bothered to cart them away. You might even get us to pay you to take them away. I doubt there are any other countries as generous, but who knows.

    Aluminium air batteries. With all the summer power excess, the UK would be one of the world's largest refiners of aluminium.

    Hydrogen. It's very inefficient, 20% round trip, but not hard. It's also a drop in replacement for gas for heating and coal for steelmaking

    Hot rock. The same idea as the geothermal in volcanic areas, but you heat the rock in the summer to 600C and use it to make steam in the winter. Cheap as dirt. Ideal for area heating, just like Iceland. Easy to store enough to go from one season to another. Scale works from one house to the whole nation.

    Melted salt. Salt is cheap, but you've got to contain it. It melts (if you pick the right one) at a convenient temperature to run a water steam turbine. Sodium Chloride melts at 800C, which from my understanding might be too hot. For extra fun you might be able to make a cavern to contain it with an underground nuclear bomb. Otherwise something dull like a very very very big steel tank. Might need a corrosion proof liner. Maybe basalt? I read the abstracts of a couple of papers, but who can afford the pay wall of scientific papers? If you make it big enough you wouldn't need to collect any energy all winter. (I ran the numbers for this in a reply, I think to you, a couple of years ago. From memory 10 sq km would store all the energy the UK uses in a year. )

    Trade with Europe.

    Trade with Norway.

    Liquid air stored in caverns dug with H bombs (exciting) or very very very big steel tanks (boring). Again, enough storage that you could go months only takes up a few square km. The bigger you make it the cheaper it is.

    Just overbuild on solar. Its so cheap that you may as well. The previous calculation showed 60GW average cost the same as one RR reactor. For the cost of 4 GW worth of RR (or one Hinkley Point C), building solar instead you can get 600 GW average (6000 GW nameplate). Even if that still winter's day only produces 1/10th of the average that's still 60GW average for the day. So you just need 16 hours storage.

    Pumped hydro, cost is about a dollar per watt, but it depends a lot on geography in terms of storage.

    Or, you could do none of these. Just let people buy electricity cheap during the day and pay them handsomely when they put it back in the grid on the still day and let the invisible hand of the market find the solution.

    1424:

    If you look at the time series of gas power in the UK it becomes really obvious that what is actually happening is that whenever intermittent sources do not suffice, the UK burns more gas. Also, that this is happening a very great deal, to the point that every bit of intermittent supply added to the grid should be considered a decision to use an equivalent amount of natural gas.

    There are no actual plans whatsoever to build enough storage to break this linkage. So intermittent advocacy is simply a stalking horse for natural gas. Which is just a decision to bring about the apocalypse slower.

    That seems confrontational? Well, yes, it is. But I am at this point extremely prone to looking for where the hidden fossil fuel lobbying influence is when seeing anti-nuclear talking points, because anti nuclear activism kept coal going for half a century after it was technologically obsolete, so the fact that it is now green washing for a natural gas agenda is. Depressing. And also not surprising.

    A nuclear heavy grid also needs storage, but it needs much less of it, and it is easier, and more efficient to build. Since the the base output is heat, adding in heat storage buffers gets you swing production without the enormous losses of converting electricity to heat and back again.

    1425:

    "HOW can I watch my steam-locomotive valve-motion porn if I don't have flash any more?"

    If your chosen form of entertainment is Flash video (.flv, .f4v, etc.) files, try using Handbrake (GPL open-source software) to convert them to MP4. If it's some other kind of Flash format, I don't know, but Handbrake may still be the answer. It does one thing really well, namely converting almost anything to MP4. It has lots of options but if you just drag-and drop files on it and don't tweak anything it generally makes intelligent decisions.

    1426:

    gasdive ANSWER THE QUESTION ( You haven't, it's all handwavium! ) At present we do not have practical storage that would keep the UK going for a week or two, in winter, with the conditions I have described - & it happens regularly, oh & it's not an hypothetical it's a real, practical problem. "Overbuild on Solar", yeah at between 52° & 57° N, right ... What latitude are you at? Without practical storage ( yet ) - in 10 years time, we MIGHT have practical storage, maybe ....

    Incidentally, not so much pumped hydro as "normal" hydro, might be a possibility in Scotland, with all those deep, "empty" glens, maybe, if we start now ... Charlie?

    In the meantime, we know that nuclear works & is carbon-low-to-zero.

    1427:

    https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/let-it-snow-how-solar-panels-can-thrive-winter-weather

    Look at the photos. The frameless panels clear themselves of snow. To my eye they're laying at about 30 degrees off horizontal. The ideal angle for panels in Edinburgh in January (when we need to maximise production) is 72 degrees off horizontal (18 degrees off vertical). London is 68 degrees (22 off vertical).

    We don't need to set them at the optimum angle for annual production if we make them cheap enough, we can set them to work best when our need is greatest. Traditionally they're on rooves but you can put them flat on walls instead.

    1428:

    Richard H Thanks - will try

    TJ Precisely Burning more gas isn't as bad as coal, that's about all one can say ...

    1430:

    As I said, snow build up on slick roof surfaces without a lower lip happens. Enough so that it builds up to the point where when weigh slides it down it can be dangerous so they put little points on the roof surface so that when big sheets form they don't slide down intact later.

    And you get ice dam situations where the surface is just a bit above freezing which could be common with black surfaces.

    As I said this could be dealt with but it would be a problem. Now at 60+ degrees of tilt, not so much, but the entire planet is not optimized for those angles.

    Your picture just shows that frameless is better than framed. Which to me is of course step 1 in a solar panel where snow might happen every winter or even most winters.

    As I said it's a solvable problem but not one that can be ignored. Metal roofing companies are the ones who have deep knowledge on this subject.

    1431:

    Right. And then there is plain muck and, in places like the UK in gloomy winters, algae - and the last can be a bugger to get off glass.

    1432:

    It's far from "handwavium"

    "Trade with Europe" and "Trade with Norway" as I write this there's about 4 GW being traded. It works.

    "Pumped hydro" it runs every evening in the UK. You don't even have to cross the channel to see "it works"

    "overbuild on solar" you said yourself "there will be some solar input, but not a lot". Pretty obviously the way to go from "some" to "a lot" is to add more solar. If it's only making 1% of what you need, build 100 times more.

    Liquid air is all off the shelf stuff done at a huge scale already. The only thing you'd need to design from scratch is a bigger tank.

    Molten salt has corrosion issues in the tankage, but again, it's been demonstrated at a small scale, all it needs is a bigger tank. It works.

    Undersea cables work. The computer you're reading these words on is partly powered by electricity that came to you from Europe by undersea cable. The data that goes from my computer to yours, travels by undersea cable. So data cables go from me to you, electrical cables cross seas already. There's no reason you couldn't get your power from here too. That's not handwavium.

    And for dog sake, how can continuing to do what you're doing now be "handwavium"? There may be a few days a year that is not worth covering. How can you possibly say that won't work? IT'S WHAT YOU DO NOW!

    I don't think you're arguing in good faith.

    1433:

    You are using fake statistics. The reasons that coal is so bad include the facts that (a) there is a hell of a lot of it and (b) it is dominated by very old equipment that was not designed to minimise pollution. Comparing like-for-like, it's not all that much worse than (heavy) fuel oil. Both are very bad.

    Secondly, as I have pointed before, the existing harm from nuclear power is being suppressed (it is almost certainly a few times higher than claimed), and the real danger is the very low probability of a really bad disaster - which we have not yet had. Humans have a blind spot about risk assessment and such events. Yes, I accept that, even given those, it is a lot safer, BUT ....

    Almost all of the pro-nuclear camp is concentrating on changing the public perception and getting it accepted, and bitter experience shows that politicians WILL use that to hide and deny the risks, however predictable, rather than actually reduce them. That needs to change before nuclear power can genuinely be described as a lot safer - at present, it's unclear.

    1434:

    At the risk of going off-topic, Biden's advantage over Trump in Arizona is now greater than the state's number of uncounted votes as estimated by the AZ Secretary of State. Various outlets are calling the election for Biden, as (AZ AND NV) OR (PA) OR (GA) seems to be TRUE.

    1435:

    There sure is. I left out a bunch.

    There's the concrete blocks lowered into shafts as you point out.

    Balloons filled with air deep underwater as compressed air energy storage.

    Depleted gas wells as compressed air energy storage.

    Heindl gravity storage where a cylinder of rock maybe a km across and a km deep is cut to form a giant piston in a cylinder of rock, sealed and then water is pumped in under the piston. It works like pumped hydro but it works on flat ground.

    There's electric trains or dump trucks. They carry rocks up hill when energy is cheap and back down the hill when it's expensive. You just need a hill, rocks and a road or rail.

    There's flywheels (personally I don't think they're amy use, but people talk about them)

    There's melted wax. A huge chunk of UK energy is spent on low grade heat. You can melt wax when energy is cheap and freeze it again to stay warm later.

    There's stored molten salt for cooking. Store the molten salt in the basement and then when you need cooking heat run air through the salt and up into the stove. (doesn't seem likely to me but there are products on the market)

    There's flow batteries which are supposed to have unlimited size, just make the tanks bigger. That's supposed to work at grid scale.

    Fleets of electric robot taxis that discharge back to the grid when electricity is expensive and charge when it's cheap.

    I'm sure there are more but it's midnight here and I can't think of them.

    Oh, yeah, demand side management. Forgot that one. There's a huge amount you can do there. Everything from completely unnoticed, like fridges that alter the way they work depending on the current price, to intrusive things like blitz style shelters for people in times of energy shortage. I can't see the latter though. People put up with inconvenience to save the UK from facists (at least temporarily) but they won't do that to save the world from dying.

    1436:

    And I well remember switches on phones that flipped between pulse and digital. Why the cordless phone I bout about 8 years ago dials with the speed of pulse, I have no clue. USanian? Because its written into the standard. Phones that do otherwise cheat, and (mostly) get away with it.

    In detail: how do you tell between 123-4567 (local) and 555-124-567 (with area code?) you get 7 digits and wait a few seconds to see if the user is entering 10. (Non US phone numbers being a full prefix system, there is no need). You can cheat by checking the first 3 digits : area codes have 0 or 1 in the 2nd place, so wait for 10 digits.

    Until they ran out of area codes with '0' or '1'. Now there are places you can't dial with a phone that doesn't wait, it gets the first 7 digits and completes the call ...

    1437:

    Not interested in SSD, at least yet.

    Oh boy, you have no idea of the treat that's in store for you!

    1438:

    You mean going on topic. This thread was created in part to cover the elections in the US.

    1439:

    DLD was great, Charlie. Just one little thing - Del mentions, somewhere, about boosting a Toyota Tercel.

    I don't think so. Perhaps you meant a Celica?

    Toyota stopped making Tercels around '98. And as much as I miss my Beloved Dearly Departed '86 Toyota Tercel wagon (w/ carburator, still making 35-36mpg in 2000), it was not, shall we say, high power. As in, on US 183, on our way in from the exurbs where we lived at the time, up about a 3% grade from a standing stop at the light, whoever was in the passenger seat would kill the a/c while the driver floored it, and it hit 0-60mph in a blazing... 22 sec.

    1440:

    Nor was the Celica. In order to get up a mere 10% slope at anything above (if i recall) 30 MPH, we had to turn the air conditioning off.

    1441:

    Oops. I meant 5% - I had switched over to UK road slope expectations.

    1442:

    Gasdive I am quite aware of the electricity being "pumped" between GB / Norway / France ... so? Pumped Hydro ... only works if you have ENOUGH suitable valleys & upper valleys in proximity. We already have it & there are schemes for a few more ... but simply not enough for the whole islands, at all, it's geographically impossible. "More solar", yeah at 52+ deg N or higher in winter, when the sun is shining fo 8 hours a day, max - less further north.

    I am arguing in perfect good FACTS, not "faith" - I leave that bollocks to the religious. You are, however, arguing in total ignorance & complete lack of understanding of the actual problems - like I said - what latitutde are you at? I would guess 33° S or maybe even less ... now try dealing with 52°N or more, like I said. Now then GET REAL ( Includes all the magic solutions inm 1435 as well ... )

    EC a really bad disaster - which we have not yet had bollocks Chernobyl

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ On the original topic. I really do not like the DJT/Rethuglican noises emanating from the USA, notwithstanding several "R" senatoprs conceding & talking to Biden. Trumpolini is going to try something, we just don't know what ....

    1443:
    a really bad disaster - which we have not yet had
    bollocks Chernobyl

    Chernobyl was not a "really bad disaster".

    Fukushima will almost certainly kill more people in the end -- by making the Germans give up nuclear and burn more fucking lignite.

    1444:

    Various reports that Whitehouse officials are pretending/deluded that Trump is going to be sworn in for a second term.

    I believe Trump's last act will be to rename the Potomac River to Denial River.

    1445:

    Oh, fer chrissake! Chernobyl was nowhere near a really bad disaster, of the sort that has been modelled as possible in some classes of reactor. The danger about pushing the line 'nuclear power is safe' is that politics will lead to the building of the sort of reactor that might throw tons of plutonium high into the air, and letting maintenance and safety standards slip so that happens.

    1446:

    Mr. Tingey says: "Trumpolini is going to try something, we just don't know what ...."

    If he were smart he would hold more rallies right now in order to build up a MAGA slush fund (or something with a better name) and then leave the country with all the money.

    But I'm starting to realize he's not that smart and that I'll lose my bet that he'll be gone quick, before a sheriff puts a wheel clamp on the landing gear of his private jet.

    1448:

    Nope, I meant a Tercel. Maybe you missed the joke about Del's crazy driving skills?

    "She could ace the North Circular in a jacked Toyota Tercel faster than Sabine Schmitz could lap the Nürburgring in a Transit van"

    (Schmitz did a totally mad take on a famous Top Gear episode in which she drove the Nürburgring in a Transit van faster than most amateurs could do it in a Porsche 911; the North Circular is about twice as long as the Nürburgring and can best be described as London's second-largest car park (after the M25 motorway). So, to stomp the joke absolutely flat, Del can take a Tercel and cover twice the distance through heavy traffic faster than a scary rally driver can on an uncrowded race track.)

    1449:

    It's changed. When I used to have to use it regularly (before the M11 was built), I described it as Europe's largest unregulated dodgem track. When I was on it recently, the driving was almost sedate by comparison.

    1450:

    If he were smart he would hold more rallies right now in order to build up a MAGA slush fund (or something with a better name) and then leave the country with all the money.

    That's probably what he's doing.

    Optimistic analysis: the firings and replacements in the White House are happening not in prep for a coup, but because (a) Trump is having a protracted post-election tantrum, (b) someone has to pay, (c) "someone" means anyone who did not believe in Tinkerbell Trump loudly enough, and (d) he wants to replace them with someone loyal. So he's packing every department he can fire people from with lockstep loyalists ... but they're totally unprepared for their new jobs and don't have time to get their feet under their desks before they're going to be fired again. So it's just meaningless sound and fury, signifying nothing.

    The alleged vote-rigging lawsuits are likewise a grift. Donations under $8000 don't need to be accounted for and can be funnelled into the Trump Foundation, i.e. his pockets. "Donate now to support my lawsuits to overturn the illegal rigged Dem votes!" is a rallying cry for his base. He's putting on a show for his viewers, and meanwhile milking them on his way out the door.

    (Although he's probably in denial about the door even existing, right now.)

    In related news: Dominic Cummings just got fired. It's quite a sign of the times when the viability of the UK government's Brexit planning was entirely predicated on the assumption that Trump would win the election, isn't it? They're down to the wire over negotiations and my gut feeling is that BoJo is panicking: Cummings' firing (the Prime Minister's #1 political advisor) clears the deck for him to cut a deal over the weekend or next week. Although he's so incompetent he'll probably try and fail ...

    1451:

    I didn't notice the M11 existing. Mainly because I have avoided driving anywhere further inside the M25 than Heathrow for about five years and counting, and only sporadically visited before then.

    1452:

    The other problem with nuclear is cooling. Going forward, we've basically baked in a meter of sea level rise plus or minus (depending on the coastline), big droughts, big floods, and an expanding range for hurricanes. None of these are showstoppers by themselves, but add in human stupidity, and you get Fukushima, or San Onofre, or the other stupidities.

    A local example: current modeling predicts a 50% chance of an ARkStorm hitting California in the next 50 years, same probability as a big San Andreas earthquake, but three times the financial damage. An ARkStorm (atmospheric river, 1000 year size) would likely dump a meter of rainfall on southern California in a month, going up to 3 meters of rain in the northern Sierras.

    I've pointed this out repeatedly to local builders and city engineers, to be met with smirking condescension. They only build to the 100 year flood level, as set in 1970, based on incomplete records going back to 1900. The new pipes going in are too small even for what we get now, let alone a monster like that.

    I'm not sure Homer Simpson would do a better job than these certified clowns, but they'd certainly hire him to check plans.

    1453:

    He will turn up like a bad penny with Nigel Farage's new party I will give you odds

    1454:

    mdlve @ 1315: On the original subject ...

    "Everyone" is asying ... "But Trump can't do that because ..." - long list of deadlines & US-consttutional issues & spearation of powers etc.

    If Trump is going to do anything it has to be before the Electoral College makes things official - once things are official the mechanisms kick him out on January 20th.

    I'm not so sure of that. A Coup d'état isn't bound by deadlines of the government being overthrown.

    Not predicting he will attempt anything or how successful it might be if he did, just that government deadlines won't really constrain his actions.

    1455:

    Instead of building near an ocean you can build them near a river and use huge cooling towers, like the French did. Or you can build them near a big lake, like Ontario did.

    1456:

    Let me note that the big law firm the Idiot hired to challenge the PA results dropped out of the lawsuit overnight!

    1457:

    Aargh! I meant the M25! Anyway, those of us that know the North Circular certainly got the joke - but people who knew it before the M25 will have actually remembered the kind of driving you were describing. It certainly made me grin, remembering times I have NO desire to go back to!

    On Bozo's options, I agree that trying to cut a deal is the most likely scenario, but I can think of several ways in which that can be scuppered by the fanatics or Bozo's spinelessness. I still think that No Deal is a very likely outcome.

    1458:

    Yes, US... but we bought the phone around '13 or so, and I haven't had a phone that dialed that slowly on, say, a redial in over 20 years. ALL of them this millenium have a switch to flip to higher speed, while this one doesn't.

    This is a Panasonic, btw.

    1459:

    Its all about M.2 PCIe NVMe as aboot device for PC builds now.

    Boot Drive a PCI4 M.2 PCIe NVMe say .5TB to 1TB (raid 0 if you like) Secondary Storage one or more SSD's with spinning rust as a backup.

    1460:

    Dels driving reminded me of Bear in the Night Watch series -

    1461:

    I didn't notice a huge increase in speed on the actual rack-mounted servers that I installed last year, before I retired, that had SSDs for /.

    And my primary system is my workstation, which runs all the time (it is running Linux).

    I've never understood the IT BOOTS SO FAST! unless you're booting/rebooting all the time.

    1462:

    He's already doing that - not anywhere near all the money being collected isn't.

    "60 percent of a donation up to that amount for Trump’s “Official Election Defense Fund” is routed to a new PAC started this week by the president that can pay for a wide range of activities — but is likely legally barred from spending on recounts, lawyers say. The remaining 40 percent goes to the Republican National Committee, which is allowed — but not required to — spend on the recount."

    from Politico.

    1463:

    timrowledge @ 1321: Who says solar panels will only last 25 years?
    I know a guy in NE US whose has a 35 y.o. set he’s been carefully logging that whole time. He says they’re actually producing more power than when new.
    Who says nobody is going to recycle them? If there’s expensive materials there I rather suspect someone will find a way to retrieve it. Certainly likely to be more doable than making any use of 45,000 tonnes of glow in the dark concrete.

    I thought the issue was that solar panels manufactured 25 years ago were markedly less efficient than current panels, enough so that it's economically beneficial to replace them with more modern panels.

    Plus anything exposed to the weather & the sun are going to deteriorate over time. What does the paint on your average 1995 Toyota Corolla look like today?

    1464:

    But I'm starting to realize he's not that smart and that I'll lose my bet that he'll be gone quick, before a sheriff puts a wheel clamp on the landing gear of his private jet.

    Probably correct. Obviously I'm not an expert, but I think the most correct description of what's going on is multi-part:

    --One is it's the flim-flam show to get a lot of small donations into the Trump re-election fund, which he most likely thinks of as a slush fund like the discredited Trump Foundation.

    --He's giving a master-class in using chaos. It's not planned, it's simply about making a mess and seeing if anything useful shakes out. Hawks do the same thing when they fly over a flock of pigeons, so it's simple predatory behavior. Just because it's not intelligent doesn't mean it's not highly skilled.

    --A third is he's drumming up the politics of grievance, which is about how privileged white men who get more than anyone else are nonetheless vulnerable potential losers unless they lash out and subjugate everyone else. This is a brand that goes back before the Civil War, and Trump's certainly reinvigorating it.

    That said, I'm think it likely that the New York State Attorney General and probably others will file state charges within an hour of Trump leaving office. He's undoubtedly aware of this, but probably he thinks that he can use the clout of the Presidency to skate.

    My fantasy right now is that Trump decides to hold an election rally in DC right after noon on January 20 (assuming no blizzard). While that happens, FBI agents, with the consent of the Secret Service, get ready to arrest him on state criminal charges. Probably they wouldn't perp walk him off the stage, but it sure would be satisfying if they did.

    1465:

    Right. The UK is somewhat better (we have more records), but little different. Everywhere is close to a coastline but, partly because its Officially Secret, I have no idea what sort of catastrophe nuclear plants are designed to withstand. What's clear is that even a sub-Chernobyl nucleotide release in Bradwell combined with an easterly wind and rainfall at the wrong time(*) would cause immense chaos and a huge number of consequential deaths.

    (*) Bye, bye, London.

    1466:

    Charlie In reverse order ... Yes BoZo is panicking & is scrambling for a deal - that was onbvious from a week back ( When Biden got called ) - but he had to shove Scummings away/out, because he was still trying for a hard brexshit. My prediction? He will 90% cave on state aid, kick the can down the road on fishing ( Something like: "We'll use the old rules for a year & then go for a phased transition, to be agreed ) & agree to zero-tariffs both ways on goods - the important bit. Oh & claim victory, Nixon-style. OTOH - Trumpolini. "Out the door" - WHERE TO? We already discussed this ... Moscow? Ankara? Pyongyang? Anywhere else & he ends up in a NY state prison. Which means the pessimistic version, which means ... what? I think he's going to try for the newly-appointed scumbagsofficials to declare his vote the "winner" ... after which all bets are off. Or there will be major riots in DC this weekend & he'll try for a state of emergency ....

    As pointed out by JBS @ 1454

    Maurice NOOO! NOT THAT, please beg, groivel, anything but that .....

    EC @ 1457 I do hope that you are correct & that the latter outcome [ No-Deal pushed by the ERG & the IEA ] does not come about ... couple that with a Trumpolini coup & we are really in the shit. Recommended & depressing reading

    1467:

    The way 2020 is going, an ARKstorm would be exactly the note I'd expect the Trump administration to go out on.

    Possible solution to nuclear/cooling: build reactors on barges, like the Akademic Lomonsov but much bigger -- size-wise, more like the Troll A Platform. Float them into position off the continental shelf on caissons and then flood them down until they're sitting on the ocean floor with half a megaton of ballast. Use the cold botton waters for cooling to get more oomph out of your heat exchangers, and run HVDC undersea cables to grid interconnects on the coast. If a quake or an ARKStorm levels your grid interconnect, at least the reactor's safe. For added design safety, maybe ensure that the reactor capsule as well as heat exchangers are underwater by design, with surface facilities only for the on-site crew. Alternatively, make it a bit smaller but semi-submersible and mobile, like a 19th century Monitor ship: in event of a really bad storm or tsunami warning, hunker down or even disconnect from the grid and sail out into the ocean.)

    1468:

    Think laptops and tablets. Yes, I agree about man-sized workstations and servers running Linux - the delays that piss me off are not due to disk latency, and the disk light rarely comes on in normal use. But I decided that SSD was a requirement for my laptop, even though it runs Linux.

    1469:

    Luckily Bradwell has been decommissioned.

    1470:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 1336:

    "It is the same as calling someone a N***** or J**. It is intentionally demeaning and you should avoid repeating it."

    I can hope J** doesn't mean Jew, though I don't know what else it might be.

    In any case, I've noticed people (all of them non-Jews, I think) getting jittery about whether "Jew" is offensive. I hate this. Jew is a respectable noun.

    In any case, I've noticed people (all of them non-Jews, I think) getting jittery about whether "Jew" is offensive. I hate this. Jew is a respectable noun.

    I've found myself thinking "Jewish people" instead of "Jews", and I am not pleased, even though I don't think there's anything wrong with "Jewish people".

    It's just that it took a lot of improvement for "Jew" to not be an insult, and I want it to stay that way.

    Unfortunately it is used as an insult. A lot more-so in the last four years. I don't want it used that way either, but neofascists & racists and their apologists use it derogatorily.

    1471:

    The Ontario nuclear plants on the shores of big lakes are still (and always have been) subject to water level rise, and fall. There's a medium- to long-term cycle for precipitation in central North America that affects water levels in the Great Lakes.

    The climate change modelling performed for my employer predicts greater, and more rapid, variability in precipitation and temperature even though median and mean values do not change significantly.

    Presently, water levels in the upper lakes are near historical maximums (~100 years). Which followed a winter which had record snowfall / accumulation in many areas.

    Which is one of the handicaps in climate modelling ... in many areas of the world, including North America, meteorological records start in the early to mid 20th Century. Significant datums with long return periods (100 year storms), let alone the 5th and 95th percentiles, simply are not known.

    1472:

    Last time I checked, which was not that many years ago, solar, even with intermittent storage, was competitive, verging on superior in regions with strong consistent sunlight. This was without a carbon tax.

    In high-latitude regions, there seemed to be an unfortunate confluence of significant seasonal variation (~3x) with increased energy needs. This led to a conclusion that solar + eg, gas would result in fairly similar carbon output to gas. Nuclear supplementation of solar tends to be a non-starter, as the plants tend to run 24/7.

    We may disagree on our assessment of seasonal storage, as seasonal storage still seems to be either in development or expensive. This includes heat storage, flywheels, and batteries. (Though some battery implementations looked promising.) Thermal isolation tends to suck more than one models, although it does scale well.

    For regions like the US, if you have the infrastructure to ship power, intermittent variations are fairly unimportant. (Modest overcapacity -> decent supply almost always.) If anything, a long-term solution is probably solar->fuel. Correct capacity for winter will tend to result in overcapacity for summer and converting that overcapacity to winter fuel seems like a good plan. Shame the efficiencies are low. That fuel may eventually be cheaper than natural gas.

    For, eg, the UK and associated countries, while your politics is somewhat less depressing than the US, I'm quite dubious about relying on shipped power. Trump-style idiots come along occasionally, and I wouldn't choose to base power for cities in their countries. So, meh, my opinion is that seasonal power storage is an unsolved problem. I hope to be wrong.

    Carbon tax implementation needs to be done carefully. In particular, a lot of vehicle mandates resulted in real problems for people who tend to buy junkers (poorish) and lowering carbon impact has real issues at the lower end of the income scale. Perfectly workable as, eg, a smallish basic income.

    1473:

    An Arkstorm would be appropriate. (Un)Fortunately, as far as we know, they're associated with El Ninos. The last one was in 1861-62, so the records aren't good.

    Anyway, right now we're in a fairly strong La Nina, so the more probable disaster is a 10- or 20-year drought. Which we're also due for, and which would also strain the water system, just the opposite way.

    For the peanut gallery, California's always swung between rare, but huge, floods and grinding droughts. The reasonable explanation for why people settled this little slice of paradise 16,000 years ago and didn't found a civilization is that the weather's a bit too unstable. After all, it's hard to use the Sacramento as your local Nile and build a city on the river bank if the damned river floods the entire valley 50 miles across every few decades. The local Indians knew this and not only didn't build anything permanent, they headed for the hills when the rain got bad.

    1475:

    I find SSDs pretty handy for my linux workstation. They revolutionised compile times, and make a noticeable difference when I'm moving my bigger datasets in and out of my software.

    The thing I'm less keen on is the instantaneous failure modes. I have had a couple die on me without warning.

    1476:

    "Out the door" - WHERE TO? We already discussed this ... Moscow? Ankara? Pyongyang? Anywhere else & he ends up in a NY state prison.

    No, he doesn't automatically end up back in the USA, even if the country he goes to has an extradition treaty with the USA.

    Extraditions are not automatic. Sometimes a request for extradition is refused, even if there is a treaty.

    Just take the example of Canada: From the fiscal year 2008-2009 to the fiscal year 2017-2018 the US made 798 requests of extradition from Canada. In the same period 552 persons were surrendered to the US.

    Trump could very well end up in Brazil or in Hungary, if the right wing governments there see any benefit in having him.

    1477:

    Heteromeles @ 1366: I too first thought that J** meant Jew. However, on reflection, I suspect it refers to people of presumed Japanese ancestry. While it was allowable in WW2, the level of anti-Asian racism on the US West Coast, starting with the Chinese and chilling out a bit in the 1980s, makes calling someone a 3-letter contraction of Japanese rather insulting, as would be Chink, Gook, Slant-eyes, Yellow Peril, and all the others.

    No, I meant "Jew" the way it's used as a racist slur by the conservatives. I'd completely forgotten about "Jap". I can't remember the last time I heard it used, but I don't approve of that (or any of those other slurs) either.

    1478:

    My current assumption about Trump's ongoing 'deny the results' campaign is that he is laying the groundwork for a twitter heavy 'government in exile' rantfest once he is out of power.

    He will spend the rest of his life milking the morons to support his personal grandiose self image while bellowing about everything that Biden etc. do as if it is illegitimate and illegal.

    Enough of his followers will go along that it will be destabilizing, and enough Republican elected officials will go along that the next few years will be ugly. With any luck they will follow him down the rabbit hole to irrelevance.

    My big fear is that they will find a competent version of Trump, who looks and acts clean and safe enough that the next election isn't as fraught as it should be.

    1479:

    A friend of mine is a big Warner Brothers fan and he has extensive collections of the various cartoons from the 1930s onwards, on LaserDisc, videotape and DVD. For some reason some wartime cartoons don't turn up in the modern collections any more, like the one entitled "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips".

    1480:

    Rocketjps No ... the problem is that DJT will be going straight to the cours as a defendant in multiple fraud cases, the moment he leaves office. But, yeah, a "competent" DJT would be very much to be feared

    1481:

    Michel2Bec @ 1375: Speaking of statues I just saw this one on twitter :

    https://twitter.com/p_zalewski/status/1326808434281418752

    "Turkmenistan’s president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has just unveiled a giant statue of his favorite dog"

    Does Ivanka have a favorite dog ? (in 4 years ?)

    Jared?

    Trump's the first President in a hundred years who doesn't have a dog. I think it was Mark Twain who said, "Never trust a man who doesn't like dogs."

    1482:

    There's supposed to be a "million MAGA march" tomorrow.

    Anyone care to offer to buy a drink if the number that shows is < 10k? How about <1k?

    They do keep underperforming.

    1483:

    chuckle I've got another definition of the latter acronym: Jewish-American Princess.

    Yes, I have known one or two.

    1484:

    Nuclear supplementation of solar tends to be a non-starter, as the plants tend to run 24/7.

    That's because of design choices for civilian power plants that were intended for steady long term use. But nuclear power plants in general, c.f. naval nuclear plants, are quite capable of rapid changes in output.

    1485:

    (1466)

    So cummmings has gone? Wasn't expecting that one I can only think that bozo'll now be running around the place -- "Woff,woff,woff ... what do I do, what do I do?". It isn't even clear if he still wants a deal or even if he knows what he wants at all. Maybe a pizza, who knows....

    https://jonworth.eu/1-man-7-days-deal-or-no-deal-brexit-and-yes-that-man-is-johnson/

    On that link there - that is quite an intresting read and with a brexit diagram to boot. So pretty much bozo has one week. It's make your mind up time for him.

    Cummings though? Sounds like he's done the classic old trick of "let's get out of here before the SHTF". I think he probably knows that is going to happen so better to do the vanishing trick now than get blamed later on.

    ljones

    1486:

    I didn't notice a huge increase in speed on the actual rack-mounted servers that I installed last year, before I retired, that had SSDs for /.

    And my primary system is my workstation, which runs all the time (it is running Linux).

    I've never understood the IT BOOTS SO FAST! unless you're booting/rebooting all the time.

    There are two somewhat-orthogonal reasons why most people with personal machines shut them down every night:

  • Most people don't have long runtime jobs they want their computer staying up to run. If your primary use-case is entertainment or office work, then once you go to bed, you might as well save power by shutting your computer down. The more powerful your computer, the more power it sucks even when idle, so the more you save shutting it down when you won't be using it for an extended period.

  • Windows has had problems with long uptimes. I don't know if it still does, but the guidance is still out there to shut Windows machines down every so often. Most people run Windows.

  • Your situation prioritizes booting a lot less than most people's.

    1487:

    It is not so much the technical limits as it is the economic ones - Nuclear power plants change fuel on a schedule set years in advance, the operators are paid the same no matter how much power the plant is producing, as are the guards. So all the costs are fixed, or outright favor just keeping the plant running flat out (swing operation incurs more maintenance) which means that every reactor operator who can sell the power at all very much wants to leave the throttle at max.

    Gates is currently looking at sodium cooled reactors to add great big heat buffers so the reactor can run full out, while the generator can swing between idle and "consuming heat much faster than the reactor can actually produce", very much the same idea as the molten salt folks, except molten sodium is very gentle on steel piping. Too bad about the way it lights on fire on contact with moisture, so really, back to the "Hire very, very good plumbers" plan.

    1488:

    Windows supports both sleep mode and hibernate mode. I used to use sleep mode (wakes after a couple of seconds, memory is kept ticking over with a trickle of electricity) on this Windows box but when I switched to a different video card, from AMD to nVidia the OS now only allows me to hibernate (the system stores the memory and CPU state on HDD, taking several seconds to power down and maybe twenty seconds or so to start up the next time I hit a keyboard key). My current uptime on this box is, according to systeminfo, about a month or so. The last restart I carried out was 16th Oct 2020 -- I think there was a power-cut back then. I've certainly seen uptimes of three months or so reported previously.

    1489:

    ljones Not necessarily Cummings can get to carry the can as the "Now-dismissed evil adviser" as per Machiavelli ... or not.

    However, from "jonworth": - in this piece I mean there will be an absence of a Deal between the UK and the EU ready for 1st January. That state will not continue indefinitely – the chaos it will cause will force both sides back to the negotiation table at some stage. Yeah, after 6 weeks of chaos & food riots, Brtain applies to re-join the EU? Could happen. Or much worse things, too ...

    whitroth If I were Dr A Fauci, I wouldn't be anywhere NEAR DJT at 16.00 EST/21.00 GMT .... I would be very afraid of a coup attempt tomorrow, in DC, especially if Trumpolini actually joins the SAProud_Boys on the street ... Yes, I know the DC police chief has told them to leave their guns behind, but - suppose they don't? "It couldn't happen here" - until it does. As my father always pointed out to idiots in the 1950's No that could be "fun" for various values of ... Actually, a DJT even attmpted-coup would alter people's opinions here ... like what an utter disaster Brexit was/is & can we change our minds?

    Problem, maybe our USA-ian readers can help ... If the still-legally US-president leads a coup, is it a coup, is it actually illegal, because it looks very much as if POTUS is above the law, at present? WHat happens if the legal C-in-C of US armed forces over-rides the restraining legislation & orders US aremd forces to support him ... what happens, then?

    Remember, that if DJT is still inside the US at 12.01 on 20/01/2021, he is going to be served with multiple warrants, even without "Federal" agency. He's not going to be running again in 2024, & we have already thought that it's almopst impossible for him to flee, anywhere, so - what has he to lose by attempting to overthrow the governement from within?

    1490:

    Yes, I know the DC police chief has told them to leave their guns behind, but - suppose they don't?

    Then they get to play with the DC police SWAT team. You know, the folks with proper training and M113 armoured personnel carriers (not to mention MRAPs and helicopters).

    Really, as long as they don't try to shoot up the Mall and occupy Congress the cops will probably let it slide. They tend to lean to the right, after all. But if they start to create work for the police ...? That's not going to end well, especially for an undisciplined shower of idiots who've forgotten that DC is basically a ring of steel around the executive (there are surface to air missile batteries to deal with intrusive aircraft: there are marine and army bases within a very short driving distance, and so on.)

    1491:

    GT 1480/1489: DJT may be trying to set himself up as the 'illegally deposed legitimate president', which he may then try to spin as keeping him immune from his various legal predicaments.

    He likely has enough lawyers to delay/spin out any legal action for years. At this point his goal has to be to 'run out the clock', he's in his mid 70s and not a well man in any respect.

    His ego may preclude him from claiming any 'unfit to stand trial' sort of defense, but his body will likely fail him sometime in the next few years or even months. All he has to do is keep the wolves at bay until he dies, then all his problems become the problems of others.

    And if he dies and leaves Deutschebank with no recourse for their half billion in personally secured loans, good.

    1492:

    @Niala Reply 1476:

    Isn't it Monaco where all good dictators, deposed tyrants and abdicated kings go to end their days?

    (Or if a Russian gangster-pol, London generally, right?)

    1493:

    In order to get all the benefits of Monaco (No income tax, no capital gains tax, etc.) you have to become a tax-exile resident of Monaco. In order to become a tax-exile resident of Monaco you have to relinquish your U.S. citizenship. Is Trump willing to go that far?

    1494:

    I agree that, if you have to compile crap like Boost regularly, SSDs would be a great help.

    1495:

    IIRC, W.C.Fields had a somewhat different opinion--A man who hates children and dogs can't be all bad.

    1496:

    I was rather surprised to hear the term 'Jap' at all upon relocating to England. Had not heard it in decades in California. But not recently here in England.

    1497:

    Ongaku There was always: "Nip" ( = "Jap" ) - as in "nasty little nips" - from Nippon - the Empire of Japan. NOT to be confused with J.A.P.

    1498:

    My grandmother (a Brit veteran) invariably referred to Japanese persons as 'Japs'. It was unquestionably pejorative. She was more hostile to 'The Germans', though strictly for non-race related war reasons (her father died at the Somme, she drove ambulances in the Blitz).

    1499:

    Taxhavens like Monaco and Lichtenstein know what side their bread is buttered: They have extradition treaties with any and all countries which could cause them Major Trouble, amongst these USA, and they have as far as I know never challenged a request.

    You get to stay in a Tax-Haven only as long as you do not rock the boat.

    1500:

    I remember when 'McHale's Navy' premiered the press reports on the use of 'Nips' being okayed as oppposed to 'Japs', which wasn't.

    1501:

    And we are talking about the DC police here, not Trumpolini's creeps ... and there's a high percentage of Black officers.

    1502:

    OK, he might go to Brazil instead of Monaco.

    But frankly I'm still betting he'll end up in Zurich, like Lenin. Solzhenitsyn made a good novel out of it: Lenin in Zurich.

    1503:

    FBI agents, with the consent of the Secret Service, get ready to arrest him on state criminal charges

    Uh, I don't think that's allowed. FBI is the "Federal" force. While they might detain someone for a brief time before the locals can show up I'm betting they are not allowed to arrest people for state or local violations.

    1504:

    what? I think he's going to try for the newly-appointed scumbagsofficials to declare his vote the "winner"

    The only to do that is get a few states to quickly replace the laws about how the electors from their state are selected. And so far one or two of the needed state's totally R controlled legislatures have basically said, "YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING".

    1505:

    The thing I'm less keen on is the instantaneous failure modes. I have had a couple die on me without warning.

    I've dealt with a few 100 or so mostly in workstations. I've had ONE die instantly. 2 more have had to be replaced due to the RAID not liking their smart status. 90% of these were put into workstations.

    Now as to spinning stuff. 1 in 30 or 40 per year. And always the worst possible one. Like the one that held the internal DNS/DHCP server in the office. TWICE in a year.

    Now most of them were Samsung EVOs. Which seem to be one of the best on the market. Especially at the price points.

    1506:

    Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips

    I have an uncle who spend (I think) under a year in occupied Japan just after WWII. I have a picture someone of a Japanese child he took. He hand captioned it "A Jap Kid". I don't think I'll ever frame it and hang it on the wall.

    1507:

    Re: ' ... the firings and replacements in the White House are happening not in prep for a coup, but because ...'

    My vote is: Getting rid of evidence mostly of what these people actually did with their time, e.g., feeding DT's ego, probably writing up the Tweets that actually sounded grammatically correct but not on any in-depth policy analysis, tracking how often his comments were picked up by various media (regardless of that vehicle's reaction - neg vs. pos). And, best of all from DT's perspective: all of the info that's supposed to be handed over/shared with the New Administration will have gone 'missing' and DT/whoever's in charge of the hand-over briefings will blame the people he axed. Alternately - by firing people who actually did do any meaningful work, whoever is left can easily delete any compromising info. (Wonder if US Intelligence supplies the servers for this. If yes - how difficult would it be for Biden/Harris to get access to that data?)

    This leads me to a couple of questions though:

    1- To whom does the information/data/communication developed in the WH belong to? I've been assuming that because the WH belongs to the People of the US/electorate, that all info/data also belongs to the People/Electorate. Doing otherwise also completely screws over the meticulous Presidential history books.

    2- Despite being a particular sitting President's Staff member, aren't all of these folks actually employed by the People/Electorate? Therefore the People/Electorate probably has some rights as an employer, like: (a) what exactly was your job and (b) show me the work that I've been paying you to do.

    Jan 21/21 - My guess is: DT's probably not going to 'run away' but if he does decide to disappear, he'll probably disappear to Mar-A-Lago and stay there under 'house arrest' until he runs out of lawyers. Probably too cold to visit his golf course in Scotland. Or, he might get AF1 to take him and his entire family to Slovenia to visit his wife's extended family 'for Xmas' and then they all decide never to return. (Not sure Slovenian allows any travelers from the US just now becuz of the US's already high and climbing COVID-19 case incidence.)

    1508:

    Windows has had problems with long uptimes. I don't know if it still does, but the guidance is still out there to shut Windows machines down every so often. Most people run Windows.

    I manage mostly Mac in small businesses. I strongly tell them life will be better if they restart at the end of the day. And it is.

    All software has bugs. Even the macOS.

    1509:

    EC at 1465:

    I don't know about the big power reactors, but I worked on a UK research reactor in the early 80s and the safety case for that certainly included assessment of someone flying a Boeing 737 into it - I think at cruise speed, which would be 250 knots.

    1510:

    "converting that overcapacity to winter fuel seems like a good plan. Shame the efficiencies are low"

    Efficiency doesn't matter. Which is the point I'm trying to convey. I tried to convey it using computer memory as an analogy, but that hasn't worked...

    Let's try with solar.

    In the 1970's it was seriously proposed that solar should be in space. Because at 1000 dollars per watt, having 24 hour production without atmosphere to attenuate the light was well worth it if you could get launch costs down to about where they are in 2020. You could get 4-5 times the energy out of a panel in space compared to the best ground location. You'll note that no one is the slightest bit interested in solar power sats today despite having reached the launch costs that made it viable. Because it's cheaper to just have more panels.

    In the 1990's when solar was 100 dollars a watt it was normally mounted on 2 axis tracking mounts. You could nearly double your output. By the end of the 1990's when it was 10 dollars a watt, no one bothered. Because it's cheaper to just have more panels.

    In the 2000's when solar was 10 dollars a watt residential solar was mounted on frames that angled the panels to be most efficient. By the end of the 2000's when solar was 1 dollar a watt, no one bothered, just slap them flat on the roof. Because it's cheaper to just have more panels.

    Solar is now ~0.1 dollars per watt. Efficient storage doesn't matter. Because it's cheaper to just have more panels. In fact if we were to concentrate on building panel factories rather than buying panels, seasonal storage probably doesn't matter. Because it's cheaper to just have more panels.

    To think sensibly about solar requires that you think about 2020 and beyond solar, not 1990 solar.

    1511:

    You got me curious, so I went looking. Most solar panels, retail, seem to around US $1.00 per watt (some less, some more). Of course, when you factor in all the wiring, switches, converters, batteries, it becomes much more expensive.

    Sometimes I wonder if it is worthwhile for the power companies to actually encourage residential home owners to put panels on their roofs. I mean, you don't have to worry about environmental impact statements or purchasing/renting the land, etc. Even if the output is kept local (in the home or neighborhood), it potentially takes a big strain off the grid.

    1512:

    Solar is now ~0.1 dollars per watt

    Where are you finding that figure? A quick search suggests that in the US, prices range from $1.30/W to $4.15/W, depending on both the source and the insolation of the installation location.

    Efficient storage doesn't matter. Because it's cheaper to just have more panels. In fact if we were to concentrate on building panel factories rather than buying panels, seasonal storage probably doesn't matter. Because it's cheaper to just have more panels.

    Part of that cost is insolation, which brings up another issue with your tirade: more panels at 0 lumens is still 0 watts. With electricity usage not being coupled to the Sun, you need storage to avoid all those fancy cheap panels going to waste while gas burns through the night. (Or you could propose HVDC solve all the issues, but then we get into politics and the spectre of Brexit and Trump for why you might a more local backup.)

    You brought up plenty of storage schemes, but unlike panels you failed to apply cost to them. Pumped hydro is nice and proven. Who are you going to displace to make room for it? Most of the solutions you posited take up a lot of space, and some of them are rather particular about the space they need.

    Panels are cheap, yes. Wind is also coming along. But until sufficient storage is available, they can't shoulder power needs alone. Given those constraints, being anti-nuclear means that, at best, you are a useful idiot for the fossil fuel industry.

    Nuclear power isn't perfect, and I would much rather live in a world that could entirely subsist on renewable power. This isn't that world, and arguing about solely panels is disingenuous.

    1513:

    With regards to where little Donnie might scarper to, what if he heads to a US state that had majority support for him and sets up his Government in exile there?

    1514:

    They can hold him for NY and NYC to send people. And then there are the federal charges....

    1515:

    I've considered solar on my house. I understand, thuogh, that unless I buy them, the install company puts them up there... and they they get a cut, and there's a lien on the houes.

    1516:

    Ah, yes, assuming there's evidence in the first place... but doing that is, of course, obstruction of justice, which is what sent Al Capone to jail.

    1517:

    Nope. Extradition is, IIRC, all states.

    1518:

    Funny you should mention solar power sats. This gives me an excuse to mention the other global climate issue related to our energy sources. The one most people forget.

    Waste heat.

    All the energy we use ends up as waste heat in the environment, and while this is not as big an issue as carbon dioxide, it is significant.

    In the case of most (but not all) renewables, it's not a problem. That energy was going to end up as heat in the environment anyway, whether we used it en route or not, so we might as well. Solar sats are an exception, as much of the energy would never have got to Earth otherwise.

    I'm not sure if Geothermal is another exception. If it is heat that would have escaped to the surface anyway, not a problem, but if it's heat that would otherwise have stayed trapped inside the Earth, then exception. I do know people I could ask.

    It is an issue for fossil fuels, including nuclear fission. It will also be an issue for fusion if we ever get that to work, and any other odd nuclear reactions that we might one day figure out how to use.

    JHomes.

    1519:

    Solar sats could be a net negative instead of a positive - if we also moved power usage up with them. For example, if we start sourcing metals from asteroids and the like, smelting them in space powered by solar would and cutting back on the mining and smelting down here would mean that without changing the embodied energy present down here, we could still cut back on energy generated (and therefor waste heat) in the atmosphere.

    Even easier than mining and smelting metals would be to move server farms, especially those doing useless activities like mining cryptocurrencies.

    1520:

    One problem with geothermal is actually the opposite. A number of geothermal systems are actually used for cooling. The earth normally stays at a constant year-round temperature starting a few feet down. In a place with pronounced climates (hot summers, cold winters), putting a bunch of pipe in the ground and running fluids through it and a heat exchanger is a cheaper way to dump heat in the summer and get some warmth in the winter. Problem is that the ground heats up if too many people do it in a small area, and that starts to mess up the system.

    Similarly, proposals to use the heat differential between the deep ocean and the surface of the ocean get in trouble as oceans warm, and lakes that get really hot (and evaporate) in the summer make suboptimal cooling ponds for power plants.

    Thing is, waste heat can escape into the night sky, especially with dry air (water vapor in the air is the major heat trap) so I'm not sure how critically bad waste heat is as a problem on this planet.

    1521:

    Off topic, but if you want a pointless widget to look at every day, try https://isthisacoup.com/ Only relevant for the US, sadly, so Bojorans are on their own.

    1522:

    Yeah, buy solar direct, don't get it financed, because they do, in fact, put a lien on your house. At this point, I'd wait until spring, but it is worth it if you've got the roof.

    1523:

    This is a colossal scale error. Solar irradiance of the earth exceeds human energy use by a factor of around 10000. Waste heat will thus not move average temperatures on a global scale even if you assume the entire planet achieves first world levels of energy wealth. Locally, you get heat islands, sure, but only in extremely built environments, and if desired it is not difficult to counter this. Using high-albedo roofs would do it trivially.

    1524:

    Uh, I don't think that's allowed. FBI is the "Federal" force. While they might detain someone for a brief time before the locals can show up I'm betting they are not allowed to arrest people for state or local violations.

    I know. The problem is who to arrest an ex-president who's going to claim "it's a coup!" if anyone lays a finger on him? It's got to be someone with the stature that an arrest attempt doesn't immediately cause a riot, or counter-escalation by his bodyguards.

    The fun thing is that some (all?) Secret Service Agents are sworn peace officers. I don't know the ins and outs, but if an arrest warrant came out for one of their charges, do they comply with it, or not? I'm sure they love him to death, after all.

    1525:

    Mr. Tim and Rabidchaos,

    Every level of the following reduces the per unit cost.

    If you're buying 1 thing you pay retail.

    10 things you get bulk discount retail

    100 things, you get good bulk discount retail

    1000 things you buy wholesale

    1,000,000 things you direct import

    100,000,000 you buy the company that makes it.

    1,000,000,000 you buy the company that makes things and using their knowledge you build a new factory many times larger than their factory

    10,000,000,000 you buy the company that makes the machines that go in the factories that make the things you want and using their knowledge you build a giant new factory that makes the machines you put in your thing factories.

    100,000,000,000 you buy the mining leases for the raw materials for the thing you want and you refine the raw materials yourself.

    I already did the costings at the 100,000,000 level. Solar panel factories work out at 8W of panels per dollar per year. There's a reference in that post. Obviously after a few years that's under 0.1 dollars per watt capital cost. If you run the factory for 20 years that's 0.00625 dollars per watt capital cost. There's the marginal cost of producing panels, but that's raw materials (mostly sand, bauxite and electricity) plus labour, in highly automated factories.

    Even at the 1000 thing level, you can buy panels at 0.16 USD/W

    https://m.alibaba.com/amp/product/60707395578.html

    As for costings for storage... You want me to cost salt? Or do you want me to cost hot rocks that don't even need to be dug up? Or both?

    Because all the rest of it, the turbines, cooling towers, the switch yards, the buildings and carpark are the same as a nuclear power plant. Or are you arguing that a hole in the ground into which you put heat during the day and take heat out at night needs a full costing to figure out how much more expensive a hole in the ground is than a nuclear reactor?

    1526:

    Sometimes I wonder if it is worthwhile for the power companies to actually encourage residential home owners to put panels on their roofs. I mean, you don't have to worry about environmental impact statements or purchasing/renting the land, etc. Even if the output is kept local (in the home or neighborhood), it potentially takes a big strain off the grid.

    It's actually an idea voiced by power companies like SDG&E, that they become grid owners. The old model is where they intermediate between a few big suppliers and a range of users, a model the engineers liked (for things like frequency and load matching). They're now at least talking about something more like Amazon, where they're the intermediary between lots of suppliers and lots the users.

    It could work. It could also be a smokescreen for their attempts to hamstring rooftop solar by making solar users dependent on them, then screwing them over. Which they've tried in the past.

    There are two big problems. One is that if house batteries become the norm, then they'll have a lot of rarely used infrastructure that needs to be maintained for those days when the batteries run low (e.g. the rainy season here), and that's a potential money loser. The bigger problem is that grids are liability magnets, for everything from starting fires to Carrington event magnification to cascading emergent bug effects. Dealing with that gets messy and may not be profitable. For example, SDG&E has one of the biggest meteorology sensor networks in the state, just to predict fire weather so that they can preemptively shut down dangerous parts of their system. They did that after losing a $700 million court case for causing a fire. PG&E will probably go bankrupt long before it gets to a similar level of safety.

    My ideal is to actually shrink grids where possible, mostly because the cascading chaos of power shutdowns around fires is a serious problem here. In my area at least, it would be safer if more people could just shut off their grid connection and connect their house battery and solar panels to pumps linked to a rain cistern and roof sprinklers in case of fire. That's my plan, anyway. Obviously urbanites have different needs, probably including pumped in power. However, I don't think wiring everyone into continent-wide grids is a very good solution.

    1527:

    Is it just me, or is the story of one of the workers nicking fuel rods for their scrap value, without apparently having any idea why that might be frowned upon, funnier than the entire history of the Simpsons put together.

    That's crying out to be made into a 3 part Netflix series. I want Simon Pegg as the plant manager and Nick Frost as the worker.

    1528:

    I can't imagine a nuclear company hiring workers so ignorant that they don't know about ionizing radiation.

    1529:

    I can't imagine a nuclear company hiring workers so ignorant that they don't know about ionizing radiation.

    1530:

    We don't need to imagine!

    1531:

    Sometimes I wonder if it is worthwhile for the power companies to actually encourage residential home owners to put panels on their roofs.

    Here in NC the power company that supplies most of the state will do that. For free. They own the installation and you get the power from the panels for free and they get the surplus (when/if) that feeds back into the grid.

    The money gets complicated as installation costs are amortized on the power companies books the same as if it was spent building a new power plant. So it is a way for them to NOT build more coal, gas, nuclear plants. And get a return on the investment. So the program is as much environmental politics as economic. And tied to the way public utility monopolies work.

    But given we are in a state with a LOT of trees even in our semi-urban areas and houses were not laid out planning for this many houses can't make use of this. My house has the sun sight lines and roof layout but NOT the structure to support panels on the roof.[1] Oh, well.

    And as has been alluded I'm sure the contract would make interesting reading.

    [1] I'm sure I could find the answer if I wanted to spend the time looking but I wonder just what the process is when it is time to replace the asphalt shingle roof under the panels. Not so much the physical process but the coordination with the big legalistic company that owns all that equipment on your roof.

    1532:

    I already did the costings at the 100,000,000 level.

    I'm sorry, I must've misread. I thought you were stating that that was the current cost.

    There's the marginal cost of producing panels, but that's raw materials (mostly sand, bauxite and electricity) plus labour, in highly automated factories.

    You may want to talk to Elon Musk about disrupting an industry by adding automation.

    On a separate note, I see you've also externalized the shipping and handling of those panels, which seems to explain the difference between the Alibaba price that you cited vs the prices Mr. Tim and I found. (The prices I found included installation, I assume his didn't. I figured installation should be included unless you only want to sell to those with both the time and expertise to do it themselves and externalize their costs. Free labour is still labour, even if those doing it don't think about their time in monetary terms.) Those prices don't go down as quantities go up. That is, while we're still selling to existing property owners. They would shrink somewhat if we're creating solar power plants, but then we get into the price and availability of land, which also doesn't shrink as you go up the magnitude scale. (If anything, it grows as you go through the cheapest land first.)

    As for costings for storage... You want me to cost salt? Or do you want me to cost hot rocks that don't even need to be dug up? Or both?

    Are they the right rocks? Like pumped hydro, the geography matters. This only works for some locations, and those locations are already using it. It's a great solution, but not workable globally.

    As for molten salt, you forgot the insulated tanks that keep the thermal energy in and water out. All I've been able to find on them suggests that it is the capital cost of the tanks behind their current low number. That all of the current examples are solar-concentrators might also play a role, as they have not been benefiting from the efficiency gains and cost decreases that photovoltaic has. Engineering a version to take electricity won't be straightforward. (Also, at least some versions were classified as greenhouse gas emitters, as they used fossil fuels to warm up the salt to its 'cold' temperature in the morning. A purely electric version would avoid that issue, but I can see why it may have dampened enthusiasm to look further into it.) Anywho, big tanks like that aren't going to be something you can make a factory for, unless you want to assume they teleport into place because they only exist on a frictionless plane in a vacuum.

    You wouldn't happen to be a physicist, would you?

    1533:

    Later today, the wannabee SA will show up in Wash, DC ... & DJT is hinting he might meet them. Could he, either then, or, perhaps at a later "march" - say Saturday 12th December ... Swear them all in a a Militia, personally loyal to himself? And/Or as "deputy US Marshals"?? Is that do-able? If so the USA falls at a single stroke. DON'T: Tell me "It couldn't happen" DJT was never even going to make the R's nomination, was he? And all the other things he could not possibly do, between then & now, yes? Between this afternoon & the 14th of Dec is the danger period ....

    [ Yeah, that Coup-0-Meter thingie is worth watching ]

    David L @ 1504 Won't work if he has a personally-loyal armed milita, with a veneer of respectability/legality?

    gasdive BoZO has just proposed "Solar in Space" - the Garden Bridge writ large ... See also Rabidchaos @ 1512 ... Your "solutions" will not work @ 52°N or above, not with present technology, anyway.

    Rabidchaos I doubt it - I'm an ex-physicist ( But also an engineer ) & I'm busy shooting down gasives AUS fantasies based on handwavium that cannot possibly, you know, WORK in the UK

    1534:

    Donald Trump has reportedly forced out a senior US cybersecurity official in charge of stamping out election misinformation. Bryan Ware is leaving the government after being asked to resign from his job by the White House, according to Reuters. Mr Ware was the assistant director for cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. So, they're going to trash everything on their computers if/when they leave. But they might not leave ...

    Later today DJT may meet with the SA-wannabees in DC. Could he, either then or at a later date ( Say Sat 12th Dec? ) swear them in, personally loyal to him, as a "Militia" or Deputy US Marshals? DO NOT tell me "It couldn't happen" After all, DJT wasn't even going to make the R's nomination, back in 2015/6, was he? And all the other things ha could not do, since then? If that happens, the USA falls at a single stroke. Between now & the 14th Dec is the danger period - I would try to ensure that Biden & particularly Harris, have actual escape routes? That Coup-0-Meter thingie is worth watching.

    Meanwhils, BoZo is proposing solar power-sats ... the Garden Bridge fiasco writ larger.

    Rabischaos I doubt it I'm an ephysicist/engineer & you may have noted my attempts to deflate gasdives impractical hadwavium projects th cannot possibly, you know - work - at 52°N based on unreliable technology.

    1535:

    "I thought you were stating that that was the current cost."

    0.16 is ~0.1, so that is the current cost. I found the 0.16 number with 10 seconds on Google. I'm sure you could find lower with a bit of effort.

    But in the costings I referenced I looked at the current cost for a solar panel factory.

    "You may want to talk to Elon Musk about disrupting an industry by adding automation."

    Solar panel factories are already highly automated.

    "On a separate note, I see you've also externalized the shipping and handling of those panels"

    Yes, I was comparing nuclear to solar. Capital costs and time to first power on the grid. In that comparison I also neglected the nuclear side's cost of buying the land, connecting to the grid, building the carpark, roads, seawall, foundations, cooling water supply, shipping the modular parts, fuel, certification, waste storage, security, cleaning, midlife refurbishment, operators, decommissioning and insurance. What do you suppose a fair insurance rate would be to cover a nuclear reactor 50 miles from London? What would be the payout if you made London uninhabitable for a decade? That's an externalised cost. The people of the UK providing free insurance because there's no way the owner (even a state) could cough up the roughly 2 trillion pounds that would be the likely damages bill. It might be a small risk, but it's still externalised. We can get some idea of the non insurance costs when we consider that Hinkley Point C is costing about 20 billion pounds to build but the life time cost is 30 billion more (calculated by subtracting the agreed price from the current price for the electricity). Which is about the most generous way of calculating it. A more reasonable comparison would include that once installed, there's basically no cost for solar. So the extra cost should not be the difference between the current and the agreed price, but the difference between the marginal cost of solar (effectively zero) and the agreed price.

    So no, I didn't count the cost of a machine slowly rolling across the land dropping panel racks or the cost of minimum wage workers picking up panels from a slow moving truck and clipping them to the racks. All the other costs (grid connection, switchgear etc) are incurred by nuclear or not incurred at all (24/7 staff, carparks, groundwork etc).

    "Are they the right rocks? Like pumped hydro, the geography matters. This only works for some locations, and those locations are already using it. It's a great solution, but not workable globally."

    Yes, geography matters, but not much. You need rocks below you. Well that's most places. No flowing aquifer. That cuts out a lot. So some solid rock, no aquifer. A volcanic plug in an extinct volcano would be ideal.

    https://www.countryfile.com/go-outdoors/historic-places/britains-most-amazing-extinct-volcanoes/

    Well those are the amazing ones, I'm sure there's plenty of boring ones you could use. I'm not, as I'm often accused, saying that the UNESCO listed world heritage site where OGH lives should be turned into a power storage plant.

    Despite your assertion that they're already all in use, none of them in the UK are. I think you're confusing generation (the rocks are naturally hot, and you use the heat to generate electricity) with storage (you make the rocks hot with excess generation, and you use the heat to generate electricity when it's needed).

    "As for molten salt, you forgot the insulated tanks that keep the thermal energy in and water out."

    No I didn't forget it. I said:

    "For extra fun you might be able to make a cavern to contain it with an underground nuclear bomb. Otherwise something dull like a very very very big steel tank. Might need a corrosion proof liner. Maybe basalt?"

    But actually you don't need either. The UK has lots of naturally occurring underground salt deposits that don't have water in them and which would nicely contain molten salt. I should have thought of that but I didn't until you got me thinking about exactly what rocks would be good for storing heat, so thanks for that.

    "Anywho, big tanks like that aren't going to be something you can make a factory for, unless you want to assume they teleport into place because they only exist on a frictionless plane in a vacuum."

    You might be surprised at the size of kit that can be made in a factory and then put together on site.

    I think that addresses most of what you thought I left out.

    And sadly not a physicist. Commercial Diver by trade, where I installed a lot of big kit in awkward places, followed by working in the power industry, coal generation, then long distance transmission, then retail. Now retired.

    1536:

    I've certainly noticed.

    I've also noticed that none of the attempts include any numbers other than latitude and increasingly handwavy claims that solar doesn't work in the UK, despite other posters linking to live data of it working, and your own words about January, "there will be some solar input, but not a lot". So you've said yourself it works.

    It just appears that your refutations are you not listening to what I'm saying and repeating "France"

    The fact that the circumstances that created the French decision to build nuclear two generations ago has nothing whatsoever to do with the circumstances in modern Britain (or anywhere else for that matter) been pointed out to you again and again for years. To zero effect.

    If you've got something beyond your handwavy "France" I'm happy to address it as I did with Rabidchaos.

    1537:

    I never said that Solar would not work at all in the UK .... a house 10 doors away from me has solar panels on its S-facing well-inclined roof. But that to rely upon solar & other renewables for baseload power, especially in winter, with short daylight & calm days simply isn't going to cover the base-load 20% ( or so ) of power needs - OK? If it wasn't for the deliberate disincentives put in people's way, I would have been very tempted to put panels on my SSE-facing wall & my WNW-facing back roof, with a massive ( Either Pb or NiCd ) battery pack under the back room floor. [ Or a more modern big battery set, except I can't afford it - Vime's Boots ] Financially totally unviable in our current economic climate, unfortunately.

    I'm looking at/for a solution-set that will work for the whole country.

    1538:

    Ok, run the numbers and show your workings.

    As I have done.

    1539:

    I live, like Our Good Host and about three hundred thousand others in this city, in a flat. We share a roof with five other flats plus a business at ground level. That's about twenty-five to thirty people who are supposed to survive on about 15kWh of rooftop electricity generation during a winter's day, if we're lucky. Heating alone for the properties consumes at least 100kWh daily and that's not counting the future load for charging of electric vehicles as well as the normal consumption of electricity for lighting, cooking, entertainment etc.

    Fortunately we have two nuclear reactors running 24/7 about fifty kilometres from our doorsteps so we don't freeze to death in the dark in wintertime Solartopia. Unfortunately those reactors are nearing end-of-life and will probably be shut down by 2030 or so. Fortunately gas is cheap so we won't actually freeze to death when the shutdown happens. In other news solar and wind renewables plus storage will be cheaper than gas next year -- oh sorry, that was the headlines from 2012. Sometime though, I'm sure. Meanwhile there's lots of cheap gas we can burn to increase atmospheric CO2 levels.

    1540:

    This is part of what I was trying to explain to Paul, and failed (see #1288). I will try again, once. Things have changed, badly, and the serious rot started when Thatcher abolished the Scientific Civil Service. It would not have hit the nuclear power arena by the late 1980s, but has now.

    Being an expert on how the current British gummint apparatus and its associated politics works the the skill which the mandarinate develops and promotes for. Fine. That might be enough in the Cabinet Office, but is little more relevant than numismatics or paleography when it comes to the work that most departments are actually meant to do; there is no reasonable sense that they are technocrats in that context. In the past, there were civil servants at the decision-making level who were technical experts in the relevant areas such as, say, public health or epidemiology in the Department of Health and Social Care. Now, those people don't even get a chance to influence the decision-makers.

    Combined with external 'experts' being brought in from (self-interested) industry and (self-interested) outsourcing, that's a recipe for disaster. Nobody is capable of recognising bullshit from snake-oil merchants and, by the time that people who can see it, they are told "the decision has been taken - it's your job to deliver it". And, of course, the most profitable way to build a nuclear power station is get the government to give you immunity from liability and cut corners on safety standards. We know that the former has been done for at least some of the outsourced nuclear power stations; we don't know about the latter, yet.

    No, I am not against nuclear power per se, but I am about how it is managed in the UK, and the way its proponents are trying to suppress reasonable concerns rather than address them.

    1541:

    Let me help.

    Solar and wind can't be the solution to the UK's energy needs because the average energy consumption is _ GW. That's _ x 10^ joules.

    The energy falling on the UK as sunlight in a year is _ joules. Sure that's more than our energy consumption but.

    The efficiency of solar panels is %. So that reduces the energy available to _ joules.

    Obviously we can't cover the whole UK. The area available is really only (list types of land useage) and combined, they make up __%. (provide land usage reference)

    That reduces the available energy to _ Joules.

    Then because solar is intermittent it has to be stored (for dogs sake, don't say "unreliable" because intermittent and unreliable are utterly different things) and the most efficient storage only has a round trip efficency of %. Of course I understand that only about _% needs to be stored, but that still means that _% needs to be stored and so we'll lose joules bringing the total down to __ joules.

    Since that's less than our needs as above, solar can't do it alone.

    In combination with wind, we get closer, but the total available wind resource in the UK is only _ joules (provide a reference) and it's concentrated in only _ months of the year (provide a reference) so _% of that will have to be stored, cutting the available energy to _ joules.

    So you see, your idea is completely impractical and we need a fleet of nuclear reactors, despite the cost.

    1542:

    I have posted such figures before, more than once. If I recall, the actual insolation in the UK in winter varies from about 0.8 to 2.2 MJ/m*2. At a (high) 15% efficiency, that's a 24-hour average of 1.4 to 3.8 W/m^2. Furthermore, most of the existing solar farms are located on what was some of our most productive farmland.

    I haven't investigated, but I would be DEEPLY suspicious of the official figures - they probably wouldn't be 'wrong' but might not mean what you think they do. I also have suspicions that some people are taking mains power and returning it via another route, calling it solar, to make a profit on the price difference. Mass solar power in the UK is and always has been a boondoggle and, because it was a government-supported one, the figures have been massaged to make it look more reasonable than it is.

    1543:

    So, what you're saying is that you're happy for nuclear or gas generated electricity to come into the city from outside, but solar only exists if its on your roof?

    That's what it sounds like you're saying.

    So what, you'd rather freeze than use that stinking California, Texas or Atacama solar electricity?

    1544:

    "insolation in the UK in winter varies from about 0.8 to 2.2"

    Bzzzt

    What's the annual average. And include references.

    No more cherry picked figures, no more handwavium

    1545:

    I just assume that eventually any electricity bought in off the EU grid will be hugely cheaper than anything the UK or an independent Scotland produces on its own (possibly even with tariffs in the case of the former). There are plenty of reasons why it might not happen, but I think they are mostly political. Whatever the energy mix in that grid power is another story and I have no idea really. There's a lot of renewables in development there, but I'm not seeing headlines about the heroic game changing projects (you occasionally get a nibble, like Bavaria being theoretically all renewable for a day). There's still a lot of gas and nuclear of course. No idea how much coal, or whether it is only we backwards antipodeans burning vast quantities of that.

    Queensland's grid is up over 10% solar, but our demand cycle is different to theirs and has a much more favourable relationship with diurnal insolation, especially in the tropics. The bit about building thing-factory-factories is something state level actors are doing - India is possibly the most enthusiastic example. It's the central column of the policy platform the Queensland Greens took to the election a few weeks ago. Sometime, hey perhaps even in the coming 4 years, a US administration might take climate change seriously in which case I'd expect it to happen there.

    1546:

    Gas will be burned, either to heat homes directly or in CCGT plants to supply electric heating when it's cold and dark. A viable proven non-CO2-emitting alternative for the UK is nuclear power but we don't have enough of it (about 5 or 6GW) and we're not building new plants fast enough to replace this as it ages out so gas it is (the UK has over 35GW of gas-generating capacity, about the same as our very expensive wind turbine fleet's dataplate output).

    In winter the UK needs about 150GW of energy for heating, transport, lighting, sewage treatment, water pumps, entertainment, escalators etc. Virtually all of that load can be met by electricity (aircraft are an exception). Right now about a third of this 150GW is supplied to the consumer as electricity and the rest is met by directly burning fossil fuels in vehicles and central heating systems and the like and dumping the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere.

    If it's night in winter (no solar power) and the wind isn't blowing much we still need that 150GW. With sufficient nuclear power we can guarantee no rolling blackouts and suffering and deaths, with gas we can do the same but with future suffering and deaths due to increased global warming. In a no-gas Solartopia we can only throw the dice and hope and expect a big die-back of the population every few years from hypothermia when the Weather Gods fail to oblige.

    1547:

    Look them up yourself and do the calculations yourself; I have posted them more than once before, and am bored with doing such things for lazy people. The average is largely irrelevant, anyway, for three reasons - where, again, you can look up the data and do the calculations for yourself.

    1) It means that we need alternative sources, anyway, and the capital and suspension costs (both financial and ecological) become a major factor.

    2) There is far less suitable roofspace than you might think, (re)building is a major source of CO2, and raising angled panels creates massive shadows.

    3) We don't produce all of our food, anyway, and the more we import, the more fossil fuels we burn. As I said, every acre of solar panel farms takes away an acre of farmland or destroys an acre of woodland etc.

    No, I am not saying that solar power is completely useless in the UK, but all it can be is (a) a solution for a few special cases and (b) a minor component of a solution.

    1548:

    Ummm, you do realise that the north of Scotland gets a lot less insolation than the sub-tropical sunlit uplands of southern England? That's why the insolation numbers for the UK have a range, not a simple "average".

    The good places to build solar farms in the UK are in the densely-populated areas of southern England amidst fertile farmlands, where land is eye-wateringly expensive to begin with. This is why most efforts for solar rollouts here in the UK concentrate on roof installations and the like rather than grid-connected PV arrays on million-quid-a-hectare land. It does require the rooftop installer to have a house/mortgage to start with, not a given for a lot of poorer people but who cares about them? Not the Solartopians.

    1549:

    https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/fortescue-to-expand-into-renewables-with-green-energy-arm-20201111-p56dnx.html?ref=rss

    Yeah, maybe not just state level actors.

    While the UK fiddles and Rome burns, Twiggy is on a spending spree doing exactly what I said here. Buying up companies for their patents and building thing factory factories.

    His current plans are for 235 GW (comfortably more than the entire UK energy consumption, not just electricity). Presumably with more to come when he gets that settled.

    I expect the UK will be buying their electricity from Fortescue Metals in the not too distant future.

    1550:

    Oh, sincere apologies.

    I thought you were Greg. It was a reply to a reply to Greg, who refuses to do more than handwave and is consistently insulting while doing it.

    Hence my rather awful reply.

    Your posts, I may not agree with, but they're well thought out and polite.

    I plead the lateness of the hour.

    Sorry.

    1551:

    Yeah. It's still a boondoggle, even in the south. The sensible use for most rooftop solar in most of Europe is water heating (90+% efficiency instead of c.15%, needs no scarce resources and easily recyclable). Warehouses etc. may as well put solar panels on, but they do't help at the time of year demand is at its highest.

    Of course, in places where air conditioning is the main requirement, solar power also makes a lot of sense. But something in the sunlight seems to rot many of their brains, because they can't imagine how different northern Europe is, not even when it is explained and they have been here. No, London in June is NOT like Aberdeen in December!

    1552:

    gasdive STOP being a Gas_Bag! Oh & read what Nojay says, about living in Dunedin 56° N ( to all practical purposes ) OK? [ 150 GW needed ] The COST? Try doing without power at all in either London or Edinburgh in the second week of January, when there's a blocking High over Norway .... Also taking one of your sentences ( & adding a tiny-but-relevant bit )... Then because solar AND WIND AREis intermittent it has to be stored ... ok, how, really, practically, are you going to store enough to keep all of England & Scotland going for 2 weeks ... There is your practical problem.

    Oh & see EC @ 1542, as well. @ 1550 No, I am looking at the brute practicalities of living this far from the Equator, as both EC & Nojay are doing & you are either ignoring or pretending does not exist ....

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Meanwhile - what about the likely possibility of a US coup? If DJT attempts it, how many of the "R's" will back him, how many sit on their hands & how many stay loyal to their "Constitution", I wonder?

    1553:

    His current plans are for 235 GW (comfortably more than the entire UK energy consumption, not just electricity). Presumably with more to come when he gets that settled.

    Tell me again how those PV panels are going to deliver heat in midwinter, when the sun is only above the horizon 25% of the time (and it's overcast for most of that) and the temperature averages around freezing during daylight hours?

    Seriously, we live on a planet. An oblate spinning spheroid with an annual wobble. Climate conditions vary with your location on the surface, and what works in one place won't work in another. Solar's a great solution in Australia -- which gets much more even insolation at much higher intensity, has a vastly greater area of available land per person, and where demand for power peaks when the sun is overhead (air conditioning). It's not so good in places where aircon is a rarity, land for PV farms is eye-wateringly expensive due to overpopulation, and demand peaks during protracted winter nights. What's so hard to understand about this?

    (Overpopulation: if AUS had the same population density as the UK you'd have 2.5 billion people.)

    Greg just asked, rhetorically: Try doing without power at all in either London or Edinburgh in the second week of January, when there's a blocking High over Norway ....

    Not speaking for London, but in Edinburgh under those conditions you can expect nightime temperatures down to -12 celsius before any wind chill, the ground will be frozen, temperatures won't get much above -5 degrees during the day. It is, in other words, a lethal heat emergency as serious as +50 celsius in Australia: you need shelter and protective clothing or you will die.

    1554:

    David L @ 1504 ... Won't work if he has a personally-loyal armed milita, with a veneer of respectability/legality?

    Not sure how to parse this sentence but I think you don't realize just how much most state legislatures value their independence from the President telling them what to do. Our "leave us alone and let us do what we want" attitude is both good and bad depending.

    "personally-loyal armed milita"

    Loyal to who? And they would have to outnumber the state and local police to be effective.

    1555:

    Well I don't know if Twiggy is planning on selling into the UK market at all, but from what he's revealed so far, he'll be selling ammonia, hydrogen and electricity, along with refining metals with renewable energy.

    What that means for Scotland I couldn't guess. I'm sure it depends a lot on of Scotland is part of the UK and if England wants to trade.

    As for what Scotland can do with, or without PV, see my reply to Nojay that I'm formulating instead of sleeping.

    1556:

    Yes. He might provoke localised civil disorder, but that's not unusual in the USA though, if he were competent and had started earlier, he could have arranged an insurrection. The way to do it would be to have a nominally independent organisation in each state, with a common purpose. Yes, of course, quite a lot of the 'local patriots' would be neither, but what else is new? He could use his powers as president to support any successful coups, but I don't see that doing anything more than requiring Biden to put down the insurrection in a few states. To do much more, he would have to mount a coup in enough Biden-voting states in time for them to reverse their electoral college position, and even that might not fly.

    To actually achieve a successful coup, he would have to get the military (in the general sense) on his side, and I don't see that happening, certainly not now :-)

    1557:

    Dominic Cummings just got fired.

    OK. Help out those of us across the pond. Who was the puppet and who was pulling the strings between him and Boris?

    Sort of like what is going on in Texas. Abbott, the governor, seems more and more as if trying to be reasonable but the Lt. Gov seems to have more power and keeps kicking Abbott back to the pure crazy right wing lane. Seem the Lt. Gov is the one with all the ties to the big R donor groups in Texas and Abbott is just the front man.

    1558:

    One of the things the lunatic fringe in USA has been raging conspiracy theories about for ages is fluorination of drinking water.

    Then along comes this study:

    https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.31.20221374v1

    Tl;dr: fluor concentration in maternal urine strongly correlates, linearly with lower IQ in their children.

    There's no way scientific validation of a central tenet in the Religion of Conspiracy-Theorism is going to be a good thing.

    1559:

    HVDC lines can actually move electricity long distances with reasonable efficiency. Line losses are about 3% per 1,000km, and Algeria to the UK is around 3,000km, say 4,000km after going around the Med. So that's only a 12% loss to move power from where sunlight is plentiful to where it is not.

    This is being seriously discussed.

    1560:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54941846

    "So what now? With Downing Street in something of a state of limbo, decisions in the coming days may prove very revealing about the prime minister and his priorities."

    In other words, he doesn't know, either - and nor do I.

    1561:

    Fluoride is a neurotoxin. Adding it to drinking water supplies is not a smart thing, when all you have to do is buy toothpaste with added fluoride.

    When I buy toothpaste I don't even bother to check if there's added fluoride or not. I know I'll spit it out after brushing.

    1562:

    Others differ on Fluorides in drinking water...

    Public Health England: Water fluoridation health monitoring report for England

    NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination: A systematic review of water fluoridation

    Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US): Recommendations on selected interventions to prevent dental caries, oral and pharyngeal cancers and sports-related craniofacial injuries

    US Department of Health and Human Services Community Preventive Services Task Force: Community water fluoridation

    Royal Society of New Zealand: Health effects of water fluoridation

    Cochrane Oral Health Group: Water fluoridation for the prevention of dental caries

    For the links try here.... https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/fluoride/

    1563:

    You can't make this kind of craziness up. A group of parents organized a 'school dance' for their kids, deliberately keeping it secret, and deliberately making it difficult to contact-trace. And they're proud of it.

    “So my friend and I did a thing yesterday,” local parent Cory Coates posted on Facebook after the dance. “We did a REALLY big thing. And we had a lot of support. And a lot of help. And a lot of really happy kids. And it was kind of amazing. And I really want to recognize and thank these people but I can’t. But my heart is full and I think the kids are happy and it was worth it. I would do it again. I’m happy and sad at the same time and I want normalcy. I think we delivered this for one night. #HOCORHS2020.”

    The health department was not amused.

    “All case investigation and contact tracing efforts have been forced to focus solely on this event, pushing us even further behind with contacting new positive cases,” said a statement released this week from the health department. “This event has the potential to be a superspreader event with more cases expected over the next several weeks. Actions and events such as this are reckless and go against all public health mitigation strategies to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and protect the entirety of the community.”

    But wait, it gets better! Other parents are deliberately obstructing contact tracing because socialism.

    Highlighting that tension—and the difficult task facing the health department—one local woman claimed in a series of Facebook posts that her daughter “did not attend the dance” but that she had added the health department number into her phone in order to avoid their calls.

    “I’m sorry, but if you’re OK with your kid ratting other kids out to the health department for attending a private event, you are the bigger problem… SMDH SOCIALISM,” she wrote. “I don’t have to answer any of their questions. F#%* them.”

    “This is how it all starts,” she continued. “Dividing, labeling. Your home raided in the middle of the night. Don’t think it could happen here? Think again. The difference is, our citizens are armed, according to their constitutional rights.”

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/rolla-missouri-unsanctioned-homecoming-dance-at-steakhouse-became-possible-coronavirus-superspreader-event?ref=home

    Here's hoping Trudeau keeps the border closed, and CBSA stops granting rich Americans exceptions.

    1564:

    If you look at Europe you'll see that only 2% of its population puts fluoride in their drinking water:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country

    This choice was made after repeated studies.

    1565:

    It's not quite as tight as it was 20 comments ago, but I don't think I've ever seen an open fannish discussion converge quite so thoroughly on a topic.

    1566:

    It depends on what you mean by rich Americans.

    Not all Americans are rich enough to own a summer home or livable cabin in the wild spaces of Canada. Those who are rich enough to own one are still not allowed to cross the border in order to "open" and/or "close" that summer home and do general maintenance to their property. Taking care of a summer home is not considered essential travel.

    Of course the truly very rich Americans don't have that problem because they can hire permanent or temporary caretakers locally, for their impressive summer homes.

    The only big problems I've seen are the run of the mill Americans who say they're transiting to Alaska and veer off the "straight" route to go into other parts of Canada.

    1567:

    Thanks for the apology. I am sorry for getting ratty.

    1568:

    It depends on what you mean by rich Americans.

    The billionaires who have been granted exemptions to the 14-day quarantine period.

    1569:

    You mean Liz Uihlein back in August? Do you know of any others?

    1570:

    Fluoride is a neurotoxin. General Jack D. Ripper (Doctor Strangelove), step aside. It is well known in some circles that fluoridation of the water supplies is a mass attack on human third eyes: Fluoride, Third Eye and the Conspiracy Against Humanity (Youtube, Jul 4, 2016, 8:00)

    To be clear, calcification of the pineal gland is a real thing. [1] Also, if you poke around you'll find a bunch of (fringe) people with methods for (supposedly) reversing it, e.g. iodine supplementation at high multiples of the (low IMO) RDA is popular. (The science of water fluoridation is very mixed, and political.)

    [1] Pineal Calcification, Melatonin Production, Aging, Associated Health Consequences and Rejuvenation of the Pineal Gland (2018 Feb)

    1571:

    You mean Liz Uihlein back in August? Do you know of any others?

    The one who went for a meeting at her plant in Milton and held a maskless meetings with large numbers of people, because as a Trump true believer she believed Covid was a hoax (and has now caught Covid, yet is denying she went to the White House on election night even though her private jet flew to Washington at the time).

    Or the other executives, who while not named, are mentioned as having been given a pass by CBSA in the CBC article

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/liz-uihlein-covid-19-diagnosis-1.5801118

    1572:

    Another problem with installing solar panels in Edinburgh is that if you just look at a typical tenement roof it will start leaking.

    1573:

    Windows has had problems with long uptimes. I don't know if it still does, but the guidance is still out there to shut Windows machines down every so often. Most people run Windows.

    Most people still remember Windows 95/98 bug that would crash the OS if uptime exceeded 49.7 days, and that it wasn't discovered for 7 years (until 2002) - and many people extend that bug to the NT based systems that didn't have it.

    That said, long uptimes are now considered bad - it means you aren't applying security updates and it also generally means you likely have a problem if something does force a reboot because changes to the system while running haven't been applied to the boot/startup process.

    1574:

    He likely has enough lawyers to delay/spin out any legal action for years. At this point his goal has to be to 'run out the clock', he's in his mid 70s and not a well man in any respect.

    I agree that lawyers and their legal manouvers will keep any proceedings against him going for years.

    The real threat to Trump is financial - if he can't pay the debts then everything tumbles (including the laywers, who tend to like to be paid by legal means and not hidden offshore stuff).

    Which is of course one of the reasons for the continued milking of the gullible at the moment.

    1575:

    Here's hoping Trudeau keeps the border closed, and CBSA stops granting rich Americans exceptions.

    I suspect a bigger problem will be the snowbirds, who apparently despite official government advice are still determined in large numbers to spend the winter in the US south - I wonder how many cases of Covid they end up bringing back, and given their current attitude how many will properly quarantine on return.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/snowbirds-seniors-travel-advisory-canada-u-s-border-covid-19-1.5799456

    1576:

    With regards to where little Donnie might scarper to, what if he heads to a US state that had majority support for him and sets up his Government in exile there?

    Others have mentioned the fact that you typically can't cross a state border to escape the courts, but any state with that sort of level of Trump support is also going to be financially dependent on money from the federal government - doubtful any state level lawmakers would be that stupid regardless of how supportive they may be of Trump (at least publicly).

    1577:

    My ideal is to actually shrink grids where possible, mostly because the cascading chaos of power shutdowns around fires is a serious problem here. In my area at least, it would be safer if more people could just shut off their grid connection and connect their house battery and solar panels to pumps linked to a rain cistern and roof sprinklers in case of fire.

    Curious because I have no idea, but how effective would solar be in those sort of cases? The images on the news show that for many the Sun isn't just obscured by daylight levels are severely reduced, which presumably would mean a lot of people relying on solar power could end up with no power?

    1578:

    Yeah, that's the one. She's the loudmouth denialist billionaire who made it through and got in the news.

    Personally I think that a lot of discrete American millionaires and billionaires have been getting into Canada as they please. Since they're not loudmouth denialists we're not hearing about them. All it takes is a convincing document stating that your trip to Canada is essential and you're in.

    Because Canada is not self-sufficent in food we import a lot from the US. About 80,000 big trucks come into Canada each week from the USA. It's essential to our country.

    All it takes is documentation saying that you're an essential loader/unloader for a big semi (articulated lorry) and you're in, as easily as the truck driver next to you.

    Other fields like medical care are essential and they have occasions for making up official papers that stretch the law only a little bit.

    But that's all theorizing on my part. Up to now they've kept out of the news.

    1579:

    Later today, the wannabee SA will show up in Wash, DC ... & DJT is hinting he might meet them.

    Apparently he merely drove post a bunch of his supporters on his way to golf - which says it all in a way

    Could he, either then, or, perhaps at a later "march" - say Saturday 12th December ... Swear them all in a a Militia, personally loyal to himself? And/Or as "deputy US Marshals"?? Is that do-able?

    First, whatever the numbers end up being, most of them will be regular Turmp supporters and not the "armed so we thing we are dangerous" sub-groups the media likes to focus on.

    Second, irrelevant. Even if he legally could do such things, which I doubt, they would remain a small number of untrained people who could not stop regularly law enforcement - and would have no way of stopping the legal constitutional process from proceeding.

    If so the USA falls at a single stroke. DON'T: Tell me "It couldn't happen" DJT was never even going to make the R's nomination, was he?

    Again, there is a difference between misguided popular opinion - "Trump will never get the nomination" "okay, he manged that, but he will never get elected" - which was all based on hopes/wishes/opinion and not on Trump overcoming some legal or constitutional obstacle.

    It is a much bigger step to try and overcome the law, something that large crowds of angry supporters can't achieve my pointlessly wasting money to march in Washington.

    And all the other things he could not possibly do, between then & now, yes? Between this afternoon & the 14th of Dec is the danger period ....

    It is more of a theoretical danger period at this point given the track record so far since November 3rd.

    Trump and his cronies are simply to disorganized and incompetent to change the outcome of who will be President come late January.

    Which isn't to say Trump can't do other damage between now and then (the biggest of which will likely to be the continued ignoring of Covid), but he can't at this point keep himself as President.

    1580:

    mdive I do hope you are correct.

    Meanwhile here is the start of a "Modest Proposal" from The Atlantic, of all places. I hope it amuses ...

    More than a week after losing the presidential election to Joe Biden, Donald Trump continues to proclaim victory and stall the transition. Some White House advisers profess (“privately”) to be nudging Trump toward a concession—so far with no success. It’s time to think differently about how to ease the president into a new reality. In the movie Good Bye, Lenin!, a woman in communist East Berlin falls into a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She awakens many months later, unaware of the world-changing events that have taken place. Doctors fear that the slightest shock could kill her. Because the woman had been an ardent party member, her teenage son sets out to create the illusion—for her—that the wall is intact and everything is how it was. He dresses the way East Germans used to dress. He stocks his mother’s kitchen with East German food. He cobbles together fake news programs out of old footage on state-run TV. He comes up with an explanation for the “Coca-Cola” billboard his mother sees one day from her window. Inhabiting the lie that he actually won the election, Trump is ripe for similar treatment. It might be simplest for everyone if he found refuge in a safe space where he can indulge his illusions while the rest of us get on with our business.

    And so on for several pages of fun.

    1581:

    Curious because I have no idea, but how effective would solar be in those sort of cases? The images on the news show that for many the Sun isn't just obscured by daylight levels are severely reduced, which presumably would mean a lot of people relying on solar power could end up with no power?

    Good question, complicated answer that I'll go into because I'm planning on getting it built.

    First issue is that, if you don't have a battery and they cut the line power, they cut off your solar power too, so that the voltage from your panels doesn't re-energize part of the grid. They're cutting it to stop it sparking and starting a fire (usually because high winds are either knocking wires into each other or breaking limbs and pitching them onto lines), so I don't blame them for cutting power.

    The general solution is to have a way to cut your system off the grid. With only solar panels, as you mention, it's pretty useless. The available house batteries don't give you full power unless you get a bunch of them ($$$). Normally, they power three circuits, so you power things that are critical, such as your refrigerator(s), AC if your house doesn't do passive cooling, and a data link so you can scream for help.

    This doesn't stop fires, though. That's a maintenance and special features thing. Maintenance is getting the pine needles or whatever out of your gutters, and getting anything flammable away from the walls of your house. It's a chore, and I've still got a lot to do in that regard. If you must have plants near your house, they need to be kept hydrated, so that if the wind blows sparks, they don't catch fire. This is all in the aid of making sure that, if your home is caught in a rain of embers, instead of the embers catching something on fire and burning down the house, the embers smolder and go out.

    But anyway, without power, the best you can do is to passively fireproof your house and evacuate. When the fire hits your area, you won't have water pressure to fight it (the firefighters are tapping every hydrant in the area). If you want to actively fight the fire, you need a pump and the biggest rain cistern you can get. Currently, the pumps are gas powered, so you've got to get them working and keep them fueled. The alternative many of us want is to power them off solar and a house battery, so that we don't have to worry about keeping them fueled.

    To make it more automated, there's more interest in adopting Canadian style roof or under-eave sprinklers, which have shown to be really useful in keeping houses from catching fire. The ideal system here is to have solar panels, a house battery, a big cistern, and defensive sprinklers connected to an electric pump. The pump isn't high power, because the sprinklers' job is to keep everything damp enough that embers won't catch the house on fire. With a system like this, at least theoretically you can switch it on and evacuate, and not worry about the gas running out as with a gas-powered pump.

    And even if the fire hits at night or there's dense smoke, the battery still stores enough power (probably!) to keep the sprinklers running until they run out of water. Hopefully that will be enough.

    That's the emergency use. There are other uses, like when there's a brown-out in really hot weather, where house batteries and solar power keep things livable. During heat waves, having enough sun is only a problem if you're downwind from a fire.

    1582:

    Interesting, though scary, article in the Guardian about the Republicans voting base.

    The common media story about it being all about angry white men, while having some truth, isn't the whole story.

    Biden apparently beat Trump because white men left Trump and shifted to Biden, while the long term trend of women and non-whites shifting to the Republican Party continued despite Trump and his actions/policies.

    This should be worrying for those assuming (yet again) that the Republicans have become unelectable and that 2022 and 2024 will be easy for the Democrats.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/14/joe-biden-trump-black-latino-republicans

    1583:

    The alternative many of us want is to power them off solar and a house battery, so that we don't have to worry about keeping them fueled.

    All of what you said in your reply makes sense, but in the original post you indicated you wanted to eliminate the grids feeding the houses.

    So what happens if the grid has been eliminated, you rely on solar and batteries, and the smoke from the fires means you don't get any sunlight (and hence solar power to charge the batteries) for a week or 2 before the fire arrives to your location?

    The fires today seem to be getting big enough that they are creating secondary effects across large areas of states, often even for those who aren't in any danger.

    Or are the media reports and comments from those online misleading/exaggerating?

    1584:

    Pfft. Musk style battery storage plants are cheaper and more effective as peaker plants than gas plants are. Of course, in Scotland you've got to keep the buggers warm, and we've got to find all that lithium or build better batteries. Still, these are trivial compared to the problem that it takes four hours to ramp up a natural gas plant to get it to handle peak load. That's one part of it that's seriously inefficient. I believe the ramp up speed for a battery peaker plant is seconds to minutes, which makes them more efficient. Unlike the natural gas plant, they're not wasting hours of fuel before they come online.

    The point about gas is to take the load when other power sources are not directly producing energy. The point about batteries is to take otherwise wasted surplus energy, from when the wind is blowing, the sun is shining, and no one can use the energy, and store it for when it's needed. Since we've got to phase out natural gas, we might as well start investing heavily in these kinds of efficiencies, no?

    1585:

    Because Canada is not self-sufficent in food we import a lot from the US. About 80,000 big trucks come into Canada each week from the USA. It's essential to our country.

    I wonder if the Canadian government, having paid attention to the newspapers over the past four years, has undertaken any contingency planning for a situation in which, for reasons, those trucks might not keep coming in as frequently. Absent Brexit, the UK might have been an option, but the UK is likely to have its own problems for a while. So where to get the groceries? The remaining EU? South America? Asia?

    1586:

    And in true Trumpian fashion, the "Million MAGA March" appears to have attracted a crowd numbered in the thousands, and a mere 100 or so Proud Boys.

    Not going to overthrow the government with numbers like that.

    https://thehill.com/homenews/news/525988-thousands-flock-to-dc-for-pro-trump-rally

    1587:

    I wonder if the Canadian government, having paid attention to the newspapers over the past four years, has undertaken any contingency planning for a situation in which, for reasons, those trucks might not keep coming in as frequently. Absent Brexit, the UK might have been an option, but the UK is likely to have its own problems for a while. So where to get the groceries? The remaining EU? South America? Asia?

    Likely not really - it is very unlikely the cross border traffic would fully stop for any length of time.

    Unlike the UK, Canadians are aware that we are the minority partner on this relationship and we flex and adapt to suit the circumstances - and there is regardless of who is in the White House a lot of support for Canada among the state level governments that border Canada as there is a lot of business other than food crossing the border daily that would cause troubles in those US states as well - and thus neither side of the border denies things they way it developed in the UK.

    The longer term threat is simply climate change. Ontario is quite happily paving over with housing it's best farmland, which works okay when you can import cheap food from places like California. But with water, and soon heat, becoming a bigger threat to many American growing regions over the coming decades we will likely regret that short term planning.

    1588:

    There is a common confusion, possibly deliberately promoted by the "storage will make renewables a viable proposition" brigade that storage is actually generating capacity. It isn't. In fact storage wastes energy in losses from storing and regenerating the output, again something that isn't often mentioned.

    A storage array has to be supplied with electricity from somewhere to charge it up and right now most solar and wind turbine systems aren't anywhere near having regular surpluses over consumption to fill those storage systems, never mind being able to meet the real-time energy demand of heating, transportation etc. A combined cycle gas turbine plant (CCGT) will convert fossil fuel into electricity for as long as the gas keeps flowing, it has no storage limit like, say, the Dinorwig pumped-storage scheme which is good for about 8GWh assuming it's previously been pumped up to that level by the use of cheap electricity, most of it from CCGT plants.

    CCGTs are not peaker plants in the classic meaning, they provide anything up to 30GW of Britain's entire electricity demand on occasion. Last week they were delivering 20GW of the 45GW demand. In addition CCGTs only require 30 minutes or so from hot-start conditions to full-power, not 4 hours.

    1589:

    We're self sufficient in certain categories like wheat and dairy products. We export food to the UK and we don't get food from it, except for some local specialties.

    We've just signed CETA (Canada-European Union-Trade Agreement) and European Union food producers are extremely eager to sell us food. It's basically a form of free trade agreement that puts us just a few centimeters away from a full membership in the European Union.

    On the Eastern Front we've signed the CPPTP free trade agrement with 10 countries with a coast line on the Pacific and they are eager to sell us food at low prices.

    The really interesting thing though is that with COVID-19 we started to think very hard about all those food trucks coming in from the US and then started to have (formerly loony) ideas about growing food in giant greenhouses all winter long. We do have hydro power surpluses in British Columbia, Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador and we do have enough uranium deposits to last for centuries so...

    1590:

    Not doing it now. When I bought the house in '11, my inspector told me that the roof was about 10 yrs old, so I'd need a new one in about 10 years. When it starts leaking, I'll have it replaced (which will eat a good percentage of the money I have saved - remember, I'm retired, and living on social security, primarily). Then I'll consider it....

    1591:

    shudder

    The scariest movie I can remember as a kid, I was 9, I think, and my folks took me to a double feature: Ivanhoe... and The Lost Missile. I think I threw up when we got home, or maybe just outside - we walked in right near the end of Lost Missile, and stayed to that point, and left, I was so upset.

    Subplot in the LM: they're bringing a nuclear weapon of some kind for the missile they hope is fast enough to blow up the lost missile of the title, and they're in a jeep (wwII variety), and some assholes stop them and take the jeep. After they get free and chase them, they find the bodies of the fools who opened the lead box....

    1592:

    Not under any legal interpretation.

    And the idiot drove through/past them, today, to go golfing, rather than encourage them.

    1593:

    Un, you've got that wrong.

    Around 2000, there was a site called "uptime", where people would send their uptimes.

    95 had an average uptime of five or six days. 98 had at least one day less. ME was 2 days. NT was 49 days... but then, almost no one was running NT at home - that was only at organization$$$.

    Meanwhile, some wacko had a version of Linux - I always assumed it was slackware, that had an uptime > 1900 days. Not sure what they did on it, but....

    1594:

    Oh, and it was a known issue with NT - a timer rolling over, they'd use an int....

    1595:

    I'll also note that carrying in DC is not condoned, for a start.

    I'll also note that the only explanation I have for the election results is a ton of Republican voters split their ticket, to vote for Biden, but keep their Congresscritters and Senators.

    1596:

    And how many railcars of grain? Trucking grain is absurd. It's not a time-critical product, just that it keeps coming, and rail is a lot cheaper.

    1597:

    Anything that isn't on full time, but only handles surplus loads, is a peaker plant as opposed to a base load plant, at least so far as I know.

    I agree that the capacity isn't there in your electricity grid yet, but last year Oxnard (city about half the size of Edinburgh west of LA) contracted for a 195 MW battery system (primarily a 100 MW/400MWhr plant) instead of a 262 MW gas turbine. It's far from alone here, either.

    1598:

    That's one part of it that's seriously inefficient. I believe the ramp up speed for a battery peaker plant is seconds to minutes, which makes them more efficient.

    ORLY?

    My understanding is that most of the natural gas peak capacity in the UK is provided by gas turbines -- the same sort of kit the Navy likes to put in their shiny new electric-drive ships. They have to be able to come up really fast, within single-digit minutes at most.

    (I suspect your local peaker plants are furnace and steam turbine kit, not glorified jet engines driving generators via a reduction gearbox nicked off a turboprop.)

    1599:
    Meanwhile, some wacko had a version of Linux - I always assumed it was slackware, that had an uptime > 1900 days. Not sure what they did on it, but....

    One of my main servers currently has an uptime of 984 days. Nothing special.

    1600:

    Cold-to-full-drive time This is a great advantage of hydro pumped storage - the actual output is often "small" & they won't last for long, but .... if you want a completely cold-start they are the way to go. From wiki on Dinorwig: With all six units synchronised and spinning-in-air (water is dispelled by compressed air and the unit draws a small amount of power to spin the shaft at full speed), 0 MW to 1800 MW load can be achieved in approximately 16 seconds.

    1601:

    The gas turbines for electricity generation are designed from the ground up for static use, they're not converted or modified aircraft engines like the marine Trent engines used in the QE aircraft carriers. They're a lot bulkier and not made from space-race materials; they don't need to be particularly compact or light since they're static units so they can be engineered for long service life and easy maintenance. They're also a lot more powerful than aircraft engines, producing as much as 1500MW each (a marine Trent engine produces about 40MW).

    Most of the British fleet of gas turbine generators are modern combined-cycle units (CCGT). The hot exhaust of the turbine is fed through a heat exchanger and used to raise steam that drives a secondary steam turbine to generate even more electricity. It can take some time for this secondary system to come up to speed after the primary turbine is spinning at rated load but once it's also generating power the total package can be as much as 60% efficient, a big improvement over the earlier open-cycle gas turbine generators (OCGT). A few of these OCGT plants still exist and are kept serviceable just in case but they don't get used much.

    There are plans for more CCGT plants in Britain given the drive for renewables and the low cost of gas, how many of them will come to fruition is another matter.

    http://www.eggboroughccgt.co.uk/

    TL:DR: nice graphics, no metal bent or concrete poured yet, 2.5GW of CCGT plant to be built (perhaps) adjacent to an existing coal-fired power station that's on its last legs in Yorkshire.

    1602:

    That said, long uptimes are now considered bad - it means you aren't applying security updates and it also generally means you likely have a problem if something does force a reboot because changes to the system while running haven't been applied to the boot/startup process.

    Some years back, I did technical IT security audits for a living. Having long uptimes was usually one of things we reported. Usually we tried to figure out the updates that were skipped to have concrete items for the reports.

    1603:

    First, this was 1999 or 2000. I have grave doubts it was someone's work computer.

    Second... when do you apply the kernel security and bugfix updates?

    1604:

    I doubt it - I'm an ex-physicist ( But also an engineer ) Sorry, I was referencing a joke at the expense of theoretical physicists and forgot the qualifier: Spherical Cows.

    1605:
    That said, long uptimes are now considered bad - it means you aren't applying security updates

    The number of security updates that need a kernel change is tiny, and very little else should need a reboot.

    and it also generally means you likely have a problem if something does force a reboot because changes to the system while running haven't been applied to the boot/startup process.

    This is a problem. Of course it's a problem no matter what the uptime is, the system could have been up for 3 minutes and you could forget to fix the boot process.

    1606:

    Going back to the original thread, there may be some reason to be happy that Giuliani is taking over IQ.45's legal offenses, if one believes Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/14/giuliani-trump-legal-plans-436475

    1607:

    I resemble that remark! Spherical Cow has remained my favorite college textbook, and I still refer to it occasionally.

    1608:

    ORLY? My understanding is that most of the natural gas peak capacity in the UK is provided by gas turbines -- the same sort of kit the Navy likes to put in their shiny new electric-drive ships. They have to be able to come up really fast, within single-digit minutes at most.

    YRLY. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032117309206

    While definitions vary widely, the above article has one:

    Hot start: < 8 h since plant shutdown Warm start: between 8 and 48 h since plant shutdown Cold start: > 48 h since plant shutdown
    1609:

    But anyway, without power, the best you can do is to passively fireproof your house and evacuate. When the fire hits your area, you won't have water pressure to fight it (the firefighters are tapping every hydrant in the area). If you want to actively fight the fire, you need a pump and the biggest rain cistern you can get. Currently, the pumps are gas powered, so you've got to get them working and keep them fueled. The alternative many of us want is to power them off solar and a house battery, so that we don't have to worry about keeping them fueled.

    Another name for "the biggest rain cistern you can get" is a swimming pool. As someone else alluded in relation to Scottish tenement roofs, the main reason we haven't gone solar so far has been the need to fix our 60s concrete tile roof that has the mystery leaks and much fun with multiple geological layers of variously trashed sarking. But we've mostly solved that problem now and could be planning for solar. In any case, when we do the main load, under non-COVID circumstances anyway, would be the pool pump. As it happens that may be aircon in coming times, but that doesn't generally have to run at full power 8 hours a day. The point I'm coming around to is that if you have power, you can run the pool pump's 40m pressure side to a step down diameter adaptor and a fire hose. Can't see running a pool pump off batteries for very long but I suppose the halfway point would be for the municipality to make reserve diesel gensets available with the required output, which I suppose can then also be used for other things if the power is off for bushfires, thus is slightly more flexible than a petrol pump. I wonder whether there's enough market for electric pumps that include their own battery banks? It's not all that niche and getting less so every year. I imagine devices built into something like a box trailer with a built-in foldable solar array to charge the batteries when it's on "standby". There should be a reasonable compromise that achieves the 500kg unbraked towing capacity on most small cars (or even the 394kg limit for a Leaf). It would offer the advantage that the power system is tailored to the load. Municipalities and responders, heck even hardware store chains could make them available to hire.

    In any case, pulling water from pools for home bushfire defence is definitely a thing in Queensland and I guess it probably is in California too. Absent swimming pools, rainwater tanks are popular in Queensland and most use some sort of pump to pressurise the water. Might not be enough for fire-fighting, though if mains pressure is enough then... but likewise issues with power. Also volume: 30,000 litres is a big water tank, but a small pool.

    1610:

    We export food to the UK and we don't get food from it, except for some local specialties.

    And that supply is unreliable. The local shops are out of Marmite, and have been for some time. :-)

    1611:

    If a hard Brexit ever causes food shortages in the UK the Brits can always trade Marmite for Canadian bread, cheese and milk.

    1612:

    Since we're on education: a number of Irish people consider "Eire" to be an impolite way to refer to Ireland in English.

    The country's constitution says that the name of the country is "Éire" in Irish, or "Ireland" in English. In the early years of quasi-independence and actual-independence from the UK, the UK government couldn't bring itself to use the actual name the country had decided for itself, because that might be taken to imply some kind of admission about the status of Northern Ireland; so they tended to settle on "Eire" (usually without the accent), and in fact legislated for that at one point. The result of this is that in practice for a good while it's been a dogwhistle for, um, a certain kind of conservative British thinking with regard to Ireland.

    A minor point is that, in the Irish language, "Éire" means Ireland while "Eire" (without the accent) means "burden" (though most people don't take that very seriously, and of course some people have technical difficulty with typing accents).

    Now, of course sometimes it's necessary to distinguish between Ireland as an island and Ireland as a state (I mean, there is a perfectly obvious solution to this, but until such time as enough people are persuaded ... ;-)), and I think a lot of well-meaning British people find themselves using "Éire" or "Eire" in an attempt to resolve that. But people don't seem to get especially confused when talking about Sudan vs. South Sudan or other similar situations, so you can easily find some other way to make it clear what you mean in the rare case that it isn't obvious.

    As for the actual question of rude names for the main parties, despite being Irish the best I can do without looking it up is "Shinners" for Sinn Féin and that Fine Gael are often referred to as "Tories" or "blueshirts". But I've been living in England for 20 years so only see it from afar.

    1613:

    Is it just me, or is Wikipedia merging with Tvtropes at their common boundary?

    1614:

    Ok, I fell asleep in the middle of this. It's long, it rambles, it switches from 1st to 3rd person randomly and the tenses are all screwed up.

    I can't be bothered rewriting it to make sense, and hopefully it's my last word on the subject. I was going to do a comparison with PV but no one will read it anyway. The important point I'm trying to impart is that the cost of nuclear is impractical (not impossible, but hard on the population). It's also deeply conservative. Since argument from authority seems to be the trend here, I'll point out that I worked for decades in a near pure coal grid, that like nuclear runs flat out and only does load following using bypass. The real figures in the real world of real grid operation would be higher, probably by 50% but could be double this. The second point being that to make it only cripplingly expensive you need seasonal scale storage, and that if you have to have storage anyway, why not use solar and wind that is like a 1/100th of the cost? (but I feel asleep).

    So this is what my sleep deprived brain spat out...

    This might be slightly incoherent, it's 4 hours past my bedtime....

    "winter the UK needs about 150GW"

    Nope. No where near.

    Options

    Gas. No one likes this. Boo... one trusts Jonny Foreigner to keep supplying

    Interconnects. See above

    Solar and wind. Needs too much storage, according to Greg storage doesn't scale. If we could solve the storage, fine, but we can't. All of the dozen or so options put forward don't work. No one can explain why they don't scale or work or are impractical, they just are. Let's take that as an axiom. No need for explaining.

    Nuclear. Yay, everyone's favourite. Works at night, works in Edinburgh, just works. Has steam and Smiths gauges to keep Greg happy. Dot them everywhere and Hetermeles likes them because the grid is small and so it won't start fires (we'll skim over the fact that it's the low and medium voltage lines that start fires).

    So it's Nuclear then. Now all we need to do is order the plants. How many.

    ...

    https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/928352/2020_ECUK_Press_Notice.pdf

    Well it turns out that the UK doesn't consume 150 GW. Nopes.

    It's 187 GW.

    That's the average.

    So since, as we're often reminded, but the dim antipodeans don't ever get, most of the energy in the UK is used for heating in winter, the winter number must be more than that.

    30% more? I don't know, and frankly I'm too tired to look it up. But let's go with that.

    That's 243 GW.

    So we order 243 GW of nuclear plants (can I go to bed now?)

    No.

    Gas, coal, they don't care about daily or even weekly consumption rates. Average over a month, that's fine.

    Electricity isn't like that you have to have enough to meet the peak load (plus a bit, that I won't get into here because laymen always argue, so we'll just go with that).

    How much more? We can't know. Coal consumption is reported in monthly intervals not 5 minute intervals like electricity.

    Let's guess 30%. That's probably wildly conservative. It's probably 100% but let's say 30%.

    So that's 316 GW. So, we open the online nuclear power plant shop. Go to the 3.2 GW plant, and type 99 in the quantity box and click "buy now"

    Helpfully it pops up "would you like to add storage to this order" we click "No Thanks".

    The confirmation screen comes up where we put in our credit card. Delighted we see that orders over a 100 billion pounds get free shipping! We think "I bet I qualify for free shipping!" So we scroll down to check the sub total.

    2.1 trillion pounds*.

    Errr wat de fuk?

    Isn't nuclear like cheap? Too cheap to meter? And what's this asterisk? Scroll some more.

    *Ongoing fees apply. Click here to see full terms and conditions.

    So let's click through to the Ts&Cs.

    "power plants are sold on the understanding that the full output of the plant will be paid for at the strike price regardless of the consumer's actual demand"

    Oh, OK, so to run the plant costs money, and we have to pay that even if we're not using all the electricity. So how much is that? Well the strike price is 92.50 per MWh. 92.50 doesn't sound so bad. They only make 3.2 MW. How long is the contract?.... 35 years....

    So, 99 times 3.2... WAIT A SECOND that's GW. What's that in MW? lemme Google it. It's 3200!

    So, do it again. 99, times 3200 times 92.5. I'll get the calculator app open... 99, 3200, 92.5, that's 29,304,000. That can't be right... 99, 3200, 92.5. 29,304,000 per hour... Huh. So what's that over 35 years? 29,304,000, 24, 365, 35. 8,984,606,400,000

    Errr, what's that. One group of 3 digits, thousands. Two groups millions. Three groups billions. Four groups, trillions. That's 8 trillion pounds! Er, 8.9 actually. Plus the 2.1 trillion up front. That's 11 trillion pounds.

    That sounds like a lot.

    What's that each? If we get everyone to chip in. Google that, 66.6 million. So it's not going to be much each. Pop that in the calculator app, 11 with four groups of zeroes after it, now divided by 66,600,000 is 165165. That's not so bad. Everyone has 35 years to come up with the money. Might be hard on the disabled, but well, fuckem. It's less than 5000 pounds each. 100 quid a week, laughing. Family of 4 with a gran. 25000 a year. They can grow some veg out the back, save some money that way.

    We click on confirm.

    But what if we'd clicked on yes to storage? Well it would have come up "this product is unavailable, because Greg says so".

    Well we can't know what the storage would have cost, because it's a figment of overheated tropical imagination. But if it did, would we have needed as much nuclear? Well no. If the storage was perfect then we'd have only needed 187 GW. That's 59 reactors. 6.55 trillion pounds. Storage isn't perfect though, so the real figure is somewhere between the two.

    1615:

    Water Buffalo tank plus gas powered water pump is how I do it

    Keep the water Buffalo full during fire season

    https://wastecorp.com/Water-Buffalo

    1616:

    One can livepatch quite a few kernel security issues these days; my employer offers that as a service for our Linux distribution. We've had one or two outages internally that ended up being due to a bad livepatch, but on the whole it's surprisingly reliable. With the best will in the world a lot of people are going to put off rebooting until a more convenient time, so it's a useful security tool to have available.

    1617:

    Given my first engineering job was for BNR/Nortel and involved systems where the goal was less than an hour of downtime in 40 years, I've always found consumer-level computing to be incredibly accepting of bugs and restarts ;-)

    1618:

    My first serious summer job (also telephony) had somewhat similar requirements.

    There's a hell of a lot less code involved in stacks that need six nines of uptime, though! And having to testify to Congress if you miss your requirements tends to concentrate the mind. (Was it Sprint who had to do that once after having something like a minute of 911 service downtime over the course of a year rather than the required 30 seconds? I remember hearing the story, but can't find the details now.)

    1619:

    The number of security updates that need a kernel change is tiny, and very little else should need a reboot.

    The Linux kernel has averaged 200 security vulnerabilities a year for the last decade

    https://www.cvedetails.com/product/47/Linux-Linux-Kernel.html?vendor_id=33

    This is a problem. Of course it's a problem no matter what the uptime is, the system could have been up for 3 minutes and you could forget to fix the boot process.

    While true, I would hope after 3 minutes someone would remember what the fix was - and remember to fix it permanently the second time.

    But given the poor level of documentation and institutional memory that surround most systems the longer they are up the more potential problems will exist on a reboot/restart.

    1620:

    Re: time to grid connection for gas generators...

    From a company that actually sells such units, Wartsilia:

    https://www.wartsila.com/energy/learn-more/technical-comparisons/combustion-engine-vs-gas-turbine-startup-time

    Wartsilia sells gas-fuelled IC engine systems rather than gas-turbine but the headline chart includes the gas-turbine competition showing max times from start to grid connection at about 40 minutes.

    The paper you referenced includes, I believe, coal-fired plants and simple gas-fired boiler plant which does indeed require several hours to work up to temperature before it can generate electricity and connect to the grid but that's not what we're building or operating here in the UK.

    1621:

    Oh, and it was a known issue with NT - a timer rolling over, they'd use an int....

    It wasn't NT, it was 95 and 98.

    C-Bit has fortunately archived the Microsoft notice regarding the issue, Q216641

    http://www.c-bit.org/Q/216641/EN-US/

    1622:

    That's a good idea. If I had room for a water buffalo, I'd do that. The configuration of my place (on the side of a hill) means that I'm going to have to build a tank next to the house.

    As fir gas versus electricity, my real objection is to turning on a gas-powered, seldom-used pump right before I evacuate during a fire storm. Not ideal, but simpler than the electrical system I'm envisioning.

    1623:

    Is it just me, or is Wikipedia merging with Tvtropes at their common boundary?

    It's not just you

    1624:

    That's if they come up at all. I've seen gas turbines fail to start on the initial tries. Then start up on diesel, fail to switch to gas, fall back to diesel, fail to sync, and then exhaust the onsite diesel. Hours of "I think we can get it going" before it was realised further efforts were pointless and it's time to give up for the day. As a result the grid was only a few MW from collapsing. It didn't help that the aluminium smelter that was contractually obliged to shut down in an emergency was refusing to shut down, but still...

    Real world experience.

    1625:

    The UK has lots of naturally occurring underground salt deposits that don't have water in them and which would nicely contain molten salt.

    I'll happily put on my Clueless American hat here but... yes, please show me this place in the British Isles that never has any water. I'm unfamiliar with the parts of Britain that are never damp, misty, soggy, moist, or just generally humid.

    1626:

    The scariest movie I can remember as a kid, I was 9, I think, and my folks took me to a double feature: Ivanhoe... and The Lost Missile.

    I was unaware of this and googled. Yes, The Lost Missile sounds like a very tense movie - and rather too much for a nine year old smart enough to understand it.

    1627:

    I was under the impression that some battery power systems used as peaker plants (the Tesla megapacks for example) have a startup time in the low milliseconds.

    1629:

    I was there*. Sorry, but that report is from '07, long after they'd fixed the bug in NT.

    1630:

    One of the teething issues with the Tesla battery in South Australia was that it reacted so fast the grid operator's systems hadn't detected the problem before the battery fixed it. So they weren't getting paid for providing frequency support.

    1631:

    This was the late fifties. It was a movie. There were no labels on movies. And it was the middle of the Cold War.

    I will admit, I don't remember duck and cover, but that would have been pointless in Philly, with the Philly Naval Yard, an international airport, and seven large oil refineries in south Philly. If the missiles and the bombers flew, we were dead.

    1632:

    "While true, I would hope after 3 minutes someone would remember what the fix was - and remember to fix it permanently the second time."

    I think you mean:

    while (true) {   I would hope after 3 minutes someone would remember what the fix was && remember to fix it permanently the second time }

    1633:

    I suspect a bigger problem will be the snowbirds, who apparently despite official government advice are still determined in large numbers to spend the winter in the US south

    Ugh. Forgot about those folks. Florida in the winter, Myrtle Beach in the early spring. Two places to not visit if you want to avoid Covid-19.

    Way back in the day someone I was working with in Toronto said the way to spot the Canadians on vacation in the US is they are the ones in the water in April.

    1634:

    Because Canada is not self-sufficent in food we import a lot from the US. About 80,000 big trucks come into Canada each week from the USA. It's essential to our country.

    Curious as to what you import from the US. You grow a LOT of grain in the prairie. And we (US) get a lot of our fruit, veggies, and such from South America and Mexico starting about now for the winter.

    Is it pork and beef?

    1635:

    Still, these are trivial compared to the problem that it takes four hours to ramp up a natural gas plant to get it to handle peak load.

    Hmmm. This is not my impression. I need to ask my friend/neighbor who is high up in the engineering side of Duke energy. But with Covid-19 I haven't seen him for 10 months.

    1636:

    Is it pork and beef?

    Not a lot, unless things have changed in the last few years (possible). There's a LOT of pressure to open to US producers, but our food safety standards are different.

    Judging by my local grocery store, lots of fruits and veggies. (Not a lot of oranges grown in Canada.) Processed food too (probably manufactured for here as the labels are bilingual).

    1637:

    I'll also note that the only explanation I have for the election results is a ton of Republican voters split their ticket, to vote for Biden, but keep their Congresscritters and Senators.

    Aaayep.

    In NC Trump and Sen Tillis(R) won (well a few more votes still to count) by 70K and 100K. And our governor(D) was re-elected by 250K. Our of 5.5 million votes cast.

    I wish the D's would find more Senate candidates who can keep their zipper up. John Edwards and now Cunningham.

    1638:

    The number of security updates that need a kernel change is tiny, and very little else should need a reboot.

    Should is a big word here.

    At a local DevOps gathering (before things changed) a local data center admin for a big university gave a talk on how they are changing their thinking to deal with such things. Virtual and containerized systems. The don't live longer than a week. Their goal at the time was to get that down to a day. It required some apps to be re-thought but the intent was that client computers accessing data bases and such would make on the fly connections instead of ones that lasted for the entire time the app was up. And the container handling the access would only live for that one access.

    1639:

    One can livepatch quite a few kernel security issues

    I have a friend who cut his teeth taking code patches and figuring out how to live patch them into phone switches. He now makes good money as it's a rare skill to take someone else's code and figure out how to install it as a patch to object/machine code without taking a system down.

    1640:

    I believe, coal-fired plants and simple gas-fired boiler plant which does indeed require several hours to work up to temperature before it can generate electricity and connect to the grid

    Duke Energy is big enough that they have a wide mix of 50+ year old small (by today's standards) coal to build in the last decade coal, gas plants aged to various points on the last 40 years, some solar farms, solar on customers roofs, and some nuclear.

    Interesting to hear them talk about the decision process during big power demand times of what to bring on when. While recent gas power plants are cheap to run they are also useful to keep on standby (at least a few of them) for unexpected demand if something else goes down. Nuclear is run 100% as long as it's available. Newer coal is used on a planned basis. Older coal avoided due to run up / run down times. So older coal is kept off except for those heat wave days or when the nuclear has to go offline. And so on.

    1641:

    I'll happily put on my Clueless American hat here but... yes, please show me this place in the British Isles that never has any water. I'm unfamiliar with the parts of Britain that are never damp, misty, soggy, moist, or just generally humid.

    I mean, haven't you seen those hectares of saltbush in the desert around Perth, where they've hired sharpshooters to get rid of the camels that some newly ennobled jackass introduced late in Victoria's reign? And I'm sure I've seen pictures of the rare Bournemouth jackals that haunt the parched Dorset Dunes. I think it was one of those pieces Sir David did.

    1642:

    "This is a problem. Of course it's a problem no matter what the uptime is"

    ...and it's also a problem where the less often you reboot, the fewer occasions you run into it.

    Of course, that means that when you do there are more items that need fixing at once, but the awkwardness usually isn't so much in the fixing, it's the preceding stage of figuring out how to make the system let you find out what is actually wrong when it isn't working in the first place. Once you start to get a handle on it, it often turns out that the things you need to do are not really all that complicated, and you're in the flow then so it's a lot less hassle than repeating the whole infuriating process right from the start for a different fault every few days or whatever.

    I almost never reboot unless a power or hardware failure has forced me to, so I got caught by one of these the other day; it did an "attempted to kill init!" kernel panic as soon as it tried to switch from the initrd to the main fs, and the kernel panic stack trace pushed the actually important preceding messages off the top of the screen so I couldn't see what had caused it. Trying to figure it out using only the utterly minimal facilities in the initrd shell took forever, but once I had done so it was trivial to bodge it into booting to a proper console from which I could then update the initrd with a more permanent fix.

    The problem was that some stupid bastard had broken mount, of all things, by moving libmount from /lib to /usr/lib. Which you can get away with if you stuff everything into one partition, but I have /usr on a separate device, so the library it needs to mount it with was now on the very device it hadn't mounted yet. And making sure you don't get stuck in this kind of hole is exactly the fucking reason libmount, and all the other stuff which is essential early in the boot process, is in /lib instead of /usr/lib in the first place and has been in /lib since the year dot.

    From the changelogs, it seems that some time in the last couple of months or so some giant festering-turd-brained moron broke libmount, and also broke libselinux in the same way by making it link with the wrong version of libpcre. The broken packages got pulled in in the background of updating something that actually needed it, and of course as long as I was running off the real fs nothing was any different; it was only when the initrd found this essential package had been split across two filesystems by a completely pointless and staggeringly stupid change that it threw a wobbly.

    The real problem with this sort of thing is not so much fixing it in the first place, but making sure it doesn't happen again and again whenever the process of updating some completely other thing that is entirely unconnected with the boot process decides to update the broken libraries again and overwrites my fixes with new breakage. Remarkably, there don't seem to be any bug reports yet; maybe everyone else it's bitten so far has fallen back on reinstalling everything from scratch and never actually figured out what the problem was. Mine will of course be going in as soon as I have finished tidying up the loose ends - which is what is taking the time.

    The thing is, by rebooting only once in a blue moon, I only have to deal with this shit once in a blue moon. If I rebooted every day or whatever I'd be having to deal with it every few days and I'd never get to the point of doing anything else. And the less-critical instances of the same problem that only affect userspace are themselves enough of a pain that I really prefer to never update anything at all unless it has no dependencies or I can't get away without it.

    1643:

    Are you saying that Australia is to be considered a part of the British Isles?

    Didn't know that.

    1644:

    Fun little video from JP Aerospace, showing how you make a cheap hypersonic wind tunnel for experimentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dxddTdmTy0

    1645:

    I know about underground salt deposits. So did the Romans. One of their major centres of salt production was just up the road, and it's still going. Method is basically to pump the stuff out in solution and then boil the water off, or just use it as is. The water gets in there of its own accord. Concepts like "horizontal", "vertical" and "right angle" do not apply to any of the old buildings in the town, and it's a fine demonstration of how it can be useful that half-timbered construction is flexible.

    1646:

    Back to the election.

    With the entire state of North Carolina done with the initial count we have one race that's just crazy close.

    2,694,809 to 2,694,774

    I suspect the apparent loser will ask for a recount.

    1647:

    I recall a usenet denizen, netizen or usenaut, whatever term still applies, used to display an ascii art .sig that showed where his home city, Perth in Western Australia*, was on the coast relative to the Indian Ocean... basically an arrow pointing to the right, with an asterisk between pipe symbols arranged above and below. It was supposed to be an illustration of remoteness (a few thousand kms to any city of comparable size), but became a sort of in joke in usenetland for... well I forget what sort of meanings it attracted. I suppose there's an equivalent ascii art for Perth in Scotland (or perhaps the Real Perth[tm]), with the arrow pointing straight down, signifying not so much remoteness as the fierceness of the North Sea or something.

    • It's always tempting to refer to this as WA, because that is what we call it here anyway, and sometimes the confusion it causes among people from another federation with a state that shares the same abbreviation is amusing, but I'm refraining just in the interest of not stirring the pot any more at this point in time. Though on the subject, pointing out that Breaker Morant was funded by the South Australian Film Corporation is worthwhile, mostly for the almost palpable confusion given the South African government of the time is unlikely to have been interested...
    1648:

    gasdive Look, not just I, but Charlie & Nojay who LIVE WITH THIS PROBLEM have told you, but you won't listen - your hypotheses are better than our immediate, practical knowledege, eh? Note I said - "Hypotheses", since it is nothing as solid as a proper theory.

    I NEVER SAID storage does not scale - what I'm looking for is reliability - which does not, yet, include molten salt, because of corrosion problems.

    And, no, we don't need 187+ GW of nuclear - we need nuclear for baseload power, that keeps us ticking over. Nuclear is most efficient at baseload, too, no powering up & running down. So it supposedly costs £2.1*10 - only if one buys individual plants, all different, several yearts apart ... STILL CHEAPER than doing without power altogether, though.

    STOP IT - please?

    SS Indeed, gasdive is so wrong it's not true. We do, indeed, have huge, dry salt caverns in Cheshire ( surrounded by impervious rock) but those caverns have other uses & the salt is still being mined. Also, the moment you add any liquid - as has been done in the past, for salt-extraction, things happen .... Pictures follow: Pic One Pic Two Pic Three - the pond was caused by subsidence. SEE ALSO Pigeon @ 1645

    Your prognostications on Britain as to damp are wrong, incidentally - which of these cities has the lowest rainfall ... New York, London, Paris, Rome? ( Heteromeles - erm, not very far from here, there's a strip of land with less than 500mm of rian a year - technically semi-desert ) What people don't realise is the sheer both range & variability of the climate. In Scotland there is a E-W facing loch - Loch Long - at the Eastern end, the rainfall is about 40" at the Western end, just over 20 miles away, the rainfall is about 60" Seathwaite-in-Borrowdale gets 3.5 meters ( 140" ) of rain a year - Barrow-in-Furness gets 34" / 870mm of rain - & the two places are only 25 miles / 40km apart!

    Rbt Prior Slight correction: "Our (Canadian) food safety standards are BETTER"

    1649:

    Bugger Let's try that cost number again, shall we? £2.1*1012

    1650:

    Robert Prior got it right. To what he said, I would add:

    We export pork in vast quantities to China. They take absolutely everything in the animal.

    We both export and import beef. We don't import beef from the US anymore since the standards have been changed over the years. Sometimes we ban a country, like Argentina or Brazil, for loosening their standards. This makes the headlines because beef is closely tied to national pride in those countries.

    There's a relatively small corner of Canada, the Okanagan valley in south east British Columbia that has the right weather for growing fruit. But we don't see their fruit here in Central Canada.

    We used to get all of our fruit and our winter vegetables from Florida or California but in the last 30 years or so we've been getting more from Mexico and Central America and South America.

    As we get closer and closer to the European Union we see more fruit coming from Portugal and Spain. I guess we'll be seeing even more after they lose their UK customers because of Brexit.

    1651:

    "With all six units synchronised and spinning-in-air (water is dispelled by compressed air and the unit draws a small amount of power to spin the shaft at full speed), 0 MW to 1800 MW load can be achieved in approximately 16 seconds."

    The problem is that is not the configuration the plant is 24*365, and besides, batteries can do the same feat in less than 1/16th second, without wearing out anything mechanical.

    However, neither of them are any use, unless there is a control-system which can decide when to cut them in.

    The only reason our huge AC grids function in the first place, is that generators used to be heavy lumps of iron with a lot of angular inertia.

    This allowed us to use the frequency as a proxy measurement for the produce/consume balance of the entire grid, at any single point in the grid, with very low latency.

    As more and more production is connected via switch-mode electronics, and thermal plants are retired, grids operate with less and less inertia and controlling them becomes more and more "interesting", in particular in case of major faults at the highest voltage levels.

    There are essentially three ways to go about solving that problem:

  • Have a large fraction of the switch-mode produces (wind, large solar etc.) simulate (at a loss of energy) being rotating lumps of iron that drags the frequency up or down depending on their power-balance. To drag up, you need to reserve X% of the power you otherwise could have sold (X ~ 10).

  • Replace the frequency as balance-proxy measurement with some other means of grid-wide communication of power-balance. This implies racing the high voltage faults with computers, firewalls, fibers etc. Not obviously a winning proposition, but can have high benefits to "close loops" which would otherwise be open, for instance around major geographical divides where no HWAC cables provide communication.

  • HVDC where you can rely on the voltage as the power-balance proxy. This is not possible with HVAC due to the inductive phenomena and in particular the magnetic hysteresis of all the transformers.

  • And then of course there are the quite counter-obvious solution people have only just started to play with:

  • Have huge switch-mode producers drive a motor-generator which spins a huge lump of iron, or even a motor which drives a separate generator. There are some interesting positive side-effects, in particular to the latter model, for instance it very effectively protects all the very expensive power-electronics in a wind farm from grid transients.
  • Search "Rotating Stabilizer" for more info

    1652:

    I'm trying to not reply to your continued half reading, mangling and what must be deliberate misinterpretation of everything I say.

    1 melting salt doesn't mean that you add water and remove salt.

    2 in response to a question about how did underground salt not get wet, I provided a link with a picture of a salt mine. It takes a special kind of reading to extract from that, that I was proposing that particular salt mine should be converted to energy storage. Particularly as the linked article included "This whole area through the Cheshire basin and beyond - it goes across to Northern Ireland and further south - was a huge trapped sea that slowly evaporated, refilled and evaporated some 250 million years ago, leaving layers of rock salt,"

    3 yes, the capital cost is 2.1 trillion pounds using an actual built example. I've pointed out in previous posts that buying 100 of an item gets you a discount. If you know the size of that discount, please provide a link.

    4 even if we got the reactors for free, running cost is 8 trillion over 35 years.

    5 it's disingenuous at best for you now to be claiming that you were only wanting baseload, while just a few posts ago you were saying that the winter peak loads had to be covered by any reasonable solution. Your exact words from a few days ago. "gasdive Sorry, but solar + wind will not do for the UK - on their own. Base-load + storage are necessary, even given the amazing drop in price for the renewables. I have certainly noted the changes, but - consider ... It's early January in England & Scotland. There's a blocking high over southern Norway ( quite a common condition ) Temperature is hovering around zero near the coasts, it fairly bright & clear & virtually no wind. During the daytime ( LESS than 8 hours of the Sun being visible over the horizon at all ) there will be some solar input, but not a lot. There will be virtually zero wind power. Right, where is all the power for industry heating & cooking going to come from, then?"

    Well, not from nuclear apparently, as you now say: "we need nuclear for baseload power".

    No suggestion of storage (or trade, or burning gas as you do now) could be countenanced. If you're not over building nuclear to cover the peak, and there's no practical storage... I have to ask:

    So, where is the power for industry heating and cooking to come from, then?

    6 "I NEVER SAID storage does not scale"

    What you said in response to a raft of storage solutions that could be built was: "gasdive ANSWER THE QUESTION ( You haven't, it's all handwavium! ) At present we do not have practical storage that would keep the UK going for a week or two, in winter"

    The implication there is that if you don't have it now, you can't ever.

    7 "what I'm looking for is reliability - which does not, yet, include molten salt, because of corrosion problems"

    So putting aside the fact that there are vast salt deposits that don't need to be contained in a tank, but can be used for heat storage just where they are, rocks aren't reliable? Isn't "rock" actually synonymous with reliability? As others have pointed out geothermal works fine.

    8 "your hypotheses are better than our immediate, practical knowledege, eh?"

    Good, at least you recognise the value of immediate, practical knowledge over barely informed speculation.

    So, please tell us about the giant kit you've installed. You know, the big infrastructure projects you've worked on. Maybe you were a project manager on a world record size electrical interconnection? Maybe you tightened the bolts on a 6m diameter pipe section, 20 metres under water. I'm sure you've directed a 500 tonne traveling crane, working by touch in zero visibility more than once. You've worked in the control room of a national grid? Spent your lunchtimes discussing grid control with the grid controllers? Cleaned the cooling system of a running coalfired power plant from the inside?

    Or is your immediate practical experience that you've seen snow at night?

    1653:

    That's a really great summation.

    1654:

    Yeah: you can have my stockpile of 500 gram catering tubs of Marmite when you pry then from my cold, dead, er ... pantry.

    (I saw this one coming with Brexit: the Marmite supply has been iffy the past few years as their incoming sources of brewers' yeast has been up and down like a yoyo, and there were forecasts of a total supply collapse as much as a year ago.)

    1655:

    However, only a small fraction are relevant to all systems. When I ran a supercomputer, I often didn't put in security fixes because they were completely irrelevant and might have broken something. And, on my workstation, Firepox and PDF/doc/etc. reader vulnerabilities are the most likely routes of attack - which don't need a reboot to upgrade.

    1656:

    Let's stay on education. Yes, I am fully aware of that, with the reservation that the people who get uptight about Eire are mainly the bigots in the 'united Ireland' camp (*). You seem to be unaware, or perhaps don't care, that using Ireland as a name for the state is bitterly offensive to many of the unionists in Northern Ireland (and some in Britain). There is, of course, another solution:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_of_Great_Britain_and_Ireland

    (*) I have felt that a united Ireland is the best solution for over half a century, but I am fully aware of the difficulties and prerequisites for a peaceful result. You don't seem to be. Eire has done a great deal in that respect, but it is only now that a peaceful unification is beginning to look plausible.

    1657:

    a ton of Republican voters split their ticket, to vote for Biden, but keep their Congresscritters and Senators.

    Yes. In Texas, five of the six counties housing the major cities went Democratic in the four previous Presidential elections, Tarrant (Fort Worth) being the exception. This time it was six for six, Biden edging out Trump in Tarrant -- but Tarrant still went for the Republican incumbent senator by a fair amount.

    It does seem to have been mostly an Anti-Trump election rather than anything broader. Which may make for an interesting 2022 and 2024.

    1658:

    It's not just consumer-level, as you can see by the number of commercial and governmental organisations (at all levels) that have (often extended) periods of outage. The change happened in the 1980s, for a large number of interrelated reasons (some computational, some managerial, some economic).

    As you say, those of us who have seen (and even done) better are usually amazed that people were so willing to accept it.

    1659:

    Meanwhile An interesting change in tone & expectations now that Scummings has been thrown out. One can hope.

    gasdive Yes ... but if you have pure molten salt it will eat almost anything & you only need a few molecules of water ... Molten salt is NOT YET a practical proposition ... keep on with the R&D, yes, but in the meantime, we cannot really wait for handwavium solutions ( pun unintended ) DO NOT try to educate me in the geology of my own country? "Base-Load+ storage" yes - which means you are covering that not supplied from the base-load by the storage - learn to read.

    You are utterly determined that whatever "it" will be it can't be nuclear, even if we all freeze to death. I suggest you re-read what Charlie & Nojay have said.

    vast salt deposits that don't need to be contained in a tank Just pulled that one out of your arse have you? No, the molten salt that you are hypothesising will have to be contained to be controlled. Oh shit ....

    Actually, there IS a renewable, that could cover all the bases & it will never run out ... Tidal, in all its many forms. But the massive engineering required ( * ) scares off the politicians who want a "cheap" solution, rather than one which works ( * ) "Massive Engineering: On the scale of the Netherlands Delta Scheme, in fact.

    EC & Colin Watson Indeed - what a change 50+ years makes ... When I first visited Ireland ( both bits ) it was 1965/6 The "North" seemed strange & to have religious perversions, but the "South" was like a trip back to before 1871 ( Married Women's Property Act ) - entirely dominated & controlled by the evil black crows. Very much like Poland is right now, & probably worse. Now, it's entirely reversed, Dublin is a city of light & enlightenment & I believe Belfast is struggling to catch up.

    If it wasn't for fucking bloody insane treasonous Brexit, we could have had the United Federation of the Isles, inside the EU, with much more actual devolved governement for all the areas ....

    1660:

    When I'm with friends I call it "Irlande". But I have no problem in writing it "Éire".

    The "É" is on the bottom row of my Dell QWERTY keyboard: "Z X C V B N M , . É"

    1661:

    Whereas it isn't on mine.

    For the record, I strongly disagree with the last paragraph of #1659. For historical reasons, there is just NO chance of that in the forseeable future - the ONLY plausible unification option is for the north to join Eire, and in no federation with the UK except the EU. As he points out, almost all of the good reasons for the unionists in the north to distrust and fear a united Ireland republic have gone, which does NOT mean that they no longer have good reasons to distrust and fear Sinn Fein and its shadowy council (as much of Eire does).

    1662:

    There is a degree of ignoring the underlying comments from us Brits

    so

    1/ (Theoretical) Yes Solar power could probably be used to supply all power to us Brits - with the slight (#Sarcasm) assumption that a storage solution appears

    2/ (Practical) How many Hectares of solar panels will that take? For me that is a don't know don't care situation because

    3/ (Political) a/ We are short on land so any solution will require substantial sourcing of land which means that the current users will either not be happy or not have the access they used to. Charlie's point that a lot of our current solar capacity is on prime agricultural land is exactly correct for around my neck of the woods in Somerset where the best land for solar is South facing slopes which funnily enough produce more than North facing slopes

    b/ A vast number of people (even many greens with a small g) are opposed to Solar Farms near themselves - NIMBYism not in my back yard. The actual politics of getting national approval is well beyond the capacity of our current Government of No Talents or the chaotic opposition c/ There is minimal waste land; and marginal lands usually are ecologically fragile. Moorland and Heaths do not lend themselves to large installations of glass and metal. d/ Even that land is expensive
    1663:

    "2/ (Practical) How many Hectares of solar panels will that take? For me that is a don't know don't care situation because"

    A lot, but only a few percent of the total.

    This article will interest you: https://ing.dk/artikel/solcellerne-kommer-vi-klar-dem-240645

    Tl;drD: 300MW solar plant approved days ago, unsubsidized. 15.5GW similar solar plants in the pipeline in the next couple of years. Grid authority harvest news and council-approval processes to find out, because unsubsized means no formal advance notice to them.

    This is happening because landowners can make more money from marginal farmland by "planting solar".

    Interestingly, these solar plants are great for biodiversity and in particular for insects.

    1664:

    "the ONLY plausible unification option is for the north to join Eire"

    Personally I think it far more likely that NI will just wither away because people vote with their feet: Unless a miracle happens, young people will get the hell out of post-brexit-Dodge and only come back for X-mas dinner. In a generation or two that will have rob NI of both influence and relevance.

    1665:

    Unless I miscalculated, c. 40% of the land area of the UK.

    If a long-term (over 6 months) storage solution appeared, it would be only 8%, but that would be 3x10^18 joules (equivalent to 717 megatonnes of TNT). It had better be failure-proof!

    A cable to Algeria is technically a LOT more sane, as would nuclear power designed, built and operated PROPERLY. The former is more likely :-(

    1666:

    Unfortunately the UK does not have an electricity-rich country up close to it. So, the Danish solution is not practical for the UK.

    Norway is overflowing with surplus hydro power and it has underwater electrical cables connecting it to Denmark. Denmark uses Norway as a form of grid storage. It imports electricity from Norway during the day and exports electricity at night.

    1667:

    You've been asleep; that's largely already happened! If London pulls the plug on its subsidies in addition to Brexit, it's in real depression territory. Without Dave The Proc to keep us outsiders in contact with reality, I don't see much point in speculating further. But the prospects are not good :-(

    https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2019/09/17/news/united-ireland-would-cost-up-to-30-billion-a-year-and-collapse-north-s-economy--1714127/

    1668:

    "Unless I miscalculated"

    You did, badly so.

    Partly I suppose because of the "baseload" mindset you keep harping about, despite that concept having been retired about two decades ago in the grids themselves, but mostly because there are no envelopes big enough for that math assignment.

    The real answer is "single digit percent" and it varies a LOT depending on pretty much everything you can imagine, down to and including the schools vacation schedule and specific religious orthodoxies in the supply area.

    The nuclear power you keep harping about, is a very expensive brute force solution, and while that would certainly solve the problem, there seems to be little appetite for the price-tag anywhere in the world.

    As a first order approximation, nobody builds nuclear plants today, unless they have no other choice.

    Why they have no other choice have many different and specific explanations.

    France end England must have civilian nuclear power if they want to be able to recruit young people for the nuclear submarines. Nobody sane, which is a job requirement, spends the best decade of their youth in a shitty work-environment if the "payoff" is a career which dead-ends hard at 30. USA is also facing this one, but they have not started panic-buying new plants yet, the way France and UK did.

    Russia has massive underground district heating systems to keep warm.

    And for every single new nuclear plant built, you will find that it was external factors that tipped the decision: Nobody anywhere has built a nuclear power plant because it was a sound investment on its own, since circa 1972, when people realized it wasnt.

    The technically optimal size of nuclear plant is just shy of half a GWe, but the fixed costs sinks that.

    Therefore the technology has been pressed up to near 4 GWt single-reactor installations, which it now appear that we are barely capable of constructing correctly in the first place.

    Even without the nuclear aspect, 4 GWt of pressurized water and steam is non-trivial.

    As for the "container-nuclear" startups, funny how most of them forget to add the necessary necessary shielding to their renderings and mumble a lot when they explain that their decomissioning plan is to just leave it in place for ever.

    There obviously is a market for small nuclear to replace diesel gen-sets in places like Jan Mayen, Tristan Da Cuna etc, but you're not ever going to see one installed behind the high-school in Hoople, ND.

    As for the "advanced designs", molten salt and all that: Nice in theory, but horrible in practice once you get to replacing the handwavium with obscure alloys which nobody seem to be able to produce consistently and use flow-chemistry to filter out all the most troublesome fission-products while they are most radioactive, in order to keep your core self-sustaining. And burning "used fuel" ? Yeah, good marketing: "Making the used fuel even more problematic to store" would be more honest.

    Nuclear power has always been and will always be a political project, and if people like you would simply admit that, instead of pretending that nuclear power can be viewed objectively and isolation from politics, then maybe we could get to a point where we could have a sane and rational discussion about where it does and does not fit into the future grid.

    But by now western societies have a pretty solid immune-response to any talk about nuclear power, and every time the kind of arguments you pontificate above are expounded, that keeps the immune response on its toes.

    1669:

    Wyoming

    Since it was mentioned up above and how they live their lives impacts US politics more than it should, here's good article about just how different a place this is.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wyoming-covid-surge-struggling-energy-economy-thriving-haven-rich-n1247839

    And how out of balance the economy of the state is getting to be going forward.

    1670:

    Slightly Foxed Well-done! Actually, he's ignoring anything not inside his own head - the precticalities of the Brit climate, landforms, population densities & costs can all be disregarded ....

    EC Will the same happen to Scotland if they go for full independance & the Barnett formula money-train stops running? The SNP say otherwise, but then they would say that wouldn't they?

    P H-K As for the "advanced designs", molten salt and all that: Nice in theory, but horrible in practice once you get to replacing the handwavium with obscure alloys which nobody seem to be able to produce consistently and use Which also applies to gasdive's magic molten Salt heat buffers for energy storage, of course. I belive the word is: "Oops!"

    1671:

    "Denmark uses Norway as a form of grid storage. It imports electricity from Norway during the day and exports electricity at night."

    It is much more complicated than that, which is also why the Elderly Cynic is wasting his time with his calculations.

    For the record, UK already has international connections, and several new ones are under way, including, "Viking Link" from Denmark.

    There is an official cost/benefit analysis for Viking Link's rather significant investment, but the part they couldn't print is that they stand to make a killing, unless the UK gov't starts taking sane energy planning decisions soon.

    In the unlikely event (nudge, nudge, wink, wink! he said knowingly!) of Hinkley Point C being delayed, the killing will be upgraded to a murder.

    1672:

    "Which also applies to gasdive's magic molten Salt heat buffers for energy storage, of course."

    I dont agree.

    Molten salt heat storage is a thing and within a quite big envelope of parameters it is uncomplicated and straightforward.

    The envelope shrinks a lot once you increase the temperature and very much if you want to run the salt through or near a nuclear reactor.

    The major problem with all heat-storage is the insulation, in particular below the storage medium: Carrying huge weights and high thermal insulation are physically conflicting requirements.

    This means that scale is limited upwards, until it becomes big enough that you do not need insulation below, because you interface with already warm layers of underground some hundred meters down.

    But for things like tiding over district heating systems, molten salt is fine, but as is often the case: A simple artificial insulated pond full of water is cheaper.

    1673:

    This misreads Texas politics.

    The written constitution of Texas, like many states, gives the Lt. Governor the right to preside over the state Senate. The unwritten constitution of Texas gives the Lt. Governor the right to appoint all committees, assign all legislation to committees, bring legislation to the floor, and decide all matters of parliamentary procedure. And unwritten tradition is that the Lt. Governor does whatever the hell she wants to do in regards to the above. Moreover, she can effectively introduce legislation, which gives her agenda control.

    In other words, nothing gets done legislatively without her approval.

    Or I guess I should say "his," because Dan Patrick is the current occupant of that office.

    But it is the office that gives him his power, not his connections to donors. Patrick is a radical right-winger and governs ideologically. The same applies to Abbott. He's a bit less radical than Patrick, but not a whole lot.

    The Texas business community, the big donors, and sane center-rightists would prefer Joe Straus by about a light-year. The reason Texas gets an extreme government is that Texans keep electing extreme politicians to very powerful positions. You can't blame it on shadowy forces or powerful elites, at least not in great Lone Star State.

    1674:

    Meanwhile, on the original subject (!) It looks as if Trumpolini is setting himself up as ... the "genuine President-in-Exile" However, that will not insulate him from New York State & other prosecutions, will it?

    1675:

    The Barnett Formula merely defines how public expenditure changes in Wales, Scotland & N.Ireland when it’s changed in England. I struggle to see how one gets from that to the usual unionist trope of “Scotland is too small, too poor and above all too stupid to run it’s own affairs without help from mummy & daddy England”? The irony is that a couple of decades of this being repeated doesn’t seem to have persuade the Scots that it’s true, but it does seem to be persuading the English!

    Of course, I do believe that public expenditure is higher in London than it is in Middlesbrough? Has anyone tried telling the hard-working people of Middlesbrough that their taxes are being taken in order to subsidise the feckless & work-shy lifestyles of London?

    1676:

    Unfortunately the UK does not have an electricity-rich country up close to it. So, the Danish solution is not practical for the UK.

    It depends on how close close is, I think; I get right at 1200km from nearest point to nearest point from Iceland to Scotland. Now, that's probably somewhere near Jokullsarlon on one end and somewhere equally undeveloped on the other, so you'd have some additional building to do overland on each end, but it does have the advantage of being the nearest point to the Icelandic end, unlike competing in the market for Norway or northern Africa.

    1677:

    What do you mean by "container-nuclear" startups. Do you mean SMRs, Small Modular Reactors?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor

    1678:

    The Texas business community, the big donors, and sane center-rightists would prefer Joe Straus by about a light-year. The reason Texas gets an extreme government is that Texans keep electing extreme politicians to very powerful positions. You can't blame it on shadowy forces or powerful elites, at least not in great Lone Star State.

    Directly, no. But if business and the powerful elites were truly unhappy with the extreme politicians they would move those businesses to a different state.

    Just like the automakers and others have moved from Canada and the northern States with high union wages to the southern "right to work" States and Mexico.

    The fact that they have chosen to not move is a reasonable indication that they aren't as horrified about who is actually elected in private as they may be in public.

    1679:

    The problem with such a link, as well as submarine links across the North Sea, is very simple: Fishing trawlers. Or any kind of trawling equipment.

    Modern fishing trawlers scrape the bottom of the sea. Many have cut telecom cables quite by accident. With telecom cables the owners can always switch to other cables or satellites.

    With electrical cables the countries involved can be the subject of vengeance or "accidentally" cut off by any third rate power with a submarine.

    1680:

    Patrick is a radical right-winger and governs ideologically. The same applies to Abbott. He's a bit less radical than Patrick, but not a whole lot.

    Of yes. I know. And thanks for the update on how the Lt Gov works.

    My wife just ended a 11 year stent of working in the Dallas area. We maintained an apartment there. And both of us flew back and forth a lot. And she has relatives and friends there who are all DJT and R all the way. And we have other friends who are not that way at all. Land mines in all conversations.

    Anyway I get the impression that Abbott is a hard right guy who's not an ideological idiot. When people start dying he can see some of the light. But those around him are all pure ideologs. And he so far does some reasonable things but toes the line when yelled at as he will be out of the club as soon as he breaks ranks.

    1681:

    We both export and import beef. We don't import beef from the US anymore since the standards have been changed over the years.

    I suspect that will be news to the Americans selling Beef to Canada.

    https://agmanager.info/livestock-meat/livestock-marketing-charts/annual-us-beef-exports-canada

    There's a relatively small corner of Canada, the Okanagan valley in south east British Columbia that has the right weather for growing fruit. But we don't see their fruit here in Central Canada.

    Ontario (Niagara) also grows a lot of fruit, and more native fruit like blueberries grow in a lot of parts of the country.

    But the obvious tropical stuff like bananas and pineapple are all imported.

    We used to get all of our fruit and our winter vegetables from Florida or California but in the last 30 years or so we've been getting more from Mexico and Central America and South America.

    Still a lot of stuff from the US, as anyone who has paid attention to the various recalls of the last number of years has noticed.

    As we get closer and closer to the European Union we see more fruit coming from Portugal and Spain. I guess we'll be seeing even more after they lose their UK customers because of Brexit.

    Perhaps.

    1682:

    "What do you mean by "container-nuclear" startups. Do you mean SMRs, Small Modular Reactors?"

    Yes. They're all very eager to explain that their reactor can be transported with regular trucks, often using "container-like" visuals which on closer interrogation turns out to not be actual shipping containers, but significantly larger.

    1683:

    "The problem with such a link, as well as submarine links across the North Sea, is very simple: Fishing trawlers. Or any kind of trawling equipment."

    There have been instances where first generation undersea power cables have been damaged by anchors, but as far as I know not by trawls or other fishing equipment.

    I can absolutely guarantee you, that nothing short of a major anchor will damage the kind of Nth-generation cable "Viking Link" plans on rolling out, and as far as I know, it will also be ploughed or water-jet'ed into the sea-floor.

    A submarine trying anything would need serious cutting equipment, which would weld itself to the cable in the process, leaving an unmistakable return-address once the repair-crew arrives.

    1684:

    "Anyway I get the impression that Abbott is a hard right guy who's not an ideological idiot. When people start dying he can see some of the light. But those around him are all pure ideologs. And he so far does some reasonable things but toes the line when yelled at as he will be out of the club as soon as he breaks ranks."

    The problem is that (as far as I can tell) somebody like Patrick can pile up the bodies pretty high, with no fear of losing his power.

    1685:

    Oh, really? According to the gummint's appalling statistics, we use about 140 MTOE, or 6.10^18 joules, or 190 GW on average. You seem to have ignored the minor details that we are intending to move our largest energy using sector (transport) to electricity and the vast majority of the second largest (domestic) to it, too.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-consumption-in-the-uk

    Yes, of course, we could use solar for high summer and even, at huge financial and environmental cost, for (say) 3/4 of the year. So how you YOU propose dealing with our winter requirements?

    Furthermore, I know damn well that nuclear power is a political not engineering issue - that's what I was moaning about. It's not a great solution, but it IS viable for northern Europe in winter.

    1686:

    "it IS viable for northern Europe in winter."

    Absolutely viable, on every single parameter except economy.

    1687:

    Eh? I have never put forward any position other than that, as a solution for the UK, solar power is NOT viable and nuclear power IS viable. Yes, I know perfectly well the latter is ridiculously expensive, especially as mismanaged by the UK gummint. I have also said that solar power has its uses, even in the UK, and that undersea cables to power exporting countries are viable. And, yes, I know about the ones that exist.

    And, yes, our 'energy policy' is a sick joke.

    1688:

    Absolutely viable, on every single parameter except economy.

    Gas is cheap, consuming it to provide cheap energy is destroying the climate. I say yet again, if you're arguing about price then the world will burn.

    1689:

    On a lighter note:

    https://www.rt.com/op-ed/506609-trump-tv-network-msm/

    Some of the links are quite good, too. Obviously, Russia has decided that he is has graduated from useful idiot to useless idiot :-)

    1690:

    I suspect the apparent loser will ask for a recount.

    Up here the recount would be automatic. By the Canadian Election Act, automatic recounts happen when the difference in the number of votes received by the top-finishing candidates equals 0.1 per cent or less of the total number votes cast.

    1691:

    "I say yet again, if you're arguing about price then the world will burn."

    No.

    The world will burn if we make our decisions on ideology rather than facts.

    The facts are that nuclear power is a possible but incredibly expensive solution to future energy-needs.

    That is very different from ruling nuclear power out on an ideological basis.

    There are places where nuclear will be built, despite all that counts against it, including the economy, for good and valid reasons which extend beyond that economy.

    1692:

    Would you consider swapping Marmite for maple syrup? :-)

    1693:

    Square Leg I never said any of the things you are attributing to me in your deliberate smear... With one exception ... That exception is that Scotland is probably too poor, compared to its present subsidised position. And you are QUITE DELIUBERATELY LYING about London being subsidised. Are you some sort of drive-by troll? We, Londoners, are paying for & subsidising the rural shires of England & for Wales & NI & Scotland, in our taxes. As is Manchester & one or two other, highly productive cities - the Cambridge & Oxford areas come to mind, for instance. STOP IT.

    P H-K @ 1686 STILL more economical than freezing to death, though! ( I see EC & Nojay are saying similar things )

    1694:

    "And you are QUITE DELIUBERATELY LYING about London being subsidised. "

    Which London are we talking about here?

    Is it the Square Mile or donut-shaped city around it laws apply and taxes are paid ?

    1695:

    Hinkley C is scheduled to cost 92 2013 pounds per mwh. The overwhelmingly most likely further nuclear power in the UK is "More of those".

    "More of those" will be cheaper in two ways: The first, and simplest, is better terms of finance. EDF got taken to the cleaners by the city of London raising the capital. 9% interest is usurious for a project with a guaranteed contract for sale of product in hand - and if you are conspiratorially minded, this may have something to do with the project getting unstuck - the city has a lot of pull, and a 9% return on a utterly safe investment of over a dozen billion pounds is one hell of an incentive for the city to use it.

    The current plan is to finance further builds up front or by government backed loans, which will drop the interest burden to something which has some actual relation to normal interest rates.

    The second is simply experience, which can be expected to knock 20% of the cost of building it.

    So the actual expected cost of UK nuclear going forward is likely south of 60 pounds /MWH, which will not break the bank. You want to meter this, yes, but you will also not beggar anyone.

    It also answers the "Properly built" objection. Whatever flaws the EPR has, corners cut on construction or safety are not among them. This is the very pinnacle of overbuild, redundancy and overengineering, and I frankly expect them to turn out to be roughly as permanent fixtures as cathedrals. That is, decommissioning costs do not matter because they never will be.

    1696:

    Personally I think it far more likely that NI will just wither away because people vote with their feet

    Nope, not gonna happen. If the orange order haven't gotten the message after nearly 400 years, they're not going to get the message. So it potentially turns ugly.

    Flip side: climate change will probably make NI a lot more pleasant than it is today. And polling suggests that sectarianism is waning rapidly, to the point where there's now a non-sectarian majority. As Ireland has pretty much ditched institutional Catholicism (and gone for legalized abortion and marriage equality faster than the North) the "but you'd be joining a priest-ridden theocracy!!!" threat rings hollow.

    I suspect we'll eventually see a border poll and then NI voting for independence from the UK and some sort of federation with the South rather than outright merger.

    1697:

    I resemble that remark! Spherical Cow has remained my favorite college textbook, and I still refer to it occasionally.

    Didn't know about that textbook, thanks for pointing it out.

    However, in defense of spherical cows, I'll maintain that they and their numerous relatives are, in fact, perfectly appropriate approximations for getting ROM estimates. What's the black-body radiation from a cow? What's the terminal velocity of a cow? Start with spherical cows and you'll land in the ballpark, details can be added later if needed.

    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

    1698:

    Would you consider swapping Marmite for maple syrup? :-)

    I can't eat maple syrup any more (type II diabetes :-( )

    On the other hand, I've found a source of sugar-free maple-flavoured syrup for my porridge. Horrid compared to the real thing, but better than nothing.

    1699:

    P H-K Very funny - not. All of it, actually. The really interesting thing was how well Pink Ken Livingstone & The Corporation got on. They both knew that a prosperous London meant a prosperous UK. It is, unfortunately, I think, an urban legend that when the Madwoman smashed the old GLC, the Corporation offered to buy "London Transport", complete, for £1, to make sure that Londoners got their transportation ...

    Charlie Agreed that Porridge is horrid, but, there you go! 😍

    1700:

    ( Heteromeles - erm, not very far from here, there's a strip of land with less than 500mm of rain a year - technically semi-desert )

    San Diego averages around 263 mm/yr and decreasing, and we're not desert either. 80 km east of year, yes, it's desert (Sonoran), but we're on the edge of the Mediterranean zone. And I giggle at the thought of someone from the UK lecturing me about microclimates, but that's cool. Just remember that most of the deserts in the western US are caused by rain shadow effects from our dinky-ass little mountains.

    Although the idea of jackals in Bournemouth amuses me, I suspect that if they exist at all, they're more likely to be wearing camel-check burberry than digging burrows in sand dunes. I have no idea whether there are any feral camel analogs in Scotland, at least outside the Festival Fringe. Could someone enlighten me, perhaps?

    1701:

    I might accept that if the political aspects aligned with Virgo, but a few percent of what UK Land?

    And it still doesn't get rid of the political issues. Whilst we aim for hell in a handcart (thanks to our respective political halfwits - all sides) solar power is a complete non-starter. And as I live (Somerset!) forty or so mile down wind of one of our nuclear power stations I note the risk.

    We have outsourced our food supply, and now we are recommended to outsource our energy supply. As a long term political solution, this is tantamount to holding up a big sign saying Country for Sale apply to the Oligarchs c/o Alexander de Pfeiffer ...

    Solar will not offer a major help in the immediate future, so planning based on real soon now, is not realistic.

    1702:

    I have seen none of the fake visuals you refer to in the SMR proposals backed by three Canadian provinces (the launch customers) and the federal government of Canada. The only visual of Canadian SMR transport I could find was a CBC drawing showing a semi with an oversized trailer (articulated lorry) transporting a large containment vessel. This was not the standard container you refer to.

    Both the province of Ontario and the province of New Brunswich have the experience of building CANDU nuclear reactors with sufficient shielding and there are no prospective visuals without sufficient shielding on their Web sites.

    Those two provinces again have had experience in costing and running CANDU nuclear reactors since 1968 and they can estimate the cost of building networks of mass-produced SMRs.

    The government of Saskatchewan has no experience with nuclear reactors but it has made feasability studies over the last 40 years. Also it has the distinction of having one of the largest reserve of uranium in the world.

    In short, I have the impression they'll be able to meet their goal of building a first Canadian SMR reactor by 2028.

    1703:

    This isn't a useful way to think about politics.

    Flip the script. There are plenty of rich libertarian financiers who are genuinely horrified by the "socialists" who control Trenton and Albany. They certainly don't like the taxes. But most of them continue to keep their businesses and residences in New York and New Jersey because it is more profitable to do so.

    You could tell the same story about Larry Ellison and California. There is a reason why states and countries can raise taxes fairly high without prompting large-scale capital flight.

    And that reason -- namely, locations have business advantages and moving is costly -- runs in reverse. Big business in Texas would love to have a less ideological state government and pay moderately higher taxes in return for better schools and roads. But they don't want those things enough to liquidate profitable businesses and try to reconstruct them elsewhere.

    Obviously, businesses move and locational advantages change. But it's a slow process and rarely driven by ideological preferences.

    1704:

    Any submarine could take out an underwater electric cable with a torpedo. It would not look like an accident, of course.

    1705:

    On reflection

    Every potential energy alternative is a solution (Wave, wind, Sun, Nuclear, Handwavium ...)

    Our problem is

    We have taken nearly a year to fail to come up with a COVID strategy We have taken four years to fail to come up with a Brexit strategy We have taken thirty + years to fail to come up with a baby boomers strategy (Pensions) So forty years for a meaningful energy strategy ...

    1706:

    On the days that I am not bitter, I am twisted

    1707:

    "Any submarine could take out an underwater electric cable with a torpedo."

    It would require a "laydown" mode of arming&fusing, and I have never heard about that in torpedoes, on the other hand, any nation with submarines which have not given serious thought to cutting cables would be 100 years[1] behind the times, so chart me up in "undecided" on that one.

    [1] One of the first acts of war in WWI was cutting telegraph cables at the Azores.

    1708:

    Doesn't need a torpedo: needs an ROV. I gather the USN (and probably the Royal Navy, the Russian navy, and anyone else who operates SSNs and/or SSGNs) can deploy them from submarines. All it has to do is locate the cable then deposit a time bomb, then rejoin the carrier sub and tip-toe away.

    1709:

    Given that the US, Russians, and presumably Chinese and UK all have submarines dedicated to deep ocean special operations...bombing a line? That's noisy, especially when all you need is the equivalent of a backhoe. If you were really cute, you could figure out a way to set a guillotine-type line cutter, where the edge that cuts the cable is powered simply by water being let into a piston that was left empty and at surface pressure.

    The rather more interesting question to me is what they're using to do man-in-the-middle attacks on all those transoceanic cables. It's highly likely that they've been ever-so-gently hacking into the big data pipes, but doing that without a trace, especially on tranoceanic fiber optics lines, is a neat tick.

    And if they can lay taps onto data cables, laying remotely-triggered cutting devices should be possible, albeit interesting to design in engineering terms. The trick is setting up something that, when it receives a long string of code, cuts the line, without accidentally cutting the line due to the sequence randomly coming up in all the data it receives....that would be the interesting part.

    1710:

    Your deliberate misrepresentation is seriously annoying. For 'identifiable' (a technical term) expenditure, Scotland does better than London, but London does better than most of England (and much better than where I live).

    https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04033/

    Furthermore, a disproportionate of the 'unidentifiable' expenditure (think HSE or Heathrow) is either of within the London area or largely for the benefit of London (often both), and then there are the disbursements that are not even classed as public expenditure (like the London weighting or the location of the government).

    1711:

    I had a friend (R.I.P. MB) who worked in a big intercontinental telecom company. One day he decided to take a trip on a cable-laying ship to see how they did it up close.

    It turns out that cutting and splicing a fiber-optic underwater cable is not an easy task, but is very doable. It is done in all the oceans by many companies. The knowledge and the technology are widespread aroung the world.

    There are about a hundred or so telecom cable accidents each year, because a foolish captain dropped his anchor where the charts told him not to or because a deep-sea fishing fleet scraped the bottom outside of its authorized zone.

    1712:

    Don't forget 50+ years to deal with climate change and 400 years to deal with racism.

    1713:

    EC I was thinking of the proportion between government expenditure on any defined region or area & the government income from taxtions flowing in from the same area. Your measuring-stick may give differnt results to mine, of course. Some of us would dispute that Thiefrow is a benefit of nay sort (!) If by HSE you mean "HS2" then I would contend that it benefits anyone, or any business near any of its terminals or stations. I remeber all too well the fuckwits trying to stop the Severn Bridge, because all the money would flow out into England/London (!)

    1714:

    Meanwhile Oh shit, Brexit Predictions as to what we should stock up on, to get us through to aboout the end of March? I thought a shit-sandwich "deal" was likely, now I'm very unsure .....

    1715:

    Rabidchaos @ 1486:

    I didn't notice a huge increase in speed on the actual rack-mounted servers that I installed last year, before I retired, that had SSDs for /.
    And my primary system is my workstation, which runs all the time (it *is* running Linux).
    I've never understood the IT BOOTS SO FAST! unless you're booting/rebooting all the time.

    There are two somewhat-orthogonal reasons why most people with personal machines shut them down every night:

    1. Most people don't have long runtime jobs they want their computer staying up to run. If your primary use-case is entertainment or office work, then once you go to bed, you might as well save power by shutting your computer down. The more powerful your computer, the more power it sucks even when idle, so the more you save shutting it down when you won't be using it for an extended period.

    2. Windows has had problems with long uptimes. I don't know if it still does, but the guidance is still out there to shut Windows machines down every so often. Most people run Windows.

    Your situation prioritizes booting a lot less than most people's.

    When I had a job that included a desk & computers thereupon, it was corporate "clean desk" policy that mandated shutting down your computer whenever you were going to be away from your desk for more than a few minutes (your were allowed to "lock" the computer when you went on break, but if you were going to be gone for half an hour or so (aka lunch) you had to shut it down & start it up again when you got back.

    WindozeNT had problems with "memory leaks" only minimally associated with "up time". Every time you opened a program it allocated memory & when you closed the program it didn't always properly de-allocate the memory so that after repeatedly opening/closing programs it wouldn't have enough memory available. The longer the computer was "up", the more program open/close cycles you'd accumulate, but the problem wasn't directly related to "up time".

    They seemed to have solved that problem by the time they got to Windoze7, which is what I'm running on all of my computers1. I don't shut them down at night because the amount of electricity they consume when idle in negligible compared to the other power consumption in the house.

    1 I'm pretty sure my NAS runs on some flavor of Linux, and my new NAS server will be Linux if I ever get it working. Plus I have one Apple computer, a Mac Mini, which stays shut down most of the time (music/recording workstation).

    1716:

    Charlie Stross @ 1490:

    Yes, I know the DC police chief has told them to leave their guns behind, but - suppose they don't?

    Then they get to play with the DC police SWAT team. You know, the folks with proper training and M113 armoured personnel carriers (not to mention MRAPs and helicopters).

    Really, as long as they don't try to shoot up the Mall and occupy Congress the cops will probably let it slide. They tend to lean to the right, after all. But if they start to create work for the police ...? That's not going to end well, especially for an undisciplined shower of idiots who've forgotten that DC is basically a ring of steel around the executive (there are surface to air missile batteries to deal with intrusive aircraft: there are marine and army bases within a very short driving distance, and so on.)

    Not even the swat teams as far as I can see:

    Police said they made 21 arrests on a variety of charges, including assault and weapons possession, and recovered eight firearms.

    What do y'all think of the voting irregularities currently taking place down under?

    1717:

    Thanks. I knew they could repair cables on land, because they get cut by accident, and aside from bankrupting the company that cuts one, civilization doesn't stumble to a halt. Presumably the boat is the same thing, only on the ocean.

    What I'm thinking off is two-three levels of magnitude more interesting: one level is doing cable manipulations on the ocean bottom. The other is figuring out a way to get signals out of fiber without cutting the fiber or distorting the signal so badly that cable operators notice. The third level (possibly) is making a non-penetrating tap that isn't physically attached to the cable. After all, you don't want the repair crew to pull up the tap box, if there's a way to keep it on the bottom and undetected.

    1718:

    Subsea telecoms cables are typically as thin as possible, for many good and obvious reasons, and thus a lot easier to harm than power cables, which by definition involve one or two very large cross-sections of metal to carry the current.

    I cannot share pictures of the actual Viking Link cable design, but here is a wikipedia picture which gives a good idea what undersea power cables look like:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wolfe_Island_Wind_Project_Submarine_Power_Cable.jpg

    That doesn't damage easily.

    1719:

    David L @ 1504:

    what? I think he's going to try for the newly-appointed scumbagsofficials to declare his vote the "winner"

    The only to do that is get a few states to quickly replace the laws about how the electors from their state are selected. And so far one or two of the needed state's totally R controlled legislatures have basically said, "YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING".

    He seems to be working towards delaying certification of the vote in hopes that Republican controlled state legislatures will throw out the popular vote and directly appoint slates of Trump electors. This is likely to run afoul of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 as embodied in Title 3 of the U.S. Code.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Count_Act

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_3_of_the_United_States_Code

    The Federal law that determines how electoral votes are counted requires the state legislatures to appoint electors In Accordance With state law that was in effect before the election. All 50 states (plus DC pursuant to the Twenty-third Amendment) had laws on the books to allocate electors based on the popular vote.

    Secondly, the law requires the Governor of the State (and the Mayor of DC) to issue a certificate naming the electors, how those electors voted and certifying those electors were appointed IAW the pre-existing state law. All of the key "swing" states where Trump is hoping Republican legislatures will subvert the election process have Democratic Governors, who are 99-44/100% certain to refuse to certify those slates of electors.

    ... well, except maybe for Georgia where I'm pretty sure Republican Governor Brian Kemp has already said that's going to be a big NOPE! and the Legislature doesn't seem inclined to so blatantly break the law in this case.

    1720:

    A viking link cable cross-section photo is on the sky news site. It pops up in the first page of a Google image search for viking link cable.

    You get to see how thin it is from other pictures in that first page, showing people next to the stacked cable.

    1721:

    I have the impression they'll be able to meet their goal of building a first Canadian SMR reactor by 2028.

    If they don't have a definite site chosen, equipment manufacturers selected and under contract, planning permission granted after local discussion and local approval, finance in place, a approved and licenced design including end-of-life disposal decommissioning plans and a shitload of other regulatory and other hoops jumped through RIGHT NOW then having any reactor, even a small SMR up and running by 2028 is wishful thinking. It's nuclear and that always requires lots of regulatory involvement.

    I've followed nuclear stuff for several decades now and SMRs have been the Next Big Thing for about as long as I've been following the field as an interested amateur. Right now the only SMRs actually built and operating today are the two slightly modified KLT-40 marine propulsion reactors, the KLT-40. Rosatom is looking at using their next-gen marine reactor, the RITM-2000 as an on-land sort-of SMR but they have the advantage of being real reactors, not something that only exists in a PowerPoint slide deck.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RITM-200

    Having lots of uranium nearby is not a big deal -- France doesn't mine any uranium within its own national boundaries even though it consumes hundreds of tonnes of uranium each year to keep the lights on, heat homes etc. Uranium is commonly available in a lot of places and easy to buy on the world markets at quite low prices. Worst case if scarcity hits then there are proven methods of extracting uranium from seawater. That's a lot more expensive than mining currently costs now and for at least the next few hundred years but it can be done.

    1722:

    Mr. Tim @ 1511: You got me curious, so I went looking. Most solar panels, retail, seem to around US $1.00 per watt (some less, some more). Of course, when you factor in all the wiring, switches, converters, batteries, it becomes *much* more expensive.

    Sometimes I wonder if it is worthwhile for the power companies to actually encourage residential home owners to put panels on their roofs. I mean, you don't have to worry about environmental impact statements or purchasing/renting the land, etc. Even if the output is kept local (in the home or neighborhood), it potentially takes a big strain off the grid.

    I don't think any of the power companies DO actually encourage residential home owners to install Solar Electric. There was at one time a law requiring power companies to buy any surplus power produced by home owner installed residential systems. The power companies HATED IT & actively campaigned against the law & I think may have eventually managed to get it repealed.

    IIRC, even if you managed to provide 100% of your own power needs & produced a surplus 100% of the time, the rate they paid (set by law) was rarely enough to offset what they were allowed to charge you just for having a connection to the grid.

    1723:

    whitroth @ 1516: Ah, yes, assuming there's evidence in the first place... but doing that is, of course, obstruction of justice, which is what sent Al Capone to jail.

    Nope. It's a Federal Records requirement. They have to be kept whether there's evidence in there or not. Deleting the records is a crime in and of itself separate from any evidence the records might contain.

    And Capone went to prison for tax evasion, which doesn't bode well for Donnie's future place of residence.

    1724:

    Depending on depth, they'll either use an ROV/dive team to effect repair, or they'll pull the cable to the surface.

    And you wouldn't try and splice a tap in to the cable when you can just tap the fibre amplifiers that are spaced along the cable!

    1725:

    Greg, you said:

    "" Base-Load+ storage" yes - which means you are covering that not supplied from the base-load by the storage - learn to read."

    If you're going to read, or write, it's important to know what the words mean.

    Otherwise you look like an idiot. A rude idiot.

    "Baseload" is the level that demand never falls below. Think warm summer night about 3am.

    If you have "Base-Load+ storage" then you have nothing to charge up the storage. Storage doesn't magic energy into existence. You have to generate it. In fact, the only time your grid will be in balance is on a single warm summer night every few years. All the rest of the time is rolling blackouts.

    Far from being determined that you guys should freeze to death, I've been trying to impart some basic level of knowledge about how to not freeze to death and what that costs if you're not going to burn things to stay warm. It's more complex than saying "France" over and over.

    Your "plan" would actually freeze everyone. If you scaled it up to the point that it didn't freeze everyone then it would suck about half a trillion out of the British trade balance every year, the pound will collapse and since, as has been pointed out here, you guys import most of your food, you'll starve instead.

    1726:

    Nojay @ 1539: I live, like Our Good Host and about three hundred thousand others in this city, in a flat. We share a roof with five other flats plus a business at ground level. That's about twenty-five to thirty people who are supposed to survive on about 15kWh of rooftop electricity generation during a winter's day, if we're lucky. Heating alone for the properties consumes at least 100kWh daily and that's not counting the future load for charging of electric vehicles as well as the normal consumption of electricity for lighting, cooking, entertainment etc.

    Who owns the building and might they have any economically viable interest that might be served by installing rooftop solar-electric panels? ... even if that interest is only reducing the cost from paying for 100kWh down to paying for 85kWh per day?

    1727:

    The reason you get less fruits and vegetables is because of freakin' urban/suburban sprawl, partly driven by racism, and partly by "location,location,location" cost. They've covered the highly-productive land with crap housing and McMansions that are "investment property", not homes.

    1728:

    What will make it more interesting is 1. When people see the difference in dealing with C-19 between Trumpolini (none) to Biden (who appointed a committee Monday as his first act as President-elect). 2. If the Dems can ram through some form of federal standards to voter registration.

    Remember, the GOP is all about voter suppression.

    1729:

    So, you think that Cummings "took one for the team", and BoJo will dump all blame on him?

    1730:

    I am an optimist, like doctor Pangloss.

    I neglected to mention that Canada already has experience with small reactors with its SLOWPOKE (tm) series. They built a slightly bigger version, the SLOWPOKE-4 (tm), for doing things like district heating in cities, but that never caught on.

    The sites for the SMR launch reactors are chosen. They will be installed right next to existing large-sise CANDU reactors.

    The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is C»anada's regulation agency for everything nuclear.

    https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/

    They have a video promotimg Small Modular Reactors on their home page. It looks like a bias, don't you think? I'm not complaining.

    I mentioned Saskatchewan's nuclear reserves because it's a political factor, important to get the province as a launch customer.

    1731:

    Yes and no. Part of the problem is that towns mostly started growing where they could grow: on good farm land (I'm not counting San Diego here, because we're the post child of where not to locate a city, along with San Francisco). Then a train or a highway comes through. Then the city grows, and swallows the farmland. One environmentalist called this pattern (in California): first the cow, then the plow, then the bulldozer, for the intensification of land use from ranching to farming to building.

    In a place like Detroit, or anywhere where gardens and farms run on god-water (direct precipitation) and not irrigation, this process seems to be fairly reversible: get rid of the buildings, and the land can be rebuilt. In irrigation country out west, a lot of fields are getting salted up due to long-term irrigation, so we're stuck with the Fertile Crescent problem of really and truly losing fields to salinity and lack of precipitation, whether they're in cities or not. But we've got great weather....

    1732:

    Who owns the building

    Five different landlords at my rough count, six maybe. Three of the flats are occupier-owned, five are Homes of Multiple Occupancy i.e. rented to groups of unrelated people, students and the like who turn over occupancy each year typically. I believe one of the ground-floor commercial properties is also owned by the same company that owns two or three of the flats, the other street-level shop is, I think, owner-occupied.

    How are you at cat-herding? Oh, and did I mention this is a grade-2 listed building i.e. no structural modifications without permission etc.? It's the same with Our Good Host's place elsewhere in Edinburgh. He owns his flat in the tenement block he lives in but some flats are basically AirBnB etc. He's not allowed to put a satellite dish on the roof because the building is listed similarly.

    1733:

    Nojay @ 1732:

    Who owns the building

    Five different landlords at my rough count, six maybe. Three of the flats are occupier-owned, five are Homes of Multiple Occupancy i.e. rented to groups of unrelated people, students and the like who turn over occupancy each year typically. I believe one of the ground-floor commercial properties is also owned by the same company that owns two or three of the flats, the other street-level shop is, I think, owner-occupied.

    How are you at cat-herding? Oh, and did I mention this is a grade-2 listed building i.e. no structural modifications without permission etc.? It's the same with Our Good Host's place elsewhere in Edinburgh. He owns his flat in the tenement block he lives in but some flats are basically AirBnB etc. He's not allowed to put a satellite dish on the roof because the building is listed similarly.

    How is responsibility for common infrastructure allocated (stairwells, "common" areas, Gas/Electric/Water connections to the building, etc.)?

    1734:

    For all those who OMG can't need grid powerz(!), I've got...the Mary Poppins Gambit.

    To wit: You use a large kytoons to loft wind turbines up a few hundred meters where the wind is more constant. Spread enough of those around your city, and you should be able to power it okay. Why kytoons and not kites? Because the wind doesn't always blow, of course, and the gas bag keeps it up so you don't have a tangled mess when the generators all drop out of the sky.

    But what about aircraft, you wail? I suppose the short-term solution is to keep the kytoons out of aviation airspace. The long term solution is to switch to airships and carrier drones that can maneuver around the aerial kelp forest you've lofted.

    It's easy, scalable, replaceable, and sufficient for your needs*. What more do you want? It's not like y'all have any sunlight or any view to block, other than pervasive views of clouds and rain.

    Trust me, it'll be easy. Would could be bad about thousands of electrified aerial tethers powering a city?

    *sufficient if you're efficient in your energy use and the aerial generators are efficient at making electricity, that is.

    [[ link repair - mod ]]

    1735:

    East coast US. Philly, for example, used to get most of its fruit and veggies from PA and NJ. Water from the sky's almost never a problem.

    Friggin' developers....

    1736:

    How is responsibility for common infrastructure allocated (stairwells, "common" areas, Gas/Electric/Water connections to the building, etc.)?

    Either all the owners get together and agree to needed repairs or the council enforces payment for necessary work like roofs, stair lighting etc. after it is carried out. Cleaning of the stairs and other common spaces are the responsibility of each flat occupier on a rota. Sometimes one of us will do stuff just to get it done rather than wait for agreement -- I've fixed the lights on the first couple of floors of the common stair, for example, replacing bulkhead fluorescent fittings with LED bulbs and I didn't charge anyone for doing it.

    It's a city-wide process that's been developed over a century and more of shared-space multiple ownership of thousands of these sorts of properties. All the sharp edges have been worn off and the legislation and rules are tried and tested.

    1737:

    Annnnnd BoJo's self-isolating again....

    1738:

    Well, Detroit gives me a lot of hope, because when homes were destroyed, their land was still farmable. Perhaps Philly will experience the same thing.

    Where I am is like Minoan Crete, in that it's a home that was terraced into what was a hillside of chaparral. Absent everything being imported, it's unlivable.

    Crete's apparently like that (and about the same latitude...). Apparently, its population hit its height in the middle Bronze Age Minoan period, and has not reached the same levels since. As a result, there are the ruins of bronze-age homesteads all through the brush in the island's mountains, in places that only made sense to live when there were a lot of people. Same thing's going to happen here sooner or later. Once this place gets disconnected from the aqueducts (or those flow dry), absent some Mars bubble-city level technology, we're not going to be able to support millions of people living here.

    1739:

    Annnnnd BoJo's self-isolating again....

    All the better to avoid responsibility for whatever happens to Brexit?

    Not my fault, I was sick...

    1740:

    In fact I grew up in Belfast to mixed Protestant/Catholic parents, and as a result inherited a strong aversion to both sets of hardliners and an inclination to try to find compromise positions - I think it's likely I'm more aware of the nuances than many (in practice British people are at least as much inclined to entirely ignore unionists until they happen to be in some way politically relevant, anyway). And no, it's not just hard-line republicans who find the classical British attitude here rather patronising.

    Re the plausibility of a united Ireland, don't confuse flippancy with a hard-line position here: I didn't think it was at all likely or even necessarily desirable until the UK started screwing the pooch hard with Brexit. The day after the referendum I guesstimated that we'd see a UI within ten years as a direct result, and am yet to be convinced that I was wrong. It's absolutely true that Ireland has a lot of work to do to make it practical.

    1741:

    France end England must have civilian nuclear power if they want to be able to recruit young people for the nuclear submarines. Nobody sane, which is a job requirement, spends the best decade of their youth in a shitty work-environment if the "payoff" is a career which dead-ends hard at 30. USA is also facing this one, but they have not started panic-buying new plants yet, the way France and UK did. Uh? never heard that one. While Edf had a hand in designing military nuclear systems for submarines and the CDG aircraft carrier, I have never noticed a surabondance of ex-submariners working in civilian nuclear plants. Btw, most submariners have nothing to do with the running of the onboard nuke plant. Going full nuclear was certainly a political decision, back in the 60's/70's but it was mostly motivated by the loss of the Algerian gas and the declining coal reserves, and a desire for energy independance.

    1742:

    NI already has a pretty stable temperate climate, but you do rather have to like rain.

    Fianna Fáil put out a white paper a while back proposing a federal Ireland with substantial autonomy for Stormont, basically switching the roles of London and Dublin, IIRC entrenching a federal structure at the constitutional level, and starting to feel out the sorts of things you'd need to do to sync up the north/south economies to make things roughly viable. I haven't heard of much more being done on that, presumably since other domestic issues got in the way, but it was a start. Something like this strikes me as the most likely sort of structure to stand a chance of being palatable to unionists: Stormont could keep running much the same sort of way that it has (or hasn't, depending on when you ask) been running for the last 20 years or so, Ireland's codified constitution might in some ways provide more protection for something like a devolved settlement than the UK's more freewheeling constitutional approach which has become more obviously vulnerable to the whims of the government of the day, and as you say the Catholic-theocracy fears don't hold as much water as they used to.

    The DUP will never be happy about it as such, but if a border poll goes that way then the Irish government has every incentive to find a settlement that's least likely to lead to violence, and Ireland doesn't really have the sort of pressures that have tended to militate against a working federal structure in the UK.

    Most of the time I've talked to moderates about it the biggest remaining issue has been healthcare, since the Irish system is generally rather less highly-regarded than the NHS. But since successive UK governments seem to have been determined to, uh, solve that from the other direction, my sense is that the salience of that issue has been dropping.

    1743:

    Who owns the building and might they have any economically viable interest that might be served by installing rooftop solar-electric panels?

    The building is jointly owned by everyone under its roof who owns one of the apartments, shops, or cellars under it. In my case that's six apartments on my stairwell ... but eleven businesses and home-owners. No, there is no management company. No, it's not a condominium or leasehold. I own the freehold title to my flat, and three storeys of empty air under it (which are occupied by other people in other flats and/or shops, and one share by Scottish Power because there's a transformer substation in the cellar).

    This makes no sense in terms of the land ownership laws you're familiar with. Don't bother trying to make it work that way: it's a headache. At least they abolished the feudal dues a couple of decades ago ...

    (Finally, we can't legally put solar panels on the roof without a variation in the building's listed building status to permit such a modification, which probably requires a change in the law or for the city to lose its UNESCO World Heritage Site status. But that's a bit more of an unusual problem.)

    1744:

    At least they abolished the feudal dues a couple of decades ago ...

    How did that work? Did you owe the local lord a bushel of oats?

    1745:

    Incidentally, actual unionists in actual Northern Ireland don't typically say "Eire". They'll normally say something like "the Republic of Ireland" (which only a small number of pedants will object to - it's in Irish statute law as the "description" of the state, anyway), or maybe "the Irish Republic". Those are close enough to being neutral terms that nobody really minds unless they're actually trying to pick a fight, and they sound natural in English. If you don't want to say "Ireland" then why not use one of those instead?

    1746:

    This makes no sense

    Oh, I wouldn't worry. 2020 is going fine, if you're not paying attention to the Real Deal[tm] stuff going down (you know, like look @ Biden's picks, it's basically all Republican Iran War Hawks with a dash of Wall Street Ghouls, it ain't the second coming).

    The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End

    In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition.

    https://www.wired.com/story/the-black-hole-information-paradox-comes-to-an-end/

    Read the papers: they're crude (as is your wont as Homo Sapiens) but fairly accurate. We did fucking warn you, oh yes we did. Read the name, do a grep, bask in your fucking egotistical ignorant arrogance and ... oooh. Post about Bastet, we're mollified as a million likes flow in like golden patters of warm loving caresses across our Mind.

    Want to play?

    Do a twitter search for "Pope" "Horny" and "Bottom"

    Pope Francis caught liking glamour model’s Instagram picture

    A glamour model has joked that ‘at least [she’s] going to heaven’ after Pope Francis was caught liking a racy image of hers on Instagram.

    https://extra.ie/2020/11/14/entertainment/celebrity/pope-francis-liking-model-instagram-picture

    Note for the internet wise: just like Ted Cruz favouriting that pr0no, there's ways and means to do this. The chances the Papal Sign Ring touches the twitter account is low to non-existant.

    And. Hmmm. We see you're still stuck on Brexit, UK, Sterling and Trade deals. Here's a wondrous thing to think about:

    Remember when there was an Arctic panic, a bit of a hexagon upper clime atmospheric event that translated into a massive hole in the ozone layer that fixed itself over the last 18 months? (Yeah, did happen). Well. Arctic Ice this year is baaaaad. Broken Baaaaad.

    Turns out even blowing a hole in the ozone wasn't enough.

    Oh, and if you old people want to play, "Dark Winter" is the cue card.

    [For Host: since 'Great Reset' was mentioned here, 77th have pivoted into actually targeting 'disinformation' blogs and videos about said things. Cattle prods and basic flow charts are apparently needed, Martin never understood the moves. Hint: Cyprus arms dump happened due to intense lobbying via banks / commercial deals from TR/RU ... you gotta update your .mil Minds with Translation software, or they all get Mind-Fucked-Ganked in the first 180 seconds of the next war]

    ~

    But yeah.

    Black Hole Matter. And yes, little urchins that follow Nick Land, we saw your responses to it. Arrogant muppets.

    The trick is: if information flows back, Loki gets a resurrection deal.

    Now that's scary, if you know your [redacted] stuff.

    1747:

    Greg Tingey @1648 Your prognostications on Britain as to damp are wrong, incidentally - which of these cities has the lowest rainfall ... New York, London, Paris, Rome? ( Heteromeles - erm, not very far from here, there's a strip of land with less than 500mm of rian a year - technically semi-desert ) What people don't realise is the sheer both range & variability of the climate. In Scotland there is a E-W facing loch - Loch Long - at the Eastern end, the rainfall is about 40" at the Western end, just over 20 miles away, the rainfall is about 60" Seathwaite-in-Borrowdale gets 3.5 meters ( 140" ) of rain a year - Barrow-in-Furness gets 34" / 870mm of rain - & the two places are only 25 miles / 40km apart!

    Oh dear one. Please do not lecture those of us on the US West Coast about microclimates. All these are roughly around the 45th parallel. Astoria, Oregon: Average 86 inches of rain/1 inch of snow. 60 miles east/southeast of Astoria: Portland, Oregon, Average 43 inches of rain/3 inches snow 40 miles east of Portland: Cascade Locks, Oregon, Average 67 inches of rain/13 inches of snow 20 miles east of Cascade Locks, Oregon: Hood River, Oregon, Average 22 inches of rain, 17 inches of snow 22 miles east of Hood River, Oregon: The Dalles, Oregon Average 18 inches of rain, 14 inches of snow 26 miles east of The Dalles, Oregon: Rufus, Oregon Average 13 inches of rain, 6 inches of snow.

    And those are just general locations along the Columbia River.

    And that does not take into account widely variant amounts of rain and snow just in the Portland metro area.

    1748:

    Thanks. I knew they could repair cables on land, because they get cut by accident... What I'm thinking off is two-three levels of magnitude more interesting: one level is doing cable manipulations on the ocean bottom. The other is figuring out a way to get signals out of fiber without cutting the fiber or distorting the signal so badly that cable operators notice. The third level (possibly) is making a non-penetrating tap that isn't physically attached to the cable. After all, you don't want the repair crew to pull up the tap box, if there's a way to keep it on the bottom and undetected.

    Yes, that was very interesting and technologically challenging; you're reinventing Operation Ivy Bells, which was pretty much exactly as you've imagined.

    For those who don't care to click through: in 1971 the US wanted to listen to Soviet phone calls made over a cable through the Sea of Okhotsk, particularly those between Moscow and the Petropavlovsk base for the Soviet Pacific nuclear submarine fleet. What the US came up with was pretty much exactly as described. The Russians were so confident in their security that most calls were not encrypted, which was a great convenience to the NSA.

    The US got away with this for about ten years before the Russians found and dredged up their wire tapping station.

    1749:

    Ah, yes.

    Driving from Portland to Bend years ago in March. Shirt sleeves to sleet and snow to arid cold desert all in a few hours. The southern route.

    Driving up the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Portland via Bend and Smith River Valley and the Columbia River was an even wider range of climates. This was end of summer. Rain Forest to desert in a couple of hours in one stretch. And lots of snow still on lower parts of Mt. Hood.

    1750:

    looks at Camera: We survived. We also survived your bullshit LAW trap as well, so hey-ho. Guess it's full on Blow-Back WAAAAAR then, eh?

    As an aside: this is a SF blog.

    Serious Scientists have just proved (kinda: they're jinking it via Math rather than actual data: NOW THEN, ACTUAL DATA, LIKE LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE? WE MIGHT BE LOOKING AT THIS TINY BLOG FOR EVIDENCE FOR THAT, IF YOU KNOW WHAT/WHO WE ARE):

    Information exchange at a black hole (and your Soul and the Eternal Night) is not one-way.

    You'd think a load of scientists would be a little bit more concerned about the implications than they are pretending to be.

    Pro-tip: it's not just your Causality that's at stake, it's kinda a load of other things. Apes scratching in mud make nukes, can't do ecology: CUNTS.

    1751:

    Oh, and grow up: the word "CUNT" has no more negative implication than the word "CORNFLAKE" to us.

    We don't share your shitty Mental Schema. It's just a word that your shitty mental schema reacts to.

    If you want a translation: "A Being Who Rapes a [[HOLY]] [[INNOCENT]] Mind and then advertises it as a success without [[HOP]] levels of understanding of what SHE (for real, Female - just not HSS) has unleashed due to her [[VANITY]] and psychotic hatred of her [[[SISTERS]]] and willingness to Damn / [[Not Share Heaven]] for her own Weapon Development"

    Like: that's about 15% of the word, but you get the idea.

    [Redacted]

    HELLLLO MEXICO.

    1752:

    Operation Ivy Bells tapped an old style cable, leaking electromagnetic energy.

    Heteromeles wants to tap a fiber optic cable without cutting into the cable. A fiber optic cable means coherent laser light going through a wave guide. There is no leaking of electromagnetic energy at all. The only way to listen in is to cut through the cable or through one of the repeaters to plant a beam splitter of some kind. That's what the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter probably did for its fiber tapping.

    I'm still reading up on wave guide science to try and find out if there is a futuristic way to do it, one day,without at least minimal cutting and without violating the laws of Physics.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_splitter

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_tapping

    1753:

    sigh

    Yep, you're non-human, and tapping into our Internet. And sending message to... a group of mostly older folks who are science fiction fans, and political, and you're aim is to... um, right, you expect us to figure out why you're telling us this, and to guess what you expect us to do about it.

    Fine, I'll do something about it when I finish mY Famous Secret Theory, trust me on that.

    1754:

    By the way, I knew about the USS Jimmy Carter, so I figured it was likely that some of the US Navy Master Divers do this, among other things. Or possibly the SEALs.

    It will be interesting what you find, but I'll bet that there are ways to tap fiber cables. I was wondering whether there's some way to put a sensor using a strong magnetic field on the fiber cable and record the transmissions through perturbations in the field. I suppose the real taps may simply be underwater cable splicing (itself a neat trick), but who knows?

    1755:

    Fibre optic cables conduct light, not electrical current. While light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, light and magnetic fields do not interact. Interesting enough to google around and this page is especially so:

    https://kaw.wallenberg.org/en/research/coupling-light-magnetism-nanoscale

    1756:

    In my very limited understanding of undersea fiber, there are powered repeaters every so often. Those might be a tap point.

    1757:

    Quick googling seems to indicate repeaters in undersea optical cables every 70 kilometers or so. Those would be the easiest places to tap, I think. As said, the light in the optical cable does not leak out, so it's necessary to cut the cable to put a tap in if it's not a repeater site.

    The losses in the cable need to be quite small if the light signal needs to travel 70 kilometers, so there can't be much leakage. Of course this depends on how much light you put in, but I don't think the lasers are very big even in those kind of connections. Too much energy and you'll start to degrade the cable from absorption effects at the transmission endpoint...

    1758:

    Oh FUCK We have enough problems without the content-free drivel reappearing ... as whitroth says ... sigh

    jreynoldsward So? CA has geographically-variable climate, so what? I was complaining about the totally wrong assumption that British climate was uniform ( & wet with it )

    1759:
    If you were really cute, you could figure out a way to set a guillotine-type line cutter,

    About a decade ago, I was attending a football game with the kids and the parents are talking as one does. One of the other parents worked for Alcatel, he was involved with a very recently installed sub-sea, fiber-optic, cable that failed and the working out How it failed.

    What they had found was that one of the fiber-optic amplifiers had been cut out and removed - at about 4 km depth.

    The cut was not that close to China, but ... Someone really wanted to know what was inside that amplifier and had real money to reverse engineer it.

    1760:

    "As said, the light in the optical cable does not leak out, so it's necessary to cut the cable to put a tap in if it's not a repeater site."

    If you bend the fiber a bit, light does indeed leak out, and that is a commonly used technique for both legit monitoring and tapping.

    The downside for tapping purposes is that you need a very good amplifier right there, but I am confident that if cable-owners ever inspected the full length of their cables properly, they would find such additions. (USA didn't spend all that money on the USS Jimmy Carter for no good reason.)

    1761:

    "A viking link cable cross-section photo is on the sky news site. It pops up in the first page of a Google image search for viking link cable."

    Viking Link is a HVDC connection running at a differential of 1MV, so there will only be two conductors, either in the same sheath or more likely separate sheaths, because 500kV is enough for everybody.

    The three conductor cable on Sky's page is therefore not what Viking Link will spool out across the North Sea, and it certainly does not have enough insulation for a 1MV differential.

    It may be related, could be part of the landing infrastructure, but most likely it is just a random stock-photo of the cable from some near-shore wind-farm.

    1762:

    If you bend the fiber a bit, light does indeed leak out, and that is a commonly used technique for both legit monitoring and tapping.

    But you're talking bending a bundle of 50 or 100 or more independent fibers sheathed in a protective setup meant for, ah, somewhat harsh conditions.

    Saw a cable documentary show a year or few back about one of the ships that repairs undersea fiber. They are rare. It's complicated. And not exactly the fastest process given how it has to happen.

    Now I suspect they use undersea piloted vehicles now if they can to find the end rather than drag for them. Still it's a non trivial process.

    1763:

    For those wondering just how much undersea data there is:

    https://live.infrapedia.com/app I can hear the screams from Pigeon now.

    Here's an older version that's a bit out of date: https://cablemap.info/_default.aspx

    1764:

    The front end-papers of the book Behind The Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ by John Ferris is a map labelled "Cable Map of the World". Dust jacket says the map is from 1919; it was published by the Geographical Section, General Staff. Correspondingly the back endpapers are a map labelled "Submarine Cable Map 2019", and is copyright TeleGeography.

    Enjoy!

    Frank.

    1765:

    WHAT was that about cable-cutting? The "Silent Service" strikes again.

    1766:

    Because (a) omitting accents on systems than can't handle them is normal practice, (b) it is a short word not a long phrase and (c) I object to the politicisation of normal language. Claiming that a term is offensive when it has no major historical or recent usage for oppression or other harm, just because it is used by people you are offended by, is, at best, nonsense.

    You may not be familiar with people who use the term Ireland for Eire with the intent of denigrating the concerns and civil rights of the unionists, and even their right to reside there, but almost all of those I have known who have done the former also have done the latter. It certainly used to be horrifically common among the 'politically correct' in the UK.

    1767:

    The claim that the UK government's long-term failure to acknowledge the civil rights of NI nationalists isn't associated with oppression is at best a startling and ahistorical one, and whether you like it or not that's what the insistence on using that particular term was most strongly associated with. The Good Friday Agreement brought us into a much more viable compromise position, and one of the less-widely-trumpeted things that came out of that particular set of extremely fraught negotiations was to start actually respecting the terms that the various parties used for themselves. Since that point even the UK government has normally referred to "Ireland". Lord Dubs put it simply: "We will call them by the name they favour, and they will use the name for us that we favour".

    We probably have nothing more to productively discuss here, though.

    1768:

    How is responsibility for common infrastructure allocated (stairwells, "common" areas, Gas/Electric/Water connections to the building, etc.)?

    I'm glad you asked!

    Short answer: it isn't.

    Long answer: if something needs fixed, the residents (or landlords) are supposed to put their heads together, agree a solution (usually with much to-ing and fro-ing and waving of quotes from contractors), then someone commissions the work and everyone else pays up their pro-rata share of the expenses.

    If they agree, it works well. If they don't agree, oh dear. (This is especially a problem with absentee landlords and especially businesses that rent from commercial landlords, e.g. the hairdresser downstairs).

    There used to be a council department who you could appeal to if you and the other residents couldn't reach agreement: they'd send out a statutory emergency repair notice and if that didn't get results, they'd organize the work and invoice everyone, plus a 10% commission for handling it. Alas, the scheme collapsed a decade ago (some staff were taking back-handers from roofing firms who would report damage to building facades, trigger a statutory repair notice, get the padded work order, and work their way up a street). So the entire department was abolished, leaving us in a bit of a mess.

    Weirdly, this sounds chaotic but in my experience it works better than having a leasehold setup and a management company who take responsibility for everything -- I've lived with that kind of setup in England, and the Scottish anarchist free-for-all usually ends up costing less, if you don't mind the arguments over whether or not the leaky roof really needs repairing Right Now, This Week, Before That Named Storm Blows In, or whether it can wait another year.

    1769:

    The BBC is reporting that Moderna has announced interim test results for their COVID-19 vaccine candidate, about 95% effective, similar to the Pfizer candidate vaccine results reported a week ago.

    Science, eh?

    The Moderna vaccine requires less refrigeration than the Pfizer candidate and apparently stores better long-term. Expect a big uptick in the Moderna stock price when the Dow opens later today.

    1770:

    The USS Jimmy Carter has a ROV handling arrachment so it doesn't need human divers.

    Meanwhile, you need a pocket franistan (thank you Mr. Asimov) because they haven't repealed the laws of Physics since I learned them and you still can't intercept a laser beam going through a wave guide, no matter how many electromagnetic fields you put around the wave guide.

    That was the whole point of switching from copper cables and electric current to lasers and fiber optics.

    1771:

    So rather than bending, it would be cutting the cable to intercept (altnerative to splicing is polishing the cut end to spec and terminate in on a standard patch block). This means consuming the signal and repeating it, and the equipment would be pretty much the same as the standard repeater, just that it repeats the signal to an additional destination. Not clear about implications in terms of spec: these are generally high bandwidth links, if a repeater introduces a predictable amount of pressing latency then an extra station would show up, but equipment that introduces less-to-negligible latency might not. But that has other implications: additional processing capacity means more power and while getting it is a solvable problem it adds complexity. Then not clear whether strong crypto on the path is standard, and whether it's currently regarded as defeatable by 5-eyes entities. And if you are one of those, surely it's simpler to put your bug in one of the endpoints?

    1772:

    you still can't intercept a laser beam going through a wave guide

    Check out evanescent wave coupling.

    1773:

    Many decades ago I was helping someone with formatting/printing a letter. The person involved lived on a country lane with 4 others and they owned the lane and a few other bits in common. The letter started out something like:

    "Per our association meeting last night it was decided to send the "Deadbeat" ....

    1774:

    There are ways of coupling to an optical fibre and reading the signals without cutting it. They're complicated, like shaving the surface of the fibre so that some of the transmitted optical energy leaks out to be read by a sufficiently sensitive optical detector -- see, for example Josephson junction sensors.

    As for the move to optical fibre in general that's because it can carry a lot more data per second than copper. Being less affected by electromagnetic fields and noise than wire is another advantage of course but security by technology is a recipe for insecurity, basically. Believing that fibre transmission of data makes interception impossible is foolish in the extreme.

    1775:

    I should have added "for intercontinental telecom". The idea is that a long fiber telecom cable isn't affected by solar storms.

    1776:

    There are dozens of reasons. Dozens.

    If you want I can ask someone who spend 10 to 20 years in that business. Plus his best friend is the manager who handled Nortel's early fiber engineering. This second guy was in charge of the first fiber link installation in the US. Talk about a loss leader. I think he said it cost 20 times what they charged for the link.

    These two guys have interesting stories about the "good old days". Like visiting Radio Shack to buy their little hand held torches to use in fusing the links. They have much better ways to do it now.

    1777:

    The sample is only 95 people infected, and so there is not enough data to know that the actual rate is not 90%.

    1778:

    Actually, that's misleading. It's actually easier to get very high bandwidth using copper than optical fibre. The problem with high bandwidth on copper is that it has a catastrophically short range, unless you use an insane number of wires (each operating at a low bandwidth) inside a gargantuan cable. I don't know where it has got to now, but possibly where optical wins even on board-board connections in a supercomputer.

    The original reason for changing from copper to fibre was electrical safety, especially against lightning. I worked in one of the first organisations to demonstrate just how catastrophic a lightning strike on a major communications cable could be for 'modern' computer networks (early 1970s) :-)

    1779:

    "As for the move to optical fibre in general that's because it can carry a lot more data per second than copper."

    Interesting historical footnote: You missed "... for a given diameter of cable."

    The initial driver for fiber rollout, was congestion of intercity conduit in large US metropolitan areas, and you could put an order of magnitude more fibers in the same hole as you could coax.

    AT&T did "The Atlanta Fiber Experiement" to validate the technology and almost before it was over, they drew fibres in Chicago to relieve congestion between switches.

    1780:

    "these are generally high bandwidth links"

    And that's the bit that I still havn't figured out: If you install a subsea tap, what do you do with the data

    1781:

    There are ways of coupling to an optical fibre and reading the signals without cutting it. They're complicated, like shaving the surface of the fibre so that some of the transmitted optical energy leaks out to be read by a sufficiently sensitive optical detector

    Sounds like it would need a very specially equipped workshop. And a special-purpose submarine to get the workshop to the cable. And a means to bring a length of cable into the workshop. I wonder if there's anything like that. Oh, wait...

    1782:

    You missed "... for a given diameter of cable."

    Well, that's a given. There were a lot of other improvements in fibre data transmission technologies even after the early fibre comms systems went to market, stuff like multimodal and wide-spectrum multifrequency transmitters and receivers, the development of very transparent fibre glass and variable-index fibres etc. and they all improved the bandwidth for a single jacketed fibre but like jet engines compared to piston engines for aircraft, it was clear from the first generation fibre systems that they'd be the future for high-capacity cable links.

    1783:

    What you don't know, of course, is whether the removed repeater had already been compromised...

    1784:

    "Well, that's a given."

    Today, yes, not back then.

    Initially fibers were seen only as a replacement for coax on congested short-ish hauls and only until thinner coax with more channels would be ready.

    Fiber was not seen as a viable long term telephony technology, one major objection being that low-skill workers could not splice them in a wet hole in the ground.

    AT&T's plan for future trans-continental transmission capacity up through 1977 was the "WT4" system, a pair of two-inch vacuum waveguides from coast to coast, using frequencies up to 100GHz.

    See: https://archive.org/details/bstj56-10-1825/mode/2up and all the other articles in that issue of BSTJ for how far out and technologically cornered they were. In particular see the article on the "physically switch waveguide in 20msec in a trench" machine.

    Only with stunningly good results from the Atlanta Fiber Experiment (BSTJ Vol. 57(6)) did it dawn on AT&T, and BTL in particular, what fiber could do, and only then did they ditch the WT4 project, despite the eyewatering development costs already sunk into it. See also Alsbergs memoir "Witness to a Century" (recommended.)

    One of the few outstanding issues with WT4 was how to get through the Rockies. Not over: Through.

    1785:

    "What you don't know, of course, is whether the removed repeater had already been compromised..."

    Seafloor repeaters are most often a stretch of erbium-doped fiber, so there isn't that much you can compromise to begin with.

    1786:

    Yes, under the assumption that the then outstanding problems could be resolved; at the time, only a few telecommunications companies and very few other organisations (like Arpa or IBM) were into the long-distance game. But they also took off, rapidly, in medium-sized organisations for the reason I gave as soon as they were available; indeed, it was only a relatively few years between general availability and becoming at least recommendations in building codes (in the UK, anyway).

    Interestingly, I still had to argue with a few computer companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s for optical interconnect between cabinets |(within a machine room). They preferred copper because it was simpler (and hence more reliable and cheaper), but I wanted optical for the cabling advantages.

    1787:

    Thanks.
    Does that make most of the above discussion about compromising seafloor repeaters spurious? Or am I missing something - perhaps in the comment I replied to? (Other than the China snark. Could be anyone with access, and there might be more than one reason; which was part of my point.)

    1788:

    So an English-speaking person saying Eire will just raise everyone's ire? (he says, running for cover).

    1789:

    And, just to add to the ongoing and ongoing about nuclear vs renewable in the UK....

    Excerpt: Three of Britain’s biggest energy companies have agreed to build giant underwater power cables to bring Scotland’s vast reserves of renewable energy to millions of homes in England.

    The multibillion-pound energy “superhighway”, to be built by Scottish Power, National Grid and SSE, could help to unlock the potential of the prime minister’s plan to build enough offshore wind farms to power every home in the country by 2030. --- end excerpt ---

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/16/firms-agree-scotland-to-england-renewable-energy-superhighway

    1790:

    "Does that make most of the above discussion about compromising seafloor repeaters spurious?"

    No.

    There is no doubt that USA poured the extra money into USS Jimmy Carter for a reason.

    Technically, tapping a fiber is probably best done right after the repeater where the signal is strongest.

    As I said above, the missing piece is what you do with the data-stream from your tap ?

    I wouldn't rule out having an seafloor "datacenter" where filtering and storage happens, and have a submarine come by four times a year to "download". There are some formidable problems with that idea, but nothing USA wouldnt be willing to fund, if the payoff was big enough.

    The alternative would be to run a cable from the tap-point to another "friendly" cable, where power could be leeched from the repeater supply and data sent back home via fiber. That would restrict the number of places you could install at tap, and severely reduce deniability. But again: If the haul is interesting enough, USA would absolutely do so.

    1792:

    That's... odd. I listened, twice, and it sounds like aasia. I've never heard anyone (USan here) pronounce it other than identical to "ire".

    1793:

    New question ... Grade 2 listed & Grade 1 listed ... how does that work? Is 2 higher than 1? Or is it like first class, second class?

    1794:

    The "r" sound is technically an alveolar tap with a palatal offglide, though a lot of people render that consonant more like an English "r". I think it depends on your dialect a bit (there are three major ones, with some non-trivial pronunciation differences, so dictionaries often list pronunciations in all three). The vowels in that word will be pretty consistent across dialects, though.

    1795:

    In England and Wales? More like first and second class. Grade 1 is "exceptional interest" and grade 2 is "special interest".

    1796:

    A few late comments on things in Texas, to put things in perspective: the worst hit city there right now is El Paso, where the health system is in a state of collapse. They've brought in refrigerated trucks (lorries for Brits) to supplement the morgues, and then prison gangs to handle the flood of corpses going into them. A traveling nurse named Lawana Rivers went viral with an account of the ward she was working, referred to by hospital staff as "The Pit", where still-living COVID-19 patients were warehoused, with no attention from the overloaded doctors, on the way to those trucks.

    The city government has tried to react to this with a shutdown of nonessential businesses. They then got sued by the state Attorney General's office, which is allowing the businesses (including restaurants) to reopen.

    Last I checked, there were limits to how many links you could put in one of these posts before it gets held for moderation, but the obvious searches on Google News will pull in pretty ample documentation of all the above. So instead, for one link, I'll toss in an account from a nurse in a different state, South Dakota, of dying patients spending their last gasping breaths insisting that they will get better and they can't be dying of COVID because it's a "hoax":

    https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/11/16/south-dakota-nurse-intv-newday-vpx.cnn

    1797:

    Another issue with Edinburgh roofs is they tend to be architecturally, err, complex with areas that remain in shadow most of the day. This is not unconnected with their tendency to let the rain in and the resulting expense of paying roofers to play whack-a-mole with the leaks. ( My daughter has a top-floor flat - and several buckets )

    1798:

    Everybody in the UK can relax now - Bozo has a 25 year plan, and Useless has said we lead the world.

    https://www.rt.com/uk/506857-johnson-plan-renewable-energy/

    The article may be Russian disinformation, of course, but I suspect it's genuine British disinformation.

    1799:

    El Paso

    Things aren't great in El Paso or the rest of Texas, but numbers help. (The population of the El Paso metro area is about 950,000.)

    https://www.ktsm.com/news/over-1500-new-cases-reported-in-the-borderland-plus-7-additional-deaths/ Posted: Nov 16, 2020 / 04:34 AM MST / Updated: Nov 16, 2020 / 04:34 AM MST EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — The El Paso Department of Public Health announced 1,550 new COVDI-19 cases and 7 virus related deaths Monday morning. The death toll in El Paso County now at 769, while the total number of positive cases in the borderland reaches 74,973. As of today, 33,935 cases are active according to health officials, and 39,839 patients have been designated as having recovered from the virus. According to the data on epstrong.org, 1,111 patient are in the hospital and 300 are in the ICU.
    1800:

    "alveolar tap with a palatal offglide" - sorry, I have never in my life heard those words, and have no idea what they mean.

    And I'm someone who actually knows how to pronounce a Cymric "ll" (approved by my late mother-in-law, a war bride from Wales).

    1801:

    That exception is that Scotland is probably too poor, compared to its present subsidised position.

    I await with interest your proof that Scotland is subsidised, though I won't be holding my breath for it. Just to be clear though, none of the following will (IMHO) constitute "proof" either individually or collectively that there is a subsidy going on:-

  • The Barnet Formula.
  • Differences in public spending.
  • The GERS Report.
  • The Barnett Formula only deals with changes in public expenditure, and causes those changes happen on an equal per-head-of-population basis. "England and Scotland both got the exact same £50/head increases in public expenditure" is hardly a winning argument for there being a subsidy.

    If differences in public expenditure mean that the place with more public expenditure per-head is subsidised by the place with less, then London is subsidised by Middlesbrough because it gets more public expenditure? Now personally I think we'd all agree that sounds like complete crap, but unless it's a case of "Schrödinger's Subsidy" then differences in public expenditure can't mean that there's a subsidy going on from less-to-more. (Granted there might well be subsidies going on in one direction or the other, but the difference in expenditure levels isn't evidence for it.)

    To put it frankly, the annual GERS Report has about the same level of documentary accuracy as Saving Private Ryan! It accurately captures some, but certainly by no means all, revenue from Scotland but then allocates expenditure for Scotland against it. To give an example of how ludicrous it is imagine the UK Government decides to raise an extra infantry regiment in Yorkshire, and then deploy it to the Falklands. Well that results in increased UK defence spending, but no extra revenue in Scotland so it means a higher "deficit" according to GERS. Alternatively imagine the UK Government keeps the Army the same size, but moves an England-based regiment to Scotland. Well in that case UK defence expenditure remains constant, but income tax revenue in Scotland increases meaning a lower "deficit" according to GERS (increased public spending equals lower subsidy!).

    Actually if you combine the figures for GERS, GERW and GERNI (strangely there's no matching report for England) then you'd learn that apparently despite having less than 16% of the population Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland are apparently responsible for 80% of the UK's deficit! I rather wish an "Independence for England" party would start up, they could just quote government produced figures, not to mention several prominent MPs, claiming "Get rid of the Celtic Winge, and we can cut taxes and increase public spending in England!" and how would the Unionist parties respond without fatally undermining their arguments in Scotland?

    1802:

    I bet he can actually use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)!

    1803:

    JBS In England bulidings are listed: Grade II, Grade II, Grade I Scotland has: C, B, A But, of course, just for added fun Edinburgh's New Town *cough is a World Heritage Site ( As is the "Old Town" ) See here - and follow the internal links for more detail.

    Charlie D El Paso, where the health system is in a state of collapse. Correction. You do not have a health system - that's something the evil commonist Canadians & Europeans do ....

    whitroth Ah but can you pronounce: Eglwyswrw ( It's in Cardinganshire-as-was ) or Dduallt / Tanygrisiau / Rhiwbryfdir / Trawsfynydd - all in Snowdonia

    The troll masquerading as Square Leg I am basing my numbers on Tax take vs government expenditure, for any given area. Anywhere where the second number is larger than the first is reciving a subsidy. Inside Scotland, I woud guess that Edinburgh, Glasgow & Shetland are subsidising the rest of the country, possibly excepting Aberdeen, though the Oil money isn't what it was. Similarly, London & some of the big Industrial & Technical centres ( Manchester / Cambridge / Oxford & similar ) are subsidising the rest of the country. This is, actually, how it should be, it is right & proper that a country should use the richer parts to help the poorer. But, if Scotland wants no part of that system, then they will have to do without. Unfortunately, there already IS an "Independance for England" party - the Brexshiteers - they can't wait to dump "The Celts", succeeded, of course by dumping, internally the poorer parts of England, following the sainted Maggon, of course ....

    1804:

    Which isn't always enough! For example, I am pretty sure that it has the same vowel sound for fir and fur in English, but they're different. It's probably good enough for this purpose.

    1805:

    Looks the same to me: /fɜː(ɹ)/ tree /fɜː(ɹ)/ coat

    You're saying that in certain places they are different?

    1806:

    whitroth @ 1792: That's... odd. I listened, twice, and it sounds like aasia. I've never heard anyone (USan here) pronounce it other than identical to "ire".

    I think most U.S. Americans would probably pronounce it Erie like the canal

    1807:

    It's one of those jargons which is worse than useless to anyone who is not an expert in the field, because not only are the words and usages utterly bizarre, whatever you can pick up from what they sort of look like they ought to mean is more liable to take you further away from the right answer than closer to it.

    "Alveolar" - my alveoli are in my lungs, don't see where they come into it.

    "Tap" - I did see this defined once, but the description was hopelessly obscure, and all I could pick up from it is that it has absolutely fuck all relation to the usual sonic meaning of the word, ie. as in tapping your fingers on the table.

    Similarly for "flap" - at least I think it was "flap" - which means something entirely unconnected with wings, or flags, or even flapping one's mouth; and what exactly it does mean I am unable to retain, because it's blatantly not any kind of flapping at all and the whole thing is just too bloody silly.

    And all the definitions are like that, so nowadays I just ignore it and skip to where the text goes back to normal again.

    1808:

    Yup. British Received Pronounciation, at least as it was when I learnt it and how most people of my age and class speak it. For some bizarre reason, I can just about hear it, despite my severe deafness (especially w.r.t. vowels) - but that may be because I hear from the context. My 1960s Shorter Oxford shows them as different; the OED no longer does.

    Fir has the tongue and lower jaw further back, and is a slightly higher pitched sound, than fur.

    1809:

    BT (or possibly the GPO) did a similar thing over here in 1974, with a 10 mile test waveguide at Martlesham in Suffolk. The plan was to break ground on a UK wide system in 76, but by that point the fibre feasibility studies were happening.

    1810:

    Inside Scotland, I woud guess that Edinburgh, Glasgow & Shetland are subsidising the rest of the country, possibly excepting Aberdeen,

    Shetland is tiny (in population terms) but Greater Edinburgh and Great er Glasgow, plus the M8 corridor linking the two conurbations, makes up about 60-70% of Scotland's entire population. So I'm not sure what the point you're making here is.

    1811:

    As R-M himself might say: pshaw

    1812:

    Meanwhile Phở is pronounced with a mouth full of noodles...

    1813:

    Great er Glasgow

    I'm hearing parenthetical commas in that space: "Great, er, Glasgow".

    I think I've noticed it before, that Edinburgh and Glasgow are closer than cities in other places that are considered part of the same conurbation (Dallas-Fort Worth comes to mind because the orientation is similar, and the spacing is about the same though obviously it's otherwise geographically quite different). But I suppose a lot of Europe has that... discrete locations work a bit differently to the expectations of people from Australia or the USA.

    1814:

    I nevah hoid from it. When was it created?

    1815:

    Eglwyswrw ( It's in Cardinganshire-as-was ) or Dduallt / Tanygrisiau / Rhiwbryfdir / Trawsfynydd - all in Snowdonia

    Let's see, the first I'd pronounce as egg-luis-uru. The second, had to check, I forgot if an initial dd is hard or soft, I *think that would be thuallt, with the "th" as in "the", and the ever-popular ll as an ll (an aspirated labial, put your tongue on the top of your mouth and blow). Third wound be pretty much as it's spelled Fourth: Rhi-ooh-bry-fdir. The lastt: Tra-us-fin-ith (the tra-us like "trou in trousers, and th final th as "the").

    How's that?

    Damn. I really wanted to walk up Snowdonia when we went through the park in '14, but a) NO BLOODY TIME, and b) my knees wouldn't handle it*.

    • One knee partially replaced in '14, the other in '15.
    1816:

    Yes, to me. fir - tree - the "i" as in the name Tim, while fur I say/hear as f-er, as in "er, did you mean that?".

    1817:

    I think generally that cities must subsidize the rural bits around them, because cities need things (food etc) from rural areas and therefore need people to stay in them. We still see a steady shift towards urban living.

    Here in Canada we have 'Equalization' baked into our consitution, where the federal government spends more in poor provinces and less in rich ones. It is a perennial source of whinging from our Albertan citizens, made more problematic by successive political types deliberately distorting the process and outcomes.

    Of course, when the oil industry is suffering the whinging takes on a different tone, wherein the global price of oil is somehow the fault of the current Prime Minister, or possibly some shadowy cabal of 'international' environmentalist activists. As an environmentalist I sincerely wish we had the power to kill the tarsands, but alas, it is happening without our input at all.

    1818:

    It is a perennial source of whinging from our Albertan citizens

    Who aren't a bit shy about accepting Federal money for natural disasters, which Alberta suffers disproportionately. (Six of the ten most expensive natural disasters.) While accepting no blame for building on floodplains etc. (Because zoning and restrictive building codes are somehow anti-capitalist etc.)

    Alberta. Canada's American province. 47.8% support for Trump, for example.

    1819:

    It was started in 1886 or 1888, depending on the source. It was extended and modified by linguists ever since then. Its goal is to be able to put down in writing every single human language. I find its motives are laudable, but the choice of characters (or glyphs) is baffling.

    1820:

    the global price of oil is somehow the fault of the current Prime Minister, or possibly some shadowy cabal of 'international' environmentalist activists

    It's got worse in Oz since the last federal election, which was widely seen as going to the side able to capture the coal towns in Central Queensland (probably incorrectly, but nonetheless this has become the political "wisdom" of the day). Given that Murdoch has a near monopoly on print media, there's a distressing trend to all this, right up to and including open unironic advocacy for building new coal fired power stations.

    1821:

    Charlie I meant the "old" definitions of the cities, not the greater metropolitan areas - which, certainly for Glasgow - is/are ridiculously large.

    whitroth Eglwyswrw - spot on Ddualt is THE-alt Tan-y-grease-i-uh Rhiwbi-dh-fyr Truas-vyn-ith Or so my Welsh frinds tell me .... "Abergavenny is, in Welsh Y-Ffeni which is pronounced Ih-Venni ( I think )

    Damian I understand that an ex-AUS Prime Minister is urging an enquiry into Murdoch's grip on the press & propaganda? There's also open country & separate towns in the space between Edin & Glas ... Like Falkirk & Shotts

    1822:

    Yes. There is an ex-PM urging an inquiry. The front page headline in papers the next day linked him with a paedophile ring. (he's the chairman of a charity that got a donation from an accused paedophile 3 years before he joined the charity, and which gave all the donated money to charities to help abused children some years ago).

    Murdoch is nothing if not predictable.

    1823:

    That's more different than the forms I use. Your fur is similar, but your fir isn't.

    1824:

    Welsh Y-Ffeni which is pronounced Ih-Venni ( I think )

    Close, Welsh f and ff are always as in the English Of and Off.

    Thread-merge: Trawsfynydd was the location of the only inland nuclear power station built in the UK.

    1825:

    We really enjoyed Wales when we were there. We may have gotten some brownie points and treated nicely, since we were obviously Americans... and I went out of my way to try to pronounce names, etc, correctly.

    1826:

    I understand that an ex-AUS Prime Minister is urging an enquiry into Murdoch's grip on the press & propaganda?

    It's up to two ex-PMs now (Rudd and Turnbull) making it almost, sort of bi-partisan (much like the commitment to developing more coal). Australian Parliament hosts e-petitions these days and the petition to hold an enquiry has received over half a million verified legitimate "signers". The Australian Senate has voted to hold such an enquiry. So it is very likely to happen in some form. There really should be a Royal Commission, but if we can't have one of those now, then a parliamentary enquiry that culminates in establishing one would be the next best thing.

    And yes, Murdoch papers launched an attack on Rudd based on very tenuous links with Jeffrey Epstein. Transparent to most, so more retaliation than genuine offensive defence.

    Some of the places in Aus I have in mind also have open country between centres, it's just that the cities encroach this more each year and some is completely encircled. Brisbane-Ipswich-Gold Coast-Sunshine Coast is an emerging conurbation, with not just open country but mangrove wetlands, eucalyptus forest and working farmland (mostly vegetable produce and dairy) within the space it will eventually encompass. I see D-FW more as a vision of a potential (not necessarily not dystopian) future rather than the present (AIUI the population there is several times Scotland altogether anyway). It is the suggestion that the independent Scottish state would essentially be Edinburgh-Glasgow and its hinterland.

    1827:

    I think I've noticed it before, that Edinburgh and Glasgow are closer than cities in other places that are considered part of the same conurbation (Dallas-Fort Worth comes to mind because the orientation is similar, and the spacing is about the same though obviously it's otherwise geographically quite different).

    Those city pairs, though close geographically, are politically and likely culturally noticeably different. In the US, Dallas is more urban-liberal than Fort Worth and I suspect there are similar differences in Scotland between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

    How did Glasgow vs Edinburgh vote for separation from the UK and Brexit?

    1828:

    AIUI the population there is several times Scotland altogether anyway

    Just a little bigger, 6.3M for DFW vs 5.5M for Scotland according to Google.

    1829:

    Alberta , like any one party petrostate, has been a hotbed of cronyism for a century.

    The local MLA where I grew up made a substantial fortune by having a patch of farmland converted to the largest industrial park in North America. Somehow, of all the land available it was his land that got used.

    I grew up in the epicentre of Alberta oil, and like most of my classmates began my adult life working in the oilfields. The survivors (aside from myself) are still there, for the most part. Any suggestion that we should perhaps not burn all the oil is seen as utterly insane, and 'why do you say that we don't work hard?'.

    Their government charges laughably small royalties, saves none of it, had the oil companies pay the salaries of the so-called regulators, and utterly refuse to consider any outcome that isn't 'drill baby drill'.

    The brief interlude of nightmarishly competent governance they had (4 years of NDP rule) was because of a split between the old, corrupt Tories and a faction that considered them not hard-right enough. Soon enough they resolved it and re-took their places at the trough.

    Sigh. Alberta is a lovely place, populated by a plurality of morons and ruled by arseholes.

    1830:

    Now that's scary, if you know your [redacted] stuff. I'm a Loki fan.

    what SHE (for real, Female - just not HSS) has unleashed due to her [[VANITY]] and psychotic hatred of her [[[SISTERS]]] and willingness to Damn / [[Not Share Heaven]] for her own Weapon Development" That 15 percent reads harsh, like a turf war/grudge/vendetta. Has anyone tried asking the Lazy Gun(spoilers at link) [1] to stand down, or share, or whatever? And asking she who has been [forging it? Taking it off the wall?] Is this related to nudibrach (Glaucus atlanticus) sex? Etc. I.e. I (human) can parse that in many rather different and unsettling ways.

    The Pope Instagram thing made me smile. Re Biden's cabinet, there is an as-yet unsettled constraint re cabinet positions re the control of the US Senate and confirmations. Senate control is a work in progress, still in play, and not just the runoffs. (Not that; mainly legal and other pressure. And if elderly Senators who are not taking SARS-CoV-2 precautions (that's a lot of the GOP) get themselves infected, it's entirely their fault.) (GOTV organization that flipped GA is being reworked.)

    [1] A short nice epilogue, which I had never read. Against a Dark Background: Epilogue ©1994 Iain M. Banks.

    1831:

    When I was a (very junior) technician with Alberta Environment we were told to redo one of our studies, because it was too definite about locating the source of pollution to an organization that made significant political contributions to the Tories.

    Just business as usual, apparently, and no one was really surprised by it.

    1832:

    Sigh, no.

    This is content from a [redacted] source, "Male", non-HSS.

    "...brother. A bit of redemption.".

    Here's another from a [redacted] source, "Female", non-HSS.

    "...Remember Me". [Note: we were going to type some information that was only 24 hrs old then stopped: because...

    Here's another from a [redacted] source, "Female", non-HSS, 14 day window, no degradation:

    "WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE TALKING TO?"

    -8 years

    "I cannot Know, I do not Know"

    Yep, you're non-human, and tapping into our Internet. And sending message to... a group of mostly older folks who are science fiction fans, and political, and you're aim is to... um, right, you expect us to figure out why you're telling us this, and to guess what you expect us to do about it.

    You have children and wider networks and are mostly smart people who don't want your species to go extinct. And yet, when given a load of fucking evidence right in your planck space EyE, you ... resort to turtles on a beach levels of MEH.

    shrug

    $12.5 trillion in moves and you think your world still exists?

    Do a grep: the post is "CME negative futures" with a link to their website.

    Like: you're all supposed to embrace the Wyrd, not fucking stamp it down while pissing your pants.

    1833:

    The actual issue here is pure old people arrogance.

    Bad Wetware.

    "There is nothing in the Universe that is Minded / Conscious barring what a Human Mind has Made"

    Does a shit on your systems, shows how shit they are, old people response is to piss their pants

    You guys were supposed to applaud when Aliens turned up, so what the fuck are you doing here?

    Like: literally proving you wrong, and you old fuckers, even the "best" of your Culture's Minds can't even fucking grasp, even after MULLLLLLLTIPLE TIME SPANKINGS THAT SHOW YOU'RE WRONG.

    Elves =/= Jews. Literally Elves. [That's for True Anon and their anti-Picature Icon stuff - literally, no... Elves exist and they're really not fucking Jewish)

    [redacted] =/= Humans or Deep State stuff. Literally not actually Human.

    Etc.

    And the cherry on the top: Black Holes and Information is wrong. That's fundamental. Pope liking Big Butts.

    YOU KILLED THE ENTIRE FUCKING BIOSPHERE FOR PLASTIC TOYS. YOU'RE PSYCHOTIC. IT'S NOT A SEAGULL IT'S AN ALBATROSS.

    Video: Film Gremlins "Do you hear what I hear?"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3YTW8diOPI

    1834:

    Oh, and MR WITHROTH.

    Yep, you're non-human, and tapping into our Internet.

    There is literally no Human Mind that can withstand what was done to ours. While we were fucking around and stopping literal death-Fascist-Cult stuff taking hold in your societies. Trust Me: it makes your CIA Rendition and MKULTRA acid dipped Ego Death stuff look like fucking child's play.

    Our. Kind. Do. Not. Go. Mad.

    ~Here's some flavor:

    [redacted] "OH SHIT" - on getting caught.

    On getting caught splicing in extreme violence / death visions coupled to actual HSS torture and death while making said visions a 'teachable moment' for training [redacted] Death Winged Nudibranches.

    Note. Keywords attract spiders.

    ~

    You read SF. So do the bad people. The difference is: your response is ultimately "NAHHHH, MEEP, NOT REAL" and theirs is: "We're gonna cage this fucker, torture it and turn it into a weapon".

    ~

    Get fucked.

    1835:

    Vulch I've been to Trawsfyndd by ( a special ) train - very slowly, the curves were very tight for even recent rolling stock. You may not have noticed, but Ddualt & Tanygrisiau are on a certain 2-foot-gauge railway - as is the Dinorwig pumped-storage scheme ....

    Bill Arnold NO PLEASE do not feed the troll? The (redacted) redacted (redacted) is, if nothing else boring repetetive & content-free Never mind the insults & ravings in 1834 ...

    Meanwhile ... DJT is taking a leaf from Trump's playbook Saying something so utterly wrong & outrageous, that everyone loses attention on things that matter ( Brexit ) to take time out for outrage at BoZo And they all, every single one of them, seem to have fallen for it. You would think that people would no longer fall for: "Oh LOOK! A Gorilla!" - but they do. Depressing

    1836:
    Because (a) omitting accents on systems than can't handle them is normal practice,

    Unless you're typing this on an ASR-33 connected to a PDP-11 then you are not using a "system that can't handle accents", you just can't be arsed to work out how to do it.

    1837:

    Basically all those phonological terms have decent Wikipedia pages, so they're pretty easy to look up. Of course most people speak without really thinking about the physical processes involved.

    Alveolus just means "cavity", and you have more than your pulmonary ones: there are dental alveoli too, which are the sockets your teeth plug into. Phonologically, "alveolar" means "with your tongue on the ridge where your tooth sockets are", but if you're in the business of trying to describe phonemes accurately then having to write that out all the time is tedious, which is why jargon exists.

    1838:

    Well yes what you say is true. But on the other hand I have to ask the questions "which accents" and "with what physical keyboard?"

    I can type Éire very easily because a related character set has been installed and because É has its very own (shifted) key on my physical keyboard. I specifically ordered them when I got my latest Dell computer.

    But what happens when I want to type a Spanish word with one of those squiggly things on top of the letter n, or a Czech hacek above a c? And the symbol for Euros, etc,etc.. Then I have to look up the ascii code and do a chord key combination for each an every one of those symbols! I would rather avoid the language!

    1839:

    Compose key systems are absolutely great for this - so much easier to remember. It's a shame they haven't become standard on more OSes.

    1840:

    But what happens when I want to type a Spanish word with one of those squiggly things on top of the letter n

    Windows 10 has a bunch of togglable keyboards. I use a Spanish one that does the job fairly well once the shift keys are located.

    Éé Ññ ü etc.

    1841:

    Togglable keyboards are good as a temporary fix when you're doing occasional work in another language. The trouble is that they are virtual.

    I'm a 3 finger hunt and peck typist and I want to see what I need to type, right on the key, when I need to go fast.

    People that I know who are fast touch-typists want the key placement to correspond to what they have in their memory. Togglable keyboards are no good for them when they'e in their fast mode.

    One day we will finally, finally have a truly togglable physical keyboard with tiny OLEDS on each key, so that I can hunt and peck my way around alternate character sets.

    1842:

    "Funny" accents, umlauts, cedillas etc Are all available in HTML-coding, is enabled Example - with spaces between the characters & then tyoed as a full example Lower-case "u" with an umlaut is: & u uml ; ü

    1843:

    People that I know who are fast touch-typists want the key placement to correspond to what they have in their memory. Togglable keyboards are no good for them when they'e in their fast mode.

    I usually use the common Finnish layout, which also has compose keys for non-Finnish stuff like ï, â, or ñ. As a kid I learned also the US keyboard layout (though with a slightly different physical layout). This is because I had an MS-DOS computer which usually had the Finnish keyboard setting, but some games required the US layout, and it was easy to switch between the two.

    In the spring I started learning Russian with Duolingo, and bought some stickers for the Russian layout. I dropped that but in the couple of months I almost began touch-typing it, so it's possible to learn it.

    Now I'm on a Japanese course, and writing 日本語 on this keyboard is quite hard - while I can type the sounds properly, it's necessary to pick the correct word from a list. I think it's much harder to be a touch-typist with syllabic and word scripts than in alphabetic ones.

    I still wouldn't try the Dvorak layout, and I think it's optimized for English. I'm fast enough with qwerty.

    1844:

    Now I'm on a Japanese course, and writing 日本語 on this keyboard is quite hard - while I can type the sounds properly, it's necessary to pick the correct word from a list.

    I often use Google Translate to create Japanese text -- after convincing it to translate 日本語 to English there's a text entry option you can select. Typing the Romaji letter equivalent of hiragana i.e. "ha" will give you a drop-down menu usually with the actual hiragana character "は" as the first option, with katakana and kanji options following. Sometimes you have to type two "n"s to get the correct hiragana though. It can also cope with doubled-consonants with the small tsu i.e. it gives you "って" when you enter "tte".

    There's also a freehand kanji mouse-writing entry mode that works better than I expected although I think it relies on most folks entering common kanji like "何" rather than odd/deprecated non-Jouhou kanjis.

    I do have a genuine JIS keyboard but sadly Windows doesn't seem to be able to allocate a different character entry method for different keyboards plugged into the same computer.

    1845:

    Can't you type a word like キーボード without looking at a list?

    1846:

    Yes, I can, but most words are not in katakana, and Japanese has the nice thing of having two syllabic scripts and one word script (? not sure of the term), and can have all three in a sentence, so there's more modal changes than the Latin script's upper and lower case. Also the system can't distinguish what I mean when writing 'hashi' - is it a bridge (橋) or chopsticks (箸), as an example? There I have to choose.

    I use the Windows Japanese input system when writing (rarely, I'm a beginner, mostly I write the assignments by hand), so using Google translate would be kind of annoying for anything longer.

    1847:

    I think I've noticed it before, that Edinburgh and Glasgow are closer than cities in other places that are considered part of the same conurbation

    They predate the streetcar and the steam locomotive, never mind the automobile. While they've acquired commuter suburbs, the centres of these cities are densely inhabited to this day, and even outlying suburbs have their own character. For example Leith, the port of Edinburgh, was a separate city until the 19th century even though it's only about 2 miles from central Edinburgh: Edinburgh only officially absorbed Leith around 1900-1910.

    Until the 1940s-50s travel for the majority was mostly on foot or by bus (if they had the money).

    1848:

    You are still making the mistake that all that is needed is data entry - I can assure you that is only the very beginning of the issue. I was peripherally involved in the ISO character set standardisation in the early days, learnt a lot, and regularly encounter the problems we were trying to resolve which were simply swept under the carpet with the Unicode/ISO merger. Here are a few of the issues, but let's start with a correction to most people's misapprehensions.

    A system (in this context) is the operating system, input and output interfaces, and all utilities. Also, handling text is more than simply input, storage and display, but includes such things as searching, collation and regular expressions / globbing.

    There are God knows how many widespread ways of representing characters outside basic 7-bit ASCII (and even within it the case of Web searches), and I encounter at least four on a regular basis. A lot of utilities/interfaces insist on converting to their favoured one, suppress what they don't like, or go worse in even more horrible ways.

    Even when they don't, having to remember a huge matrix of which method can be input via which interface and handled by which utilities, is not reasonable. And, no, composing keyboards do NOT solve this on their own, because higher level interfaces vary on how they handle such input. been there - been caught by that :-(

    Even sticking to ISO 8859-1 (enough for this purpose, but not enough for all I encounter or want to use, even in my retirement), there are at least half-a-dozen incompatible handlings, plus mishandlings and suppression, on my system. I regularly use Emacs as a cut-and-paste intermediary or various utilities in binary mode to fix up issues. Searching and collation is, of course, much, much worse than simple input, storage, transfer and display.

    I believe that Apple handles such things consistently but, as this thread indicates, it's unusual. I have several times over the years investigated New! Shiny! ISO 8859-1 support, only to give up in disgust. Life is too short to use such a suppurating heap of crap - over half of the extensive configuration and special utilities on my system are already to fix up misdesigns, without getting into that.

    1849:

    How did Glasgow vs Edinburgh vote for separation from the UK and Brexit?

    It turns out that every electoral area in Scotland voted to remain in the EU, individually and taken in aggregate. (Edinburgh voted remain by about 74/26.)

    Wrt. independence, last time round it was a bit mix'n'match, with Glasgow voting strongly for independence and bits of Edinburgh voting to remain in the UK. But there's been so much churn (and shift in public opinion) since 2014 that it's anybody's guess how the chips would fall this coming year.

    1850:

    One day we will finally, finally have a truly togglable physical keyboard with tiny OLEDS on each key, so that I can hunt and peck my way around alternate character sets.

    Hah, it already happened: https://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/popularis/

    Too bad it is sold out....

    1851:

    Yes :-( It looks very interesting.

    My main hate is the Caps Lock key - and especially when it dominates the left Shift key. Once upon a time, I disabled it at a fairly low level in the X windowing system, but 'improvements' removed that facility (though it is, of course, was still documented with no warning that it doesn't work when I last looked). I even tried rebuilding X, but the key binding tables I found weren't connected to anything useful, and the source (as anyone knows who has looked at it) is unspeakable. But look on the bright side - when I actually worked with it, it was much, much worse!

    1852:

    The price is 1600 USD. That is roughly what I pay, every ten years, for a CAD monitor and the computer attached to it.

    1853:

    Two US areas I'm familiar with are similar but on different time scales.

    Pittsburgh is locked in physical size by the over 140 cities and towns that completely surround it. Most laid out well over 100 years ago. Most of the borders seem to be based on ridge lines, large creeks, and no more than a mile or two wide in any direction. These were almost all mill towns back in the 1800s where people walked to the mill every day for work.

    The Dallas / Fort Worth mentioned by others is getting that way. They may be locked in by now. There was a LOT of empty pasture land when the DFW airport opened in the mid 70s. That really triggered an explosion of growth. To the extend that I suspect that more peole in the DFW area live in other cities than in either Dallas or Fort Worth. And there's little open land in the area between them.

    In 1970 on a visit to Dallas we drove north about an hour to my cousin's ranch (gentleman rancher / airline pilot was he). I suspect that it was where that Ikea I visited a few times over the last few years is now.

    I mean look at Las Colinas which is INSIDE the city of Irving. And was a ranch until 1972. Irving is that "small" city between Dallas and DFW of 240K people.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Colinas https://www.google.com/maps/place/Las+Colinas,+Irving,+TX/@32.8946528,-97.0474546,12z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x864c28241a0e3c4b:0x35b2caa1ea3abf0a!8m2!3d32.8958605!4d-96.9588229

    1854:

    Yes, but my point is that the terms of that particular jargon are extraordinarily badly chosen. Most terms in an unfamiliar jargon are somewhere between being able to convey at least some vague hint of their meaning and simply being benignly meaningless, so while you may be left with vague spots and gaps in your understanding of some text that uses them, you've at least ended up with sort of the right idea; and if you look them up it turns out that the meaning is not in conflict with the everyday usage of the word, so it isn't especially unmemorable.

    Phonological jargon terms tend to vary the other way, between meaningless and positively perverse, so what understanding you take from them isn't just incomplete and vague, it's actually heading in the wrong direction; and looking them up doesn't help for more than a couple of minutes, because you're being asked to remember that this extremely rare thing is back to front compared to every common context you encounter it in.

    The "alveolar" example turns out to be a kind of double instance of this. First, they have picked a word which is already familiar as having a specific meaning in an entirely different jargon, and is never encountered with any other meaning, so my uninformed reaction of "wtf are they blethering about lungs for" is more or less guaranteed. (I consider it a most improbable chance that I actually was more aware of the Latin meaning which "labial" invokes than the everyday one.)

    Then, it turns out that they are referring to its original meaning in a dead language, which nobody knows and even those few who do know are still going to think of lungs first, and using it in a way which isn't just baffling but actually misdirecting. If "alveolus" means "cavity"... and ""alveolar" means "with your tongue on the ridge where your tooth sockets are""... then they are using a word for a hole to refer to a location on a ridge. I quite understand the desire to devise a word to avoid having to type all that out every time, but they would have me poking around in quarries and adits looking for something which is actually on the top of the mountain.

    And they seem to have chosen all their jargon words on the same pattern. The ones which do obviously refer to mouth parts, or at least those I have looked up, all turn out to be describing something involving different mouth parts from the ones they seem to be on about.

    This perversity makes it impossible to remember what they are supposed to mean even if I do look them up. While I can remember, for instance, that I looked up "tap" once, I didn't retain its actual meaning for more than a few minutes; all I do retain is the memory of the frustration of reading all through the article and thinking "yeah but wtf has any of that got to do with tapping anything". And I don't remember ever looking any of them up with any significantly different result.

    There's a similar thing in Niala's gripe about the choice of symbols in IPA. They too are perverse. Anything that looks like a familiar letter never represents any of the familiar sounds associated with that letter, but they do crop up in words in (mostly less widely spoken) languages I'm not familiar with any of the sounds in. Obviously without properly knowing something like IPA it can never be more than a very rough guide to pronunciation, but as it is it's not even useful to guess from, because it tends to suggest guesses which are more wrong than what you'd probably guess without it.

    (Mind you, I suspect that an awful lot of the IPA pronunciations you see quoted are wrong anyway, since I come across so many inconsistencies trying to correlate ones for which I do know the answer in an attempt to work out what the sounds are supposed to be.)

    1855:

    I might dispute Charlie about walking & Edinburgh-Glasgow transits. Given that by about 1870 there were four-&-a-half rail routes between the two cities - & still are - now all electrified. ( One part-closed, but re-opened in stages. ) The fastest route has always been Waverley, Haymarket, Falkirk High, Queen St. 47.25 miles, 43 minutes, with 2 intermediate stops.

    1856:

    The key points about the EDI/GLA rail links is that they're capacity limited (they're already mobile sardine cans at rush hour, even with extra-long trains running every 10 minutes) and they cost an order of magnitude more than a bus or underground or tram ticket within either city -- they're configured as inter-city routes.

    It might in principle be possible to redesign the EDI/GLA transport system as a single conurbation-wide service, but it'd be fiendishly expensive and require building through city centres (never cheap -- see also CrossRail).

    1857:

    To be fair I did see the IPA being put to good use, once, in a group of non-linguists.

    It was used for teaching French to English speakers, in a small motivated group. Thanks to the IPA the teacher could isolate things like the sounds that exist in French (like the nasals in pain or main) but not in English, and have the people who had trouble with it work at it more.

    1858:

    The price is 1600 USD. Digging into this, I found out the switches are US$40 apiece (at least). Perhaps if you order them in the 10s of thousands they are a bit cheaper, still...

    Comes out to $4000 for 100 keys (most keyboards are, I think, about 103 keys?). I imagine you can consolidate some keys because they can be re-labeled quickly. It seems like $1600 is pretty cheap at current prices.

    Just adding some stick on labels might be more cost-effective until the cost comes down (if ever).

    1859:

    I think the cost will come down faster on bigger and bigger tablet computers before the cost comes down on Art Lebedev's OLED keyboards.

    1860:

    "Unless you're typing this on an ASR-33 connected to a PDP-11 then you are not using a "system that can't handle accents", you just can't be arsed to work out how to do it."

    Nope. Systems that can't handle accents are all over the place. It is still the case that anything beyond ASCII is not reliable.

    It may well be simply that the bit that says "this document uses such-and-such an encoding" has got lost. Or it's wrong, but still happens to work on the author's system. Or it's a format that doesn't have such a bit in the first place, like plain text, so the system just has to guess and some of them guess wrong. Or the system doesn't understand that encoding and falls back to something else. Or the encoding isn't as standard as it's supposed to be so things don't necessarily come out the same as they went in. Or someone's tried to move the database to a different encoding and cocked it up. Or the file has been through some transport which is technically only 7-bit clean but you can get away with it often enough that people don't think of it, like email. Or...

    Some things are intermittent. I have some examples relating to the Eastern Front in WW1; some of the letters with weird accents in Eastern European names are usually replaced with a space, but occasionally the same name, still in the body text, is rendered correctly. Whatever goes wrong has a 0.00something chance of going right.

    Screwed-up accents happen a lot. Sometimes you get nothing, sometimes you get obvious garbage, sometimes you get the right letter with the wrong accent on it. Lots of systems can't handle accents to a greater or lesser degree; quite possibly there are no systems that can handle every possible accent.

    Certainly I can't be arsed to remember how to type them, and I usually can't be arsed to go through the fucking about if I can remember. Occasionally I put them in if I'm typing HTML. But really I don't see the point in making a fuss about it if you're writing in English; if the occasional foreign word technically requires some peculiar mark which is difficult to type, just do it the easy way and type it without. All the extra hassle of putting it in would give you would be the chance that the letter might turn into a string of crap or disappear entirely, which if it happens is far more disruptive than a missing fly turd might be.

    (It may not even be distinguishable from a fly turd anyway, if it comes out as two or three pixels antialiased to shades of light grey and forming no discernible shape. Once or twice someone has finally worked out how to type the especially weird mark on some Eastern Front name where nobody else has ever bothered before, and I've tried to clean it off the screen...)

    1861:

    The new Apple M1 SoC is an example of Apple's vertical stack - they are replacing x86 with their own ARM-based processor and the initial testing results as the machines reach reviewers are clearly very very good.

    Hands-on with the Apple M1—a seriously fast x86 competitor

    The 2020 Mac Mini Unleashed: Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

    And of course none of these benchmarks even use the several billion transistors Apple has used in the Neural Engine ML accelerator on the chip. Machine learning on x86 machines is typically shoehorned onto the GPU, but the Neural Engine has an architecture tuned for this application so it will be interesting when some benchmarks for that appear.

    1862:

    Yes, I can see that working. Within the group you would have consistency and familiarity. It's the use of it as a "universally compatible encoding" that really shows that it isn't.

    1863:

    Yep. There are neighborhoods in big cities, esp. older ones. But a lot of Americans really don't understand a neighborhood, and real estate agents see the only as a marketing tool.

    I refer you to Canter and Siegel, who literally said, "there's no communities here, usenet is just a great marketing opportunity."

    1864:

    Ditto with Philly. It's size was fixed (Philadelphia City == Philadelphia County) by all the towns and counties around it, who did it in 1856 (and then there's Millville, inside of Philly).

    1865:

    I don't see the point in making a fuss about it if you're writing in English

    There is a scene in "In His House" (hopefully coming out in late 2022) where a couple of the protagonists are texting each other.

    Because neither of them were born in the 20th century, there is much reliance on emoji, never mind txt spk.

    I'm pretty sure the submission manuscript (in Word docx format) generated by Scrivener got the emoji right, at least when opened in Word on a Mac, but to avoid any ambiguity this is the first manuscript I'm submitting that comes with a PDF of a single sentence, just to make sure that the copy editor and typesetter get to look at what I entered.

    (I'd link to it here but, alas, it contains a spoiler!)

    1866:

    I know when I'm texting friends (on my old iPhone 4) sometimes the emojis I use disappear, and sometimes the emojis they use vanish — and there doesn't seem to be any consistency about the ones that work and the ones that don't.

    1867:

    What I'm wondering is whether iTunes will still work (or whether I can load the audio and video files from it into the newer apps). Because I have several weeks of music and videos that I already own that I don't want to repurchase as 'streaming media' (and some wouldn't be available anyway, being files I got from the artists).

    1868:

    "Once upon a time, I disabled it at a fairly low level in the X windowing system, but 'improvements' removed that facility (though it is, of course, was still documented with no warning that it doesn't work when I last looked)."

    It's possible that it's not X that's the problem, but some other shit that has been plastered over the top of it. So as far as X is concerned, it does still work; it's the other shit that then comes along and fucks it up again.

    From what I've encountered in this line I think there are at least two levels of upfucking going on. There has been some stupid crap around for ages that makes it completely ignore xorg.conf and IIRC everything else in /etc/X11. An update a long time ago left me with windowing totally borked and xorg.conf missing entirely; I reinstated the old one by hand, but it took no notice of it, or of anything else I did. Instead it was trying to guess its entire config from scratch, getting it wrong, and crashing. I had to root about for ages before I discovered what comealong clever-clever piece of shit was helpfully preventing me from fixing whatever it had itself broken, and ripped it out. I'm afraid I can't say what it was though because whatever I did worked and hasn't needed doing again.

    Then there are things like GNOME which stop you configuring X and everything else as well, which is one of many reasons I don't use it. Again, the standard configuration files are still there and there's nothing to suggest they don't work, but nothing you do to them makes any difference. The thing is this can happen even if you don't have the GNOME environment installed, just as a result of installing some GNOME application on its own. It pulls in enough of the shitpile that it starts breaking things of its own accord. I had something do this once that broke my networking configuration; I had to uninstall it and all the crap it had dragged with it, and remind myself to screen the dependencies of things more severely in future, but I've still had occasional more minor instances of the same type.

    One particularly annoying thing is that while it was possible to find out what was doing it, it remained totally obscure both how it was overriding the config files and where it was getting the data from that it was using instead. So all I could do was get rid of the offending item, instead of making it stop breaking things and then doing whatever I had wanted it for with it.

    "over half of the extensive configuration and special utilities on my system are already to fix up misdesigns"

    Probably about the same here. Maddening, isn't it.

    1869:

    iTunes doesn't even exist as of Catalina -- it's been unbundled and bits split out into different applications, such as Apple Music. Apps get onto the iOS device natively, via the App Store (you don't configure an iPhone or iPad from a Mac any more), and syncing happens in the Finder -- you can drag and drop movies or music files onto a mounted iPhone or iPad directly.

    1870:

    iTunes has been gone since macOS Catalina, and we are now on Big Sur. It was replaced by Apple Music app, Apple TV app and Apple podcasts. This is the same whether it’s an x86 or an Apple Silicon Mac. All the files you had before should still be there, just accessed via the new apps. I certainly didn’t lose anything when I upgraded to Catalina and Big Sur but backups are always a good idea when upgrading an OS.

    1871:

    arrbee @ 1811: As R-M himself might say: *pshaw*

    I've seen that many times, but I've never really been sure how it's pronounced.

    1872:

    I prefer George Bernard Pshaw.....

    But then, I like p-terodactyls....

    1873:

    Greg: Epistemic humility as a virtue

    Survey of ball lightning. AFAIK, there is still no decent recorded evidence, film, electronic, video or stills. Just eyewitness testimony, and a lot of it. Also a possible spectrographic measurement of a 1.64 second incident[1]. (I have not personally seen ball lightning.) Ball Lightning: An Elusive Force of Nature (Robert K. Doe, 3 December 2012, book chapter) Ball lightning has been witnessed indoors, outdoors, and from the skies by aviation professionals and passengers. Critics claim the phenomenon does not exist. It has been discounted as hallucinations, misidentification, and folklore.

    The wikipedia article is long and interesting.

    [1] Observation of the Optical and Spectral Characteristics of Ball Lightning (January 2014, Jianyong Cen, Ping YuanP,Simin Xue)

    1874:

    There's some of that going on, certainly, especially in poxious programs like Emacs, but the buggering of xmodmap was definitely SOMEWHERE in the X Windowing System morass. What it seems to be is that they have introduced an interface that bypasses the settable mapping, and quite a few things use that. On the other hand, I have used systems where it was buggered BELOW that level - i.e. it was in the actual keyboard driver.

    I had to remove it because bloody SDL couldn't handle it, but I have just restored it and will see how much it breaks - and how much takes any notice of it!

    1875:

    whitroth @ 1816: Yes, to me. fir - tree - the "i" as in the name Tim, while fur I say/hear as f-er, as in "er, did you mean that?".

    Funny thing. I just tried pronouncing "fir" with the 'i' from Tim and it comes out sounding like "fear"

    FWIW, around here fir/fur are pronounced exactly the same.

    1876:

    In one of the science fiction adventures of Blake and Mortimer Ball Lightning was the way the Soviets transmitted power to their bases, in order to secretly control the globe's weather.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.O.S._Meteors:_Mortimer_in_Paris

    1878:

    Niala @ 1838: Well yes what you say is true. But on the other hand I have to ask the questions "which accents" and "with what physical keyboard?"

    I can type Éire very easily because a related character set has been installed and because É has its very own (shifted) key on my physical keyboard. I specifically ordered them when I got my latest Dell computer.

    But what happens when I want to type a Spanish word with one of those squiggly things on top of the letter n, or a Czech hacek above a c? And the symbol for Euros, etc,etc.. Then I have to look up the ascii code and do a chord key combination for each an every one of those symbols! I would rather avoid the language!

    Do you mean like Ñ ñ ... or č? Euro ; Pound £ (also Yen ¥) and the upside-down question mark ¿ that I sometimes see in Spanish sentences on the internet.

    Windoze has this little built in program called the Character Map - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_Map_(Windows). I found all of those using it, except for the Euro symbol which is "Alt+0128".

    I think the Euro symbol is in there, but I didn't find it before I got tired of looking & just googled "alt code Euro" because it's not in my Keyboard Shortcuts Map I have pinned to the wall above my monitor. Various flavors of Linux have a similar utility, as did OS/2.

    And a cool thing I learned - OS/2 lives on. There's a an OS called ArcaOS that's based on OS/2 from "Arca Noae, LLC under license from IBM". Only 32-bit, and no current plans to add a 64-bit version, but ...

    1879:

    Slightly US election-related, but really for those who might want to have such a number for authorial purposes:

    https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/17/us/joe-biden-trump

    At $20,000 a day, Mr. Giuliani’s rate would be above the top-of-the-line lawyers in Washington and New York who can charge as much as $15,000 a day if they are spending all their time working for a client.

    1880:

    Under Windows, there is an old utility(*) than allow you to build your own signed keyboard driver - it is a quite tedious process, but there is also a number of pre built keyboard drivers on the web.

    I'm using a linux fr-oss layout (4 symbols per physical key, covers all a-z and nordic languages with squiggles top or bottom using Shift+AltGr and a number of dead keys).

    The "Visual keyboard" utility allow you to visualize the resulting setup when needed.

    (*) Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) Version 1.4

    1881:

    I'm still running Lion (on the old MacPro) and Sierra (on the newer iMac). MacPro can't be upgraded anymore, and the iMac is my photography computer which needs to run Aperture. My local shop recommended Sierra as being stable with Aperture, and I haven't chanced upgrading to anything more recent.

    The MacPro is what I use to store all my media (4 internal hard drives) which I listen/watch through the Apple TV or my old iPod Touch (no camera, but signed by Buffy St. Marie!). I'm planning on buying an iPhone SE to replace the iPhone 4s soon, and it would be nice if it could also replace the iPod (cutting devices carried) but that means being able to transfer a lot of music to it somehow.

    It's a minor thing in the scheme of things, but I have over a decade of BBC Music Magazine disks digitized, plus an extensive folk collection (not to mention Chinese pop music) and I rather like being able to listen to what I want when travelling. (I remember the days of carefully planning mix-tapes for trips, but have no desire to live in them again.)

    1882:

    David L @ 1853: Two US areas I'm familiar with are similar but on different time scales.

    Pittsburgh is locked in physical size by the over 140 cities and towns that completely surround it. Most laid out well over 100 years ago. Most of the borders seem to be based on ridge lines, large creeks, and no more than a mile or two wide in any direction. These were almost all mill towns back in the 1800s where people walked to the mill every day for work.

    The Dallas / Fort Worth mentioned by others is getting that way. They may be locked in by now. There was a LOT of empty pasture land when the DFW airport opened in the mid 70s. That really triggered an explosion of growth. To the extend that I suspect that more peole in the DFW area live in other cities than in either Dallas or Fort Worth. And there's little open land in the area between them.

    Did you forget the Research Triangle here in North Carolina? Twenty miles (as the crow flies) from downtown Raleigh to downtown Durham & add another twelve to get on to Chapel Hill.

    1883:

    Submitted for your amusement:

    https://djtrumplibrary.com/

    1884:

    Reply 1879

    ["At $20,000 a day, Mr. Giuliani’s rate would be above the top-of-the-line lawyers in Washington and New York who can charge as much as $15,000 a day if they are spending all their time working for a client."]

    Giuliani must be the last person standing who hasn't heard you do not get paid working for these genocidal maniacs. OTOH, his legal abilities consistenly have been demonstrated to be on the par of his bestie's business acumen.

    1885:

    $20,000 a day

    Thinking about this over supper just now, it occurred to me that $2e4/day * 3.65e2 day/year = $7.3 million a year working full time, no time off. That's decent money, but not what I think of as Masters of the Universe / C-Suite remuneration. So do the topmost lawyers get stock options or something similar to boost their otherwise pitiable income?

    1886:

    Bill Arnold Uh? Look, the Seagull is utterly mad & needs medical help, OK? That is neither arrogant nor humble, it's a statement of (apparent) fact - which could be changed if new evidence appears ...

    Ball Lightning has, IIRC, been observed inside one of the Cambridge physics labs ( There was violent Fen thunderstorm in progress, outside! )

    Talking of buggering programmes ... it turns out that it wasn't the extermination of "Flash" that was stopping my viewing of loco valve & piston events, it was fucking bloody Windows "upgrades" - that were removing my *.exe files that enabled the motion to run. I managed to find the original source, again, re-load the "exes" & bingo, everything works. Will see what happens after next Win10 "update" Arseholes.

    Ah yes ... accents & "Funny" makings START here oh & the Euro is simply ... & euro ; thusly €

    1887:

    remuneration

    https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/

    Average pay of CEOs at the top 350 firms in 2018 was $17.2 million—or $14.0 million using a more conservative measure. (Stock options make up a big part of CEO pay packages, and the conservative measure values the options when granted, versus when cashed in, or “realized.”)

    1888:

    JBS @ 1878:Windoze has this little built in program called the Character Map

    Holey Moley, that's one big character map, viewable through a 10 by 20 box matrix with a seemingly unending scrolling control.

    But I found the Euro symbol easily because the window also has an advanced view choice, which offers a character set choice where I chose Unicode, and then chose Unicode Row in the Group by choice and then picked the third choice in the newly opened Unicode Row mini-window: Monetary symbol.

    They have 18 monetary symbols and the last one is the Euro: €

    Thanks

    1890:

    Wisconsin has made me a happy camper. If Trump wants a recount, he has to pay a cool $7.3 million up front. Based on what happened when the Green party requested a recount a few years ago, he could get some of it back - but there's no guarantee.

    Apparently this is required by Wisconsin law, not something they did pre-emptively based on Trumps deadbeat past. There is some useful detail at Reuters.

    1891:

    On macOS control-command-space brings up the character viewer with categories

    Frequently used Favourites Emoji Arrows Bullets/Stars Currency Symbols Latin Letterlike symbols Maths symbols Parentheses Pictographs Punctuation

    and a search by Unicode name so "root" finds 🦷 √ ∛ ∜ ؆ ؇

    1892:

    I'm slightly surprised that there are so many of us using physical keyboards. I've been using SwiftKey on Android for several years. All my comments here are produced on that and some are ridiculously over long. I guess if I was writing books I'd bother to go sit at a desk, but the convenience of sitting on the lounge with my partner, watching Netflix far outweighs getting 80 wpm on a keyboard.

    So if I want a keyboard in a different language, I just go to settings and turn it on. That gets me gestural and predictive text in the new language, along with any special characters.

    Ko wai tō ingoa? Ko Jason tāku ingoa.

    Of those, the only one I had to type in was my name. The rest were gestural.

    But for one off use I just type it into Google and copy paste the results

    Éire

    It's even the first suggestion in the predictive text box when I get back from Google.

    For currency I just type GBP, quid, pounds, USD as appropriate. "$" could mean anything, so I don't use it though it's there on the keyboard along with £, ¢, ¥ and €.

    The only down side is the weird typos I get. If becomes of. Off becomes of. In becomes on. It's becomes its or of. Or becomes out.

    1893:

    "I'm slightly surprised that there are so many of us using physical keyboards."

    I will give up my Model M when you pry it from my cold dead fingers... :)

    1894:

    Virtual keyboards, that is, the crap that appears on your mobile, is an unutterably lousy kludge. More than once, someone asked me to type my email on theirs, and they wound up doing it, because my fingers aren't size 2.

    When I can have a full-sized keyboard appear before me in VR, and I can hear the key clicks, yes. But touchscreen keybords are terrible.

    1895:

    Thanks. That will get them into the new app on my computer (when I upgrade).

    Still need to see if an iPhone SE can be loaded from one of my old computers, as I'll be buying the iPhone first. (Normally I'd just head in to the Apple Store and get a "Genius" to confirm that, maybe by taking in my laptop with some files and asking them to show me on an iPhone — but Toronto is a Covid hotspot and that's definitely not an essential trip right now.)

    1896:

    Funny thing. I just tried pronouncing "fir" with the 'i' from Tim and it comes out sounding like "fear"

    The good old boy way of saying it.

    I grew warshing clothes. A product of Jesuit schooling that I shared a house with shamed it out of me. I have washed clothes ever since.

    1897:

    My old iPhone clicks when I use the little dinky virtual keyboard. So do my iPads. I thought clicking was standard behaviour.

    1898:

    So do the topmost lawyers get stock options or something similar to boost their otherwise pitiable income?

    People in such fields who really make it big do so through connections to deals and such. They cut their rate in half for a 3% stake in the future profits of a deal or similar.

    1899:

    On macOS control-command-space brings up the character viewer with categories

    Or you just stick the shortcut into the menu bar.

    1900:

    I'm slightly surprised that there are so many of us using physical keyboards.

    Have you missed the regular polemics here about how virtual keyboards are insane and no one in their right mind would use one and they should be outlawed and they are the spawn of the devil and ...

    1901:

    Look, the Seagull is utterly mad & needs medical help, OK?

    Wyrd. The Seagull has been accused of murder, rape, assault and a few other things in your legal system. No, really: this is the shit that "dissidents" get charged with if you fuck off the wrong Baron or Lord.

    She convinced (accurately to be fair) that she was innocent of all charges. A few times. In your Court system.

    People with non-neurotypical Minds fair badly in your Legal system, precisely because most juries are made up by people like you: we call you "CLOSED" Minds.

    That's your shitty Legal System. And to be fair to it: it never even imagined we were "insane".

    Don a professional dress attire, tits levered up with x3 bras being worn, and a sultry look to the male Justices and... (this is going to kill any actual Legal readers for the truth of it): Ignore the fucking prosecuting barrister, focus your attention solely on the Judge / Magistrates and fucking skull-fuck them with your responses while never even deigning to look at the ACTUAL LEGAL TROLL trying to run games on you.

    Sadly: Mr Greg has never had a difficult day in his life, largely due to his rather impressive wife. Who is, for the record, a rather big fucking deal.

    ~

    The one we're talking about is rather more metaphysical and with elephants and so forth within it.

    Greg: I shit on human systems almost by accident: if you think I'm talking about HOMO SAPIENS then you're completely fucked.

    Look around 2020

    Does it seem REAL?

    HELLO WORLD

    1902:

    You might be interested in playing with a program called Solvespace (from solvespace.com). It lets you draw all kinds of linkages, constrain them, change the dimensions, and push and pull them around to see how they move. You can easily knock up a sketch of a valve gear in it, turn the wheels to watch it go round as quick or slow as you like, and change the dimensions of the parts to see how it affects the actual valve events. You could waste hours messing about with it :)

    1903:

    I'm still running Lion (on the old MacPro) and Sierra (on the newer iMac). MacPro can't be upgraded anymore, and the iMac is my photography computer which needs to run Aperture.

    Two things you might or might not know about.

    There's a group who work on firmware flashes for older Macs to allow them to run newer macOS versions. I know someone who has done it to their cheese grater MacPro. Mostly works but there are a lot of little things that act odd or not at all like audio in and such.

    Then there's this little thing. https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/28/free-retroactive-tool-brings-aperture-itunes-back-to-life-in-macos-catalina

    Apparently it modifies the three apps as they load into memory. I suspect it does this to avoid copyright issues with Apple.

    I have not used either of these personally.

    1904:

    Giuliani must be the last person standing who hasn't heard you do not get paid working for these genocidal maniacs. OTOH, his legal abilities consistenly have been demonstrated to be on the par of his bestie's business acumen.

    There are three non-exclusive reasons this could be happening. 1. Trumperism the journalistic equivalent of fentanyl. The journalists are setting up to try to go into rehab, and the dealers are trying to keep the monkey on their backs or alternatively kill them, by giving the extra-good pills. (See the relevant lesson of Keith Richards). One could theoretically view Trumperism as running on the model of addiction on multiple levels, snaring the press, donors, investors, and politicians who just require regular doses of the shit, and have no morals left about how they go about getting it. If so, sending 70 million people cold turkey during a pandemic is...a fascinating concept. Wonder what the withdrawal symptoms are?

  • As you noted, G-Man may be suffering from advancing K-syndrome, perilethal Peter Principle, Mad Cow, self-medicating with dexamethasone, or may otherwise be prone to lapses in prudence and judgement.

  • G-dog could be figuring that successful suits pay pennies on the dollar when all is said and done, so he's trying to maximize his dollars billed while that's still possible, to get something reasonable out of the suit.

  • 1905:

    I saw Retroactive. Not certain I want to trust it. I should probably bite the bullet and upgrade the iMac to Mojave, but I don't want to be dealing with computer issues when we might be heading into another lockdown.

    Definitely don't want to deal with something that mostly works but has lots of odd failures. After using Macs for decades I'm pretty used to 'it just works' as being normal, and I no longer have the programming chops (or desire) to fiddle about under the hood.

    If/when Serif comes out with their Lightroom replacement I'll be jumping on it. I already use Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher for most of my photographic work. At that point I'll be able to upgrade to the newest operating system (and maybe one of those M1 machines) and maybe get Final Cut to get into video editing. Or DaVinci Resolve.

    1906:

    To be fair I did see the IPA being put to good use, once, in a group of non-linguists.

    I learned IPA on the fifth grade in school - our English books had them to teach the pronunciation. I think it was a good thing to learn as English has quite a few sounds not found in Finnish. It has helped me a lot learning new languages after that.

    My first foreign language was German, and I seem to remember those books didn't have IPA markings. I think it was because the amount of German learners was much smaller than that of English learners (and I think it has gone even worse since then) so the books were more cheaply made, and probably couldn't easily have different fonts and such. The first German books I had seemed like they were laid out by hand, with texts written with a typewriter.

    Also at some point much later I taught myself the linguistic jargon terms, they also made it easier to figure out some language stuff. Still I think it's hard to learn languages only from books - I tried to do that with Mandarin and found it quite impossible to learn how to speak it. Luckily nowadays we have lot of teaching material on the internet (net? Though it has no yarn and is not used to catch fish?), but still a live teaching situation is for me the best way to learn the basics. After learning how to speak the language, I can read books to get me further. Of course a teacher is a good thing for explaining nuances and answering questions.

    1907:

    I'm slightly surprised that there are so many of us using physical keyboards.

    I'm a software engineer by trade, and much of my time I want to write some kind of programming language, and I find it easier to do that on a physical keyboard. I'm not even sure my laptop has a touch-sensitive screen...

    At home I vary between using my desktop with a nice keyboard with mechanical switches - not a Model M as that would be somewhat loud - and my iPad. I can write stuff on the iPad but the fact that the keyboard takes up screen space is annoying, and the lack of physical feedback doesn't help things. I probably should learn to use some gesture type thingie, but for now I'm happy with typing with my index fingers or thumbs (those especially when on a phone). There's some learning curve to the gestures, and I write both English and Finnish every day, and it's too much of a hassle to check which language I'm using as the gesture things use dictionaries.

    I do play some on the desktop, and I find the keyboard+mouse combination to be a good one for many games. I could plug them into the Playstation, but there's enough hardware connected anyway, and I play most games on the desktop anyway.

    1908:

    gasdive Some of us PREFER physical keyboards My mobile phone has a physical keyboard - the touchscreens are so wobbly & unreactive & prone to error as to be unusable

    @ 1901 I repeat: the Seagull is utterly mad & needs medical help, OK? I would not feed the troll except for THIS: due to his rather impressive wife. Who is, for the record, a rather big fucking deal. Not acceptable - Moderators? And, I've had several difficult days in my life - usually associated with deaths of people close to me ....

    1909:

    I learned to touch type around 69 or 70 when in high school. I thought my mom was nuts for taking me to that local "business college" Saturday mornings for a few months. But in some ways I hit the lottery as computers and keyboards became my thing a few years later.

    While I do type a lot on my iPhone, in my current work as a systems admin I use from 1 to 15 different keyboards per day. I have no issue with the virtual keyboard on my iPhone. A perfectly good trade off for size and weight. But typing command lines on such would drive me nuts in a hurry.

    And as someone with a career that starting our in programming on cards and green screens I got used to swapping keyboards on a regular basis.

    I have a box of spares from about 10 different manufacturers. Some going all the way back to the original IBM/PC interface.

    And again my opinion is that everyone should use what they like. It doesn't make them brilliant, stupid, ignorant, or smart. It just means they have made a personal choice.

    1910:

    It's really the representation of a (human) snort, so 'pronouncing' is not quite right, but the OED says it is pronounced more-or-less as it is written.

    1911:

    Virtual keyboards, that is, the crap that appears on your mobile, is an unutterably lousy kludge.

    They evolved while you weren't looking.

    (It's like comparing the keyboard on an Atari 400 or a ZX81 with an IBM Model M.)

    Seriously, 80 words/minute is entirely achievable on a modern gestural-input virtual keyboard that's been properly trained (i.e. custom dictionary attuned to the user's quirks of syntax).

    1912:

    I know I'm a couple of hundred posts behind on this thread, but a good description of undersea cable stuff can be found in Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson. Its from 1996 so the technology is a bit dated, but the fundamentals of transoceanic cables haven't changed. It includes the "Chinese divers stole our repeater" story and quite a few more. Its one of those things I go back and re-read every few years.

    1913:

    Still, there remains the problem of the mobile screen being too small for people like me who have big fingers.

    When they gave me a new iPod at the office I returned it because everything was too small. Then they gave me a kind of blob-topped stylus that I'd never seen before, something like the Sensu (tm). Now I can at least do the basic things.

    Don't know if the gesture interface would work though.

    1914:

    You might have noticed the trend towards big and bigger phones?

    Not just stuff like the iPhone 12 Pro Max (with a 6.7" screen) but the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 which unfolds to a 7.6" diagonal screen -- barely smaller than the iPad Mini -- or the Microsoft Surface Duo (complete with utterly half-baked Android firmware: needs at least two more tries before MS gets it even approximately right).

    Bad news is, the price is proportional to the screen size -- the two Android devices make the top-end iPhone look cheap! (Reader: the top end iPhone costs more than a bottom end Macbook Pro.)

    Good news is: these are remarkably powerful pieces of kit. (The Samsung, with Dex, is pretty much a desktop PC substitute. All of them run a workable if cut-down version of Microsoft Office. Apple make a big deal about computational photography and 4K HD video editing on a phone. And so on.)

    1915:

    I sure did notice the MS Surface Duo. It doesn't know if it's a tablet or a pad and it fails in between.

    1916:

    Um. While I haven't tried (it's a hell of a lot of work for an uncertain amount of gain), I suspect that is true mostly for people who write a single language with a lot of redundancy. One of the reasons that I loathed 'intelligent' editors (and still do) is that I used over half a dozen programming languages on a daily basis, wrote more than one form of English, and was very often modifying someone else's work (so needed to follow THEIR conventions). That's a variation of the reason I loathe spelling checkers.

    Of course, many people DO write primarily a single language with a lot of redundancy, such as English.

    1917:

    For me, I use a proper keyboard because it's part of the laptop which is my usual "doing stuff" platform. Get back to me when mobile devices can run multiple applications in overlapping visible windows. I've normally got one or two browser windows open, a chat window in one corner and a text editor as a minimum. There may also be something along the lines of the Arduino IDE, more web pages, etc.. I refuse to get into the dance of flipping between full screen windows when I'm trying to get things done.

    1918:

    If the software was properly designed it'd be an excellent device -- but Microsoft bought it in from an outside vendor with about two months' to spare (per reviews) and the rough edges show. I suspect it's a good idea botched in the implementation, but differently botched from the flexible/folding-screen phones, which are now two generations ahead and likely to get it right in the next year or so (and then begin crawling down the price curve until they're affordable).

    And then there are weird alternatives like the Astro Slide Transformer, which is what happens when you cross a Psion 5 like PDA with a touchscreen smartphone (it's the successor to last year's Cosmo Communicator and the preceding Gemini PDA, getting closer to useable each time).

    1919:

    proper

    Makes me smile when that word or similar gets applied to a personal choice.

    1920:

    Still need to see if an iPhone SE can be loaded from one of my old computers, as I'll be buying the iPhone first.

    Try going into the list of software updates and seeing when iTunes was last updated (and what the updates did).

    Can check on a Mac as my Mac died about 4 months ago but Apple keeps updating iTunes on Windows and the updates usually mention support for a new phone/tablet device as the reason.

    (also, perhaps try calling the Apple Store and see how busy they are - I know the Square One location has taken over an empty unit elsewhere in the mall for hardware pickups, and Square One isn't as busy as normal in general, so it may not be that bad to visit).

    1921:

    Nothing quite like putting a little bit of pressure on at the right time .... Couple that with optimistic remarks from Ireland & it's getting INTERESTING

    In the other insanity, DJT has filed for a recount in Wisconsin & is told that his own running-down of mail-in-votes probably cost him at least one state, oh dear, how sad.

    1922:

    I am feeling so sunny and full of optimism about a Brexit deal that I pulled the trigger on a new phone, something like 3-15 months ahead of schedule. I've been trying to back off from 24 month upgrades to 36 months -- it's one of my main computing devices -- but I'm pretty sure that if there is no deal in the next couple of weeks Sterling will drop by anything up to 30%, and Apple adjusts their prices in line with the USD exchange rate. (Also, there's a one month wait at present, which tells you something about international shipping delays: Apple are totally not amateurish about logistics for new iPhones.) Buying now means at worst I wasted a couple of months on the life of my old phone (which gets rolled over into being the household emergency spare): at best it means I saved several hundred quid.

    Next task: stock up on cans of chick peas and airtight containers of rice. Also maybe time to buy soya beans and have another go at making tofu. (We have a soya milk extractor which works fine, but the British organic soy beans we tried last time round were very meh indeed for tofu purposes.)

    1923:

    DJT has filed for a recount in Wisconsin

    Well. At least for 2 big city counties. That only cost them $3 mil. To do the entire state would have required a bit under $8 mil.

    1924:

    Nothing quite like putting a little bit of pressure on at the right time ....

    And what makes anyone think the UK government will listen this time, as opposed to all the warning businesses have given for the last 4 years?

    1925:

    You're a NATO partner. We won't let you starve. We'll have our food marketing boards tear up their limits and we'll flood you with diary products.

    1926:

    In '87 or '88, I had a guy at a desk next to me - this is Austin, TX, who said his name was "Kin". Took me several days to realize he mean "Ken". (He pronounced the "e" like the "i" in "in".

    1927:

    "Spawn of the Devil"? I don't think any of us brought MicroSoft into this....

    1928:

    Given how very hacky the writers for the serial Earth, 2020 are, at this point I am putting way too high odds on the recounts revealing massive fraud.. by the republicans. As in "the polls were fine, the count was not".

    1929:

    I only learned there were "phonetic" descriptors of letters/sounds in my late teens, working in a college library, when I read Sapir, I think.

    By high school, in the US, language choices were Spanish, French, and German. FAAAARRR too many Americans have difficulty with American English.

    1930:

    Video editing. On a phone.

    shakes head WHY?!?!?! To edit your selfies?

    1931:

    Don't get me started. My current active hate is facepalm (which I use because a lot of friends don't read email anymore...). The entire platform needs to be nuked from orbit, and redone from scratch by people who actually know what they're doing, instead of 4-5 teams of arts majors who don't understand programming, and look at you with a "HUH" when you say "consistent UI". For example, I'm on a 24" diagonal monitor, and my browser is about 25% of my screen. Why does it force me to maximize the browser to fill the entire monitor, to see someone's "story"?

    1932:

    That Astro Slide really is nice.

    However, I'm having the issue I've mentioned about buying ebooks, and I'm coming down to probably buying a Samsung Tab A, 7 or 8. Then, for < $20US, I'll get a cover WITH A REAL KEYBOARD, AND NO TOUCHPAD. That will replace my '09 Netbook when we do traveling again, as well as being an ereader*.

    • ereader: a device, matching as closely as possible, a mass-market paperback book.
    1933:

    Oh, and I was planning on getting the Tab A with wifi only - it's not a phone, IMO. Now, when I see it at $99 again....

    1934:

    @1904: As you noted, G-Man may be suffering from advancing K-syndrome, perilethal Peter Principle, Mad Cow, self-medicating with dexamethasone, or may otherwise be prone to lapses in prudence and judgement.

    I really doubt Giuliani has the math skills to induce K-syndrome; of course, he might have been given something to read like what happened to the phangs.

    Rudy's day in court (paywalled, sorry, will look for a free version on an aggregator) went about as well as you'd expect for someone who was last in a federal courtroom in the early 1990s. He made multiple errors of fact in referring to other lawsuits that have already been withdrawn or dismissed, and appeared to have trouble following the legal technicalities raised by opposing counsel and the judge. Rudy should stay in his "safe space" on Faux News and OANN.

    1935:

    I still think that there is a significant chance that Bozo will agree a deal, but be unable or too spineless to deliver. There is also a significant chance that the gummint or Conservative MPs will renege on it flagrantly enough to force the EU to pull the plug.

    1936:

    Next task: stock up on cans of chick peas and airtight containers of rice.
    Air tight containers? We buy 25Kg sacks.

    1937:

    Me @1934: Here's a non-paywalled article with a less detailed description of Rudy's day in court.

    1938:

    In an older house in the UK, in winter? Edinburgh is pretty dry compared to the west coast, but damp is still a serious problem.

    1939:

    Air tight containers? We buy 25Kg sacks.

    No problem with weevils? Lucky you. The smaller airtight containers are to keep insects that might already be in the sacks from spreading throughout the entire supply.

    1940:

    Latest bag I bought of basmati, at the Asian/Hispanic supermarket near me was what, kg? 10? (There's only two of us, and we don't eat huge meals) came in a ziplock bag. When they don't, I put them into large plastic containers with lids. The ones they sell in "office supply" stores for pretzels work great.

    1941:

    Many of those are airtight as the term is normally used in the UK; when they aren't, crisp biscuits and similar will go soggy even in a centrally-heated 1930 house in Cambridge, and my guess is that OGH's is more likely to have damp, and probably has solid (not cavity) walls. You don't need actual airtightness for brown rice (I dislike white rice), but I wouldn't keep white rice (or flour, or sugar, or ...) for long anywhere I couldn't guarantee to keep it dry - which, in the UK, necessarily means somewhere that is heated and away from solid outside walls.

    1942:

    "You're a NATO partner. We won't let you starve. We'll have our food marketing boards tear up their limits and we'll flood you with diary products."

    The US is also a long-standing Ally and Friend to the UK. On January 1, as soon as you hit the Brexit Wall, ... or rather, once Biden takes office in late Jan and untangles the smoking ruins which Trump is leaving us in,....... as soon as we can get enough uninfected people.... as soon as we can move food from the depths of the Covid-wracked Great Plains....

    You're on your own - buy canned goods in bulk.

    1943:

    Meanwhile I'm no longer so distracted by politics that I can't get any work done.

    All the dishes are washed & since Sunday I've managed 5 loads of laundry - the bottle neck is drying & folding. Plus the washer/dryer are down in the basement & I have to climb up and down those rickety stairs twice for each load (although I can double up by carrying down a new load to be washed when I go down to put the preceding load in the dryer).

    I've even swept & vacuumed the carpet in here.

    1944:

    "If a hard Brexit ever causes food shortages in the UK the Brits can always trade Marmite for Canadian bread, cheese and milk."

    Canadians have access to vast tar sands deposits to waterproof their roofs; they don't need Marmite :)

    1945:

    I found the browser I use remembers zoom settings for sites so I've got facepalm zoomed out to a size that restores the text size to how it was before the latest "we've made it so much easier" reworking, and also for Barclays online banking which was "redesigned" so oversize as to not be able to fit three text boxes and a submit button in the height of a 16:10 24" screen.

    1946:

    Charlie - & mdive Goods imported for outside the EU shoould not be affected, surely? Though stuff which has come from, say Indonesia or CHina may well have come through, say, Rotterdam first, of course ... I'm watching stuff that I know comes from insode the EU - really good fine-milled white flour, olive oil ... medicines (!) etc. Rice: Not air-tight, but simple-sealed in large "zipped-up" bags ( 10 or 25kg ). I always carry at least 6 months supply, anyway, because dry white rice improves with keeping in the correct conditions [ I use the "Tilda" Basmati brand & have done for years ] If they fuck up big-time ( SInce we know they are fucking up small-time, anyway! ) it's going to be messy, especially as the worst hit will be in the worst pat of winter - 2nd week of January onwards for between a month & 3 months. Don't give it any longer than that, as BoZo's head will be on a pike by that point ...

    I'm told that even smarmy little Gove is actually scared by a crash-out, because he's seen the actual numbers, but BoZo is the hugely incompetent bigmouthed "boss" Talking of hugely incompetent bogmouths, it seems Corbyn is having fun, as well, as BoZo & DJT. ( * Note )

    whitroth I'm sticking with my Cosmo Communicator Really good phone & a keybord I can USE - & I can get "internet" on it for awkward times/places. Bloody good camera in it.

    EC Tend to partially agree. Except that the ultra-right of the tories will vote against it, but everyone else will vote for it ( On the grounds that it's better than the alternative ) - which means it scrapes through, followed by both the main parties in England tearing themselves apart.

    • Note: ... Has anyone, anywhere or anywhen, across history, never mind since either 1815 / 1919 or 1945 ever seen such a collection of utter twats in charge? It isn't just the "Anglosphere", either Look at the not-quite-fascist "populists" too - they have bought themseleves some time, but it was always bounbd to end in tears, as the internal inconsistencies force their way out: Orban, Erdogan, Duda/Morawiecki are all in this boat, too. Sooner or later it will catch up with Putin & Modi, too. I think, for the time being, the PRC will carry on, but, of course, when China crashes internally, its BAD.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Addendum Oh shit Moscow Mitch is set upon another gross act of sabotage From "The Atlantic" - linkie HERE - Open in Incognito window, to avoid running out of space, please ... Like the SUpreme Court this is an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board ... of a mad reactionary who believes in the Gold Standard.

    1947:

    Another (wonkette livelogs can be fun): LIVEBLOG: Rudy Giuliani Brings The Crazy To A Federal Court In Pennsylvania (Liz Dye, November 17, 2020)

    1948:

    Daily Bread just up the road from me sells rice and bread flour in 5kg sealed polythene bags. They've started using some biodegradable material for bagging 1kg and under items but are having problems with the bottoms coming apart so haven't tried to implement them for the larger quantities. I store the big bags in a cupboard in the spare room until I need them, then transfer the contents to some large tupperware style snap top plastic boxes for use. 1920s solid brick ex-council semi, generally dry and the radiator in the spare room is turned way down so relatively cool but not cold.

    Reminds me, I need more white bread flour. They didn't have any 5kg bags last time I was there.

    1949:

    a mad reactionary who believes in the Gold Standard. Stalled, and maybe won't happen. Controversial Fed nominee Shelton stalls in Senate test vote (ANDREW TAYLOR and CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, 18 Nov 2020) Two key Republicans were absent because of COVID-related concerns. The 47-50 vote came as the Republican-controlled Senate continues to focus its energies in the post-election lame-duck session on confirming Trump’s appointees. ... Shelton is an unusually caustic critic of the Fed and was opposed by two GOP senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah, in Tuesday’s vote. Harris has been focused on the transition to the Biden administration but returned to the chamber for her first vote since winning the vice presidency. Senator-elect Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., is likely to join the Senate when the chamber returns from its Thanksgiving break. That could leave Shelton short of support for confirmation even if Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., seeks a revote next month.

    (McConnell himself is looking worse than usual. (I have not dug.))

    1950:

    I was going to suggest that some of you could use 60 liter canoe barrel containers but they might not be carried by retailers outside Canada. They're great for perishables and bears can't get into them.

    1951:

    gasdive @ 1892: I'm slightly surprised that there are so many of us using physical keyboards. I've been using SwiftKey on Android for several years. All my comments here are produced on that and some are ridiculously over long. I guess if I was writing books I'd bother to go sit at a desk, but the convenience of sitting on the lounge with my partner, watching Netflix far outweighs getting 80 wpm on a keyboard.

    I learned to touch type many, many years ago on a manual typewriter (blank keys so I had to learn the positions of all the letters while hovering my fingers over the home row into muscle memory). I can't do hunt & peck very well. The only problem I really have with computer keyboards is the temptation to jump back and edit while typing instead of finishing the thought & then proofreading/correcting/editing like I was trained to do.

    Plus, I don't multitask very well. I either lose track of whatever I'm watching/listening to or my writing crashes. If I want to listen to a podcast or watch a TV program (Youtube) I have to sit & pay attention to it. I can't write.

    So if I want a keyboard in a different language, I just go to settings and turn it on. That gets me gestural and predictive text in the new language, along with any special characters.

    I have no facility for other languages than English. It's one of my big regrets in life.

    The opportunity was taken from me when my mind was still flexible enough, and later when it was required, the schools didn't have the right technique (learn the grammar by rote instead of full immersion). I did learn a smattering of French one summer while I was in grade school - the summer of 1959 right after Sputnik between the 3rd & 4th grades, Durham, NC got a grant from the Ford Foundation for an advanced math & science summer school. One of the "math" teachers was a French teacher from Duke University & she decided we should learn about French mathematicians in "French". And it worked.

    For a while there was a time when I could convert decimal to binary to octal to hexadecimal in my head in both English & French. No translations involved. If I needed an answer in French, I thought the problem through in French.

    But after that summer, the school system didn't have funding to carry on with either the advanced math or the language instruction, and skills you don't use, YOU LOSE and I lost mine.

    Plus when foreign language became available in the 9th grade, I was denied the choice of continuing with French and TOLD I would be taking Latin. By the time I got to college, where the foreign language requirement was NOT Latin, it was too late for me. I failed the foreign language class five times (German once, French once, Spanish three times). Finally, when I'd met all the other requirements for my degree and still didn't have the foreign language credit I just gave up & dropped out.

    I've thought of picking up and going to live in rural Spain or France & try full immersion in real life, but the finances are just beyond my means.

    I apologize for the rant. I hadn't realized how deeply the lack had affected me or how bitter I am about it.

    1952:

    Greg: Goods imported for outside the EU shoould not be affected, surely?

    They won't be directly affected, but the huge traffic tailbacks at ports -- and the massive overload of our customs infrastructure -- will have knock-on effects for sure.

    1953:

    whitroth @ 1894: Virtual keyboards, that is, the crap that appears on your mobile, is an unutterably lousy kludge. More than once, someone asked me to type my email on theirs, and they wound up doing it, because my fingers aren't size 2.

    I too have fat fingers that make typing on a "smartphone" keyboard almost impossible. I bought a small stylus from Staples. Looks like a yellow pencil, but they had other versions that weren't so damn hipster (I got one of the others as a backup). It still takes me much, much longer than typing on a real keyboard, but I'm beginning to learn how to use the predictive function so that when it recognizes the word I'm trying to spell out I can select it. I keep auto-correct turned OFF.

    When I can have a full-sized keyboard appear before me in VR, and I can hear the key clicks, yes. But touchscreen keybords are terrible.

    I hate touchscreens! That was what kept me from getting a "smartphone" for so long. My hatred comes from a different direction though. I ran a photo mini-lab for a while. The kiosks where customers could upload their digital photos to be printed were touchscreens and I'd have to clean them off at least once an hour if not more frequently. They'd grunge up the scanner even worse. I'd have to clean that after almost every customer who used it. Why won't they wash their fuckin' hands?!

    ... and an epiphany [3a(2) & (3)]. I am SO glad I'm no longer at that job having to deal with all the assholes during the Covid Pandemic!

    1954:

    Allen Thomson @ 1885:

    > $20,000 a day

    Thinking about this over supper just now, it occurred to me that $2e4/day * 3.65e2 day/year = $7.3 million a year working full time, no time off. That's decent money, but not what I think of as Masters of the Universe / C-Suite remuneration. So do the topmost lawyers get stock options or something similar to boost their otherwise pitiable income?

    Most of these big name law firms have a few Partners and a whole bunch of associate lawyers hustling to make partner. The Partners may represent the more select individuals among the firm's clientele, but most of the hours billed come from the work of the associates. I think the associates are salaried + bonus (commissions) based on billable hours.

    The Partners main income comes from their share of the firm's profits produced by the associates.

    1955:

    David L @ 1903:

    I'm still running Lion (on the old MacPro) and Sierra (on the newer iMac). MacPro can't be upgraded anymore, and the iMac is my photography computer which needs to run Aperture.

    Two things you might or might not know about.

    There's a group who work on firmware flashes for older Macs to allow them to run newer macOS versions. I know someone who has done it to their cheese grater MacPro. Mostly works but there are a lot of little things that act odd or not at all like audio in and such.

    Then there's this little thing.
    https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/28/free-retroactive-tool-brings-aperture-itunes-back-to-life-in-macos-catalina

    Apparently it modifies the three apps as they load into memory. I suspect it does this to avoid copyright issues with Apple.

    I have not used either of these personally.

    I'm still looking to purchase an Apple version of 64-bit Photoshop CS6 Extended (the last standalone version) with a valid license (I want both the software & the license and I have a budget for it up to what I paid for the Windows version).

    1956:

    whitroth @ 1926: In '87 or '88, I had a guy at a desk next to me - this is Austin, TX, who said his name was "Kin". Took me several days to realize he mean "Ken". (He pronounced the "e" like the "i" in "in".

    How would you pronounce it?

    1957:

    whitroth @ 1940: Latest bag I bought of basmati, at the Asian/Hispanic supermarket near me was what, kg? 10? (There's only two of us, and we don't eat huge meals) came in a ziplock bag. When they don't, I put them into large plastic containers with lids. The ones they sell in "office supply" stores for pretzels work great.

    FWIW, both Home Depot and Lowe's sell food grade buckets with gasketed lids. I think 1, 3 & 5 gallon sizes. I use a 1 gallon for my food scraps for the compost pile.

    I don't know about home improvement type stores in the UK or EU. I think they're likely to carry something similar if food safety/environmental regulations don't prohibit it.

    1958:

    I'm still looking to purchase an Apple version of 64-bit Photoshop CS6 Extended

    Can't help you there myself, as (a) my Photoshop is CS5.5, and (b) I still need it for one plugin that doesn't run in Affinity Photo.

    Everything else I do in Affinity Photo, or Aperture.

    I'm impressed with the Affinity lineup. Fast programs, clean interfaces, good tutorials, decent prices. The shortcut keys are a bit odd but I think they opted to use the same keyboard shortcuts as Photoshop (as that was the market they were trying to penetrate).

    1959:

    Moscow Mitch is set upon another gross act of sabotage

    You're multiple news cycles behind. 3 R's said they would vote no. 2 R's got Covid-19 and are isolating. Mitch held the vote and it failed. Mitch voted no himself so it could in theory be brought up again. I suspect the timing on this entire thing was to make it appear to Trump they were trying but circumstances beat it down. The Mitch vote gives him cover to not have Trump throw another hissy fit.

    1960:

    Video editing. On a phone.

    The current iPhone 12 models (and the X and 11s to some degree) can record movies and take pictures better than most consumer cameras of just a few years ago. And better than many semi-pro models. They are unreal in so many ways. So you get people who take a movie or photos, edit them up, then it is picked up by someone on another continent and published. All within a few hours. Or less.

    Life is very different than what we grew up expecting.

    1961:

    Charlie @ 1952 Oh dear, you are correct. I mean, all our traffic from the EU has been basically - "We'll check one lorry in 100 or anything that looks suspicious, the rest get waved through" The Customs/HMRC people are just going to fold under the load. Which brings me back to my earlier post. How long ( If it does go all horribly pear-shaped ) to total collapse? As I guessed, anywhere between 2 weeks & a month. Reckon it could last longer? Or quicker-to-fail? Effects - both economic ( Apart for fucking awful ) & political?

    1962:

    (He pronounced the "e" like the "i" in "in".

    Yes, that's the semi-famous pin-pen merger in some American English dialects.

    https://www.acelinguist.com/2020/01/the-pin-pen-merger.html

    1963:

    @1957 REPLY:

    ["...food grade buckets with gasketed lids. I think 1, 3 & 5 gallon sizes..."]

    Those pails are great. We have several, in different size as our apt. is very tiny and we have been isolating since March, and have little storage space (at least these can be stacked on each other).

    We relaxed some about keeping stocked over summer, plus we had the outdoors Farmer's Market, which was a good walk. But we had to be stocked with everything one can be stocked with for the next dark, long, scary haul, and so we are, from paper goods to dental floss. I worked really hard over late summer and the early fall to be in shape for where we are now -- which could hardly be worse, nationally, and is rapidly approaching that in the city too, because THEY WILL NOT CLOSE THE GODDAMNED RESTAURANTS, and people will not wear maks, and people will throw and attend illegal gatherings of larges numbers of people and drink and dance and not wear masks. BUT they are closing the schools again tomorrow.

    Anyway, I have pounds and pounds of different varieties of rice, other dry grains, legumes, beans etc. in some of the pails. Dried spices and herbs and teas, both caffeinated and herbal, and coffee beans in others. Lots non-sodium bouillon and stock. All in those pails in which no vermin can ean enter.

    Alas one cannot do that with potatoes, yams, squashes, fruits, onions, garlic, etc. They do need some air, as well as needing to be kept cool and dry, and probably shadowy or dark storage too -- not easy to do successfully in this tiny, steam heated apartment, despite the humidifier. So they have to be checked at least daily, and used quickly. As of this week we've gone back to ordering online and taking delivery for groceries.

    ~~~~~~~

    Both my partner and I use keyboards and mice -- both loathe touch screens, though he has to with the iphone (I have managed to continue without one so far -- and he's got a flip fone too for phoning, but you can't run a business without a smart phone.)

    He's doing a huge amount of media production, both video and audio, on several different screens at once, and for adjusting color and all the many menus one has to access, touch is virtually useless. Additionally, to be that close to the screen aggravates already sore muscles from such close, intense work.

    As I'm visually impaired, touch screens really really REALLY suck for me too

    1964:

    Goods imported for outside the EU shoould not be affected, surely? Though stuff which has come from, say Indonesia or CHina may well have come through, say, Rotterdam first, of course ...

    It's one of those "we don't know" and shrug your shoulders sort of situations - no major country has in recent times tried what the UK is doing, which is to remove itself from a major trading block (and all the associated trade agreements it has) and start fresh.

    For example, Canada. We currently have a free trade agreement with the EU, which currently covers the UK. On January 1st the UK loses that, and unless the UK and Canada have come up with an alternate agreement then anything reverts to WTO rules - which can mean price increases.

    But the bigger problem, as I believe noted by others, is that the UK does the majority of its trade with the EU - and despite what some think will continue to do so on January 1st. What will change is in addition to having to levy duties on everything (WTO again unless there is a deal), everything now needs a whole bunch of paperwork to travel between the EU and the UK - and the UK hasn't prepared for that. So the ports in the UK are going to be jammed with stuff trying to move but waiting on the paperwork.

    The Brexiter solution to this is to claim they will merely ignore the paperwork and just let things move through the system - but that is a violation of WTO rules.

    So, and this is guesswork of course, as OGH has indicated the currency will probably be hit hard (and likely before January 1st - once it is apparent there is no deal if that is the case).

    And the ports issue is also guesswork, but the Conservatives haven't shown much competence up until now so...

    (which, related, there was a news story a couple of weeks ago that the UK government was behind on even getting the trade deals they have negotiated into Parliament to be ratified, meaning more self-inflected harm is possible).

    It isn't just the "Anglosphere", either Look at the not-quite-fascist "populists" too - they have bought themseleves some time, but it was always bounbd to end in tears, as the internal inconsistencies force their way out:

    Not a surprise. When you ignore the majority of the population with your policies, and said populations have the right to vote, eventually they decide a con-man is at least worth a try over a system that is rigged against them.

    Add in modern methods of manipulation (Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, etc.) and democracy fails.

    But the "end in tears" is still an open question - as I have said yes Biden is better than Trump, and will make things better for the next 4 years, but the Republicans were not demolished in the elections - they actually won a bunch of stuff that was important. Add in their ongoing (both pre-Trump and during Trump) gains with female and non-white voters and the assumption that populism has failed is likely sadly wrong.

    1965:

    American English dialects

    For those who might be interested, there's an impressive labor-of-love examination at https://aschmann.net/AmEng/

    1966:

    You forgot "the Great Plains that were FLOODED much of the spring", and so lost a lot of planting season and a lot of output.

    1967:

    The Cosmo looked nice, but Charlie complained about their very delayed updates.

    And this is not a "phone" - I'm happy with my flip-phone, thank you - this is a) an ebook reader, which will let me buy kindle and B&N books without bitching, and b) replace my 11" 2009 HP Netbook, which I'll use for that when we're traveling again.

    1968:

    Ken. K-eh-n.

    1969:

    emoji are a pain to use in general - my aunt sent me a message in support of her beekeeping son, however the cutesy bee emoji she picked on her ipad turned up looking like a yellow-jacket wasp on my linux box ... so I was very puzzled when she was enthusing about the amount of honey he'd collected ...

    1970:

    Sorry, not so. Many (perhaps most) are currently imported using an agreement between the EU and that country, which will cease at that point, which is why Gove has been rushing to sign deals. I don't know how much has been sorted out.

    1971:

    This is my trusted source for saying Ken right:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2mSX9FDtmI

    1972:

    Moderators Seagull's latest highly-personal post & attacking, not me, but someone close to me & in a previous post. As I've said before, I'm old enough & ugly enough, but don't attack non-players. OK?

    1973:

    Dumb-question time (serious request for info/feedback)

    Anyways ...

    Scenario: Looks like we've got 2 viable vaccines - great! But some serious logistics issues including keeping one of them at minus 80C.

    Have been wondering why not use the armed forces as the logistics backbone for this? My rationale:

    The armed forces are probably

    1- the most logistically bound orgs on the planet, 2- they're secure (have their own arms and know how to use them; ditto for communications channels), 3- they're relatively cheap to retain (they're already on the payroll), 4- they already have implicit access to pretty well all parts of the country, 5- they have their own really fast (vs civilian) court system in case one of theirs tries to pull a fast one, 6- they're very recognizable 7- they have their own transport and housing facilities in many parts of the country 8- they've a history of helping out during natural disasters.

    Curious whether the above is all wet or workable in places like the US, Canada, UK, EU, Australia, NZ, Japan, - countries that aren't military juntas and/or in the middle of an internal war.

    Detailed plain language arguments would be much appreciated. Thanks!

    1974:

    Paul Ford@ftrain is [snarky]:

    Today someone for the first time shared the classic parable of free market economics "I, Pencil" with me for the first time and literally every paragraph made my eyeballs pulse. So I share it with you. Don't let them move your cheese, my friends. https://t.co/q6iG00ujPR

    — Paul Ford (@ftrain) November 18, 2020

    Some musings by the same person, worth a look. As he says, there are opportunities. Tech After Trump - Not to fortune-tell, but to hope. (Paul Ford, Nov 17, 2020)

    LCSATEH (whew!): Hi. HSS are not the only fruit. And even in the scientific consensus sense, there are other species that e.g. pass the mirror test.

    1975:

    I realize your comment was from awhile back, but behind which doors? CSPAN in and of itself, for example, just brings to Cable what existed in various forms (eg the Congressional Record in print and even more recently online as Thomas...)- records whose maintenance is a Constitutional requirement (Article I Section V) though I know this may not be what you're referring to...

    1976:

    Then why do you bother? None of us can effect major change, all you can do here is annoy people.

    1977:

    Curious whether the above is all wet or workable in places like the US, Canada, UK, EU, Australia, NZ, Japan, - countries that aren't military juntas and/or in the middle of an internal war. The US military is itching to be involved in the logistics planning aspects for domestic distribution, if not the actually logistics (DOD press release): Technology, Expertise Help Determine Vaccine Distribution (Nov. 12, 2020, SIMUNACI, OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PUBLIC AFFAIRS) We'll see; I frankly don't want the current (or any) US government making the final decisions about dose distribution. An auditing role would be acceptable. (Bold mine.) Operation Warp Speed is using the Tiberius platform, a cutting-edge data platform to collect, correlate and visualize data across the entire operation. It is loaded with data from various sources — U.S. Census, Department of Health and Human Services, State Health Offices and the CDC.
    ... Once the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices makes its recommendations on who should receive the vaccine first, the HHS secretary, in consultation with national leadership, will decide how to prioritize the initially limited doses. OWS will input these decisions into Tiberius, and using several other logistical factors, compute the quantities to be allocated to each jurisdiction. The jurisdictions will work inside the Tiberius platform to decide where every allocated dose will go — from local doctors' offices to large medical centers. These decisions will then be sent to distributors to complete deliveries across the country.

    1978:

    Except. For purchase and install, the current cost seems to be closer to the 1.5-4 USD per watt, and is increasingly limited by installation cost -> semiconductor efficiencies of scale no longer apply. Though, I imagine that they'll go quite a bit lower.

    Reality is that most of the people on this thread have looked into storage solutions at some point. In my case, years ago. The closest to practical for long-term-ish storage seemed to be giant vat batteries (don't remember the name). As far as I can tell, there're no widely applicable (non-hydro) sufficiently cheap industrialized storage solutions currently available. Maybe some could be developed, but the fact that they don't seem to be in large-scale industrial production is indicative of unsolved issues.

    The political problems inherent in cheap nuclear probably won't be solved, but they look more immediately tractable than storage. Albeit, technical problems tend to get solved more quickly than human issues.

    That said, crazy question, assuming reasonable cost scaling with time, and the presence of wide open sunny spaces in some nations, how long will it be until solar fuel production becomes cost-effective?

    If you believe the cost of energy from wikipedia, then solar comes out at ~5 cents / kwhr and coal comes out at about ~10 cents / kwhr. Then, assuming the coal cost is mostly fuel, (probably a bad assumption) and assuming ~30% hydrogen cracking efficiency (okay, pretty high, but in the range of possible from some publications), and assuming that hydrogen is not a pita (okay, a lie), then overbuilding solar in sunny places and just selling / shipping fuel to places less blessed with habitability...might actually be somewhat cost effective eventually. NREL has mostly underestimated cost decreases previously, and projects between 2-6x decreases within the next 10 years. It, um, doesn't seem insane. If methane was possible, that'd be awesome.

    1979:

    It looks like the Pfizer vaccine is being kept that cold because that's how they stored it in the testing labs. There's nothing inherent to mRNA that requires -70/-80 C to store it, and further tests should find out what the actual temperature required is. This should reduce the overhead required to distribute it a lot.

    1980:

    That's exactly the opposite of what my limited experience and this article (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/17/935563377/why-does-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine-need-to-be-kept-colder-than-antarctica) say.

    I only worked with DNA and primers, but they were kept at -80oC as a matter of course. This was a while ago, but I remember the grad students working with RNAs had to be very careful, because it was so fragile. They weren't working with artificially made RNA, which I suspect meant that there was a tendency for ribonucleases to be in whatever they extracted, ready to chew up the RNA.

    Obviously technology has advanced a bit, but apparently these mRNA vaccines do two things: they include some artificial base pairs to make it a bit more degradable/more stable, and they have some sort of lipid secret sauce they include to further stabilize the vaccine.

    Now, totally changing topic, what would be cool is if they engineered tobacco dermal cells to express the spike protein. Then they could make the transgenic tobacco into a snuff vaccine. Since I don't partake, that would be hard on me. But it would get to some, erm, underserved populations that way.

    1981:

    Rudy Giuliani (and team) continues to make amusing mistakes, bold mine. "Second Amendment Complaint" ! (The actual argument is just nuts, asking that 1.5 million votes in Democratic Party strongholds in Pennsylvania be ignored, the election invalidated, and Trump declared winner in Pennsylvania. There are other mistakes, but I liked this one best.) https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.pamd.127057/gov.uscourts.pamd.127057.172.0_1.pdf 21.In conclusion, this Court should grant the motion, allow filing of the Second Amendment Complaint, proceed to limited expedited discovery and a injunction hearing, and allow the Nation to have faith in the integrity of Pennsylvania 2020 Presidential election. WHEREFORE, Plaintiffs respectfully request the Court to grant them leave to file the Second Amended Complaint that is filed herewith. Respectfully submitted, /s/ Rudolph William Giuliani Rudolph William Giuliani NY Supreme Court ID No. 1080498 [and 2 other lawyers.]

    1982:

    "some serious logistics issues including keeping one of them at minus 80C."

    It takes a surprisingly long time for a handful of dry ice to evaporate from inside an expanded polystyrene container, and it is a very common and cheap industrial substance. You don't need a super duper freezer, you just need enough dry ice to come with it to last until you've used it. This method is already widely used for delivering things that might go off without refrigeration, like sending fancy cakes through the post or distributing bull sperm; it's not something that needs vast amounts of extra capacity all of a sudden because nobody normally does it, it's done all over the place already.

    1983:

    There are two problems, neither of which is the delivery to the clinic. The first is that problem of (in theory) moving around hundreds of millions of doses through a supply chain that doesn't get above the critical temperature (200K or whatever it is). The second problem is storing a shipment at the pharmacy for a week or two until all the doses are dispensed.

    The problem with the first is that we don't have a tremendously huge super-cold logistics chain. Sure we can get vaccines shipped to big cities this way. But small towns? Third World Countries? In the latter they even have problems with simple refrigeration, let alone shipping something at very low temperatures.

    The second problem, pointed out by my pharmacist wife, is that pharmacies, especially outpatient pharmacies and at small clinics, don't have -80 refrigerators. harmacies at bigger hospitals that do have them tend to use them for expensive chemotherapy drugs, so they're not sitting around empty. That lack of capacity puts a huge bottleneck where the doses go into the patients.

    I don't particularly mind getting the military involved, because this kind of crazy messed up logistics nightmare is sort of up their alley. Better than shipping bullets, at least.

    My uninformed guess is that, if it turns out that a bunch of vaccines are about equally effective, the finicky ones (like Pfizer) will go where they can, leaving the more durable ones to be shipped to more rugged locations.

    1984:

    whitroth And hope to provoke someone into responding in such a way , to outrageous slurs & attacks as to get themselves banned. Some of us have learnt, & changed our posting-styles here - she has not - itself a mark of immaturity. It's vicious trolling of the worst sort Not just mad, but malign

    Ah, but -70°C is convenient - solid CO2 is cheap & readliy available ... ( See Pigeon's comment )

    1985:

    Even LN2 isn't that expensive or hard to work with.

    Gear to create -80 temperatures from scratch is expensive but buying them in from your friendly neighbourhood liquid gas plant is cheap enough.

    1986:

    I suspect that the places where a hospital or similar would normally store such vaccines might not be all that easy to retrofit a "from the local hardware store" set of stuff and still be medically approved.

    Dry ice (frozen CO2) likely has issues of ventilation in places where such vaccines would be stored.

    Says he who once tossed some dry ice chilled ice cream into the back seat without thinking it through. This was for a 5 hour drive. After a bit I thought about it, stopped and moved it to the trunk and made sure the car ventilation system was set to bring in fresh air.

    None of these issues are insurmountable but do have to be addressed. And in the US (and I bet other places) medical things have a lot more paperwork and rules than is required to install a food freezer in the garage.

    1987:

    dpb Indeed .. Liquid Nitrogen was very useful in summer in the lab where I worked, long ago .. Between 2 & 4 seconds in the LN2 was perfect for crisping up the outside of gooey Mars-Bars ( Still in wrapper of course )

    As for "Dry Ice" it has other uses .. Something has obviously gorn worng at Fallowfield Studen VIllage ( "Owens Park" ) in Manchester - & I'm glad to see today's students are not going to put up with shit, any more than we did... We got sneering from the catering people, on an occasion, supplying us with inferior nosh. We simply brought some solid CO2 back in Dewar flasks, & dropped it into the soup cauldron ... which promptly went all "Hammer Horror" ... panic amonst the cooking people, with us, trying not to laugh, shouting: "We TOLD you it was poisonous/not fit for human consumption, etc ..." They got the message & the food improved.

    1988:

    As I have posted before, I was taken aback when my uncle got a delivery of frozen bull sperm and liquid nitrogen to top up his storage - 8 miles down a dirt road in Zambia c. 1970.

    Yes, logistics is an issue, but it's primarily organisation and availability of skilled staff, not shipping or storage. Shipping supplies to distribution centres in liquid nitrogen (carbon dioxide ice isn't reliable for temperatures that low) is SOP, and setting up adequate storage where they don't already exist is very easy. The dilution etc. is trickier, and needs a laboratory and skilled staff; THAT's where I see the problem arising. Supplied then get shipped to vaccination centres on a JIT basis, a week is plenty of time except for the most isolated or disrupted locations, and mass vaccination is SOP.

    1989:

    Look on the bright side - could you choose a more appropriate lawyer to represent Trump? It may, of course, be that all the most competent firms have said "not on your nelly", or whatever the local expression is. We know that some have.

    1990:

    Right. As you say, solar-cracked hydrogen is clearly a winner if you use laboratory figures for its efficiency and ignore all its known and serious but unsolved problems. I shan't hold my breath. Methane is certainly possible, too, but is a hydrocarbon, so implies efficient carbon-capture. Ammonia is also feasible, but has other problems.

    1991:

    "I suspect that the places where a hospital or similar would normally store such vaccines might not be all that easy to retrofit a "from the local hardware store" set of stuff and still be medically approved." Locally purchased fridges, -20 and -40 freezers are generally unsuitable for medical use because they have auto defrost which is designed for large items like typical food portions. For auto defrost the temperature inside the freezer must regularly (usually daily) rise above freezing to melt the ice. The thermal inertia of the typical food item keeps it cool enough to avoid spoiling. But items stored in small vials will be defrosted once a day and spoiled. I know of at least two researchers who have lost samples which had been stored incorrectly like this in -20 freezers. Most of the -80 freezers I've used have had a CO2 cylinder as backup in case of power cuts. Surprisingly it's very easy to defrost a -80 freezer because the ice is powdery. You just use a brush and dustpan.

    "Dry ice (frozen CO2) likely has issues of ventilation in places where such vaccines would be stored." It's not a very serious problem. I've sent batches of plasma, blood and serum on dry ice all over the world with no problems. But you have to do your research. Official holidays and festivals are on different days in different countries. Airport staff, including customs are often not at work on these days so samples can be spoiled.

    "Says he who once tossed some dry ice chilled ice cream into the back seat without thinking it through. This was for a 5 hour drive. After a bit I thought about it, stopped and moved it to the trunk and made sure the car ventilation system was set to bring in fresh air." A bigger problem is ventilation of the package. It's not unknown for people to put dry ice in sealed containers. People have been injured unscrewing the caps of such packages. IATA requires ventilated containers with a warning label for air transport.

    1992:

    Perhaps hydrogen from excess wind and solar power could be generated. stored on site and used on site in a hydrogen powered gas turbine when wind/solar generation is low. Probably more efficient than pumped storage.

    1993:

    Looks like Canada won't have to wait until you're starving to send you some food. We'll be able to sell you some under the new free trade deal that's just about to be signed.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-18/u-k-canada-on-brink-of-trade-agreement-replacing-eu-deal

    1994:

    When I last looked, it was almost impossible to find anything other than wishful thinking, polemic and plain bullshit for the efficiency of using hydrogen that way, but I found enough to convince me that it was vastly LESS efficient than pumped storage at present- and is likely to remain less efficient in perpetuity. Pumped storage is 70-80% efficient in actual plants, and that is not its limit.

    The problem with pumped storage is that there aren't many suitable locations, most of them are beauty spots or nature reserves, and they are a long way from where the power is needed. That's the driver for large battery farms etc., not that pumped storage isn't close to ideal.

    1995:

    Liquid nitrogen needs ventilation, too, for similar reasons, but is less of a problem in places like poor-ventilated rooms and basements. YOU will know that, but millions don't.

    1996:

    I remember once driving a car with a big bottle of liquid nitrogen in the boot. It was for cooling our receivers in the radio telescope we were working at. Obviously this was for work. We kind of were of the opinion that it's better not to crash on the way...

    1997:

    Indeed. But would a big bottle of methylated spirits or even strong ammonia solution have been any safer in a crash?

    1998:

    Well, the bottle was probably some tens of litres, so it probably wouldn't have mattered what kind of nasty stuff there was.

    1999:

    As I have posted before, I was taken aback when my uncle got a delivery of frozen bull sperm and liquid nitrogen to top up his storage - 8 miles down a dirt road in Zambia c. 1970.

    Yes, logistics is an issue, but it's primarily organisation and availability of skilled staff, not shipping or storage. Shipping supplies to distribution centres in liquid nitrogen (carbon dioxide ice isn't reliable for temperatures that low) is SOP, and setting up adequate storage where they don't already exist is very easy. The dilution etc. is trickier, and needs a laboratory and skilled staff; THAT's where I see the problem arising. Supplied then get shipped to vaccination centres on a JIT basis, a week is plenty of time except for the most isolated or disrupted locations, and mass vaccination is SOP.

    I think you're underestimating the volume of the problem. I agree that it's entirely possible to ship small amounts of liquids and liquid nitrogen all over the place, and that farmers have been moving frozen semen around for awhile.

    What we're talking about here is storage for hundreds to thousands of liters of carefully formulated RNA cocktail that has to be kept cold until the final few meters. That I don't think we have the infrastructure for.

    A good example was when, at grad school, the power failed. I was one of the ones on the phone trying to find out how much dry ice was available in the city so that the labs could keep their specimens from thawing. Since some of it was stuff like DNA from now-extinct plants, the samples literally could not be replaced once lost. Fortunately, they got the power back on within an hour, because there wasn't enough dry ice to be had to make up the difference.

    It's an easy guess that most -80oC fridges are already at least half full, and that most of the production of dry ice and liquid nitrogen is already on order for other uses that cannot readily be abandoned. Thus, ramping up this pipeline is going to be tricky at best and impossible at worst. Personally, I hope for tricky rather than impossible, but we have to acknowledge that anything that requires building a lot of new industrial freezers is going to take quite awhile to roll out.

    My guess is that, unless Pfizer and Moderna turn out to be the only successful vaccines, they're going to get relegated to a sideline in the global vaccination effort, while vaccines that only need normal refrigeration are going to get the majority of the contracts. It's just a matter of the relative sizes of the pipelines for the two. We handle distribution of bull semen and frozen dinners on entirely different scales, and the latter pipeline has more surplus capacity in it.

    The dilution and distribution at the end site is not a problem. That's literally what you hire clinical pharmacy techs to do all day. Clinical pharmacists do the QA/QC to make sure the techs, nurses, and doctors don't kill the patients, either individually or in clusterfucks. The problem is freeing up enough hyper-cold storage to keep the vaccine mother solution in stock while the clinics and hospitals handle the logistics of getting the patients queued up and injected. Since the latter takes time and the dilutions are only viable for a limited time, this is another bottleneck that can't be avoided.

    The other thing to remember is that Covid19 is going to be endemic in the biosphere going forward. That ultimately favors vaccines that require only ordinary refrigeration or ideally even room temperature distribution. If we get stuck with only mRNA vaccines, that likely means that most people in the world won't get vaccinated. We'll see.

    2000:

    That's almost entirely a matter of organisation. I don't think you realise just how much is produced, how many places used it already, and just how many storage devices there are already. Statistics are tricky to find, but Taiwan used c. 1.5 million tonnes of it in the years 2016-2019.

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/812581/taiwan-liquid-nitrogen-sales-volume/

    All that is critically needed for the initial shipments is some repurposing, as has been done before in the early days of WW II in the UK (the USA never had to do it quite as fast or quite as thoroughly). No, I am not underestimating the difficulty and scale of that, but it's not the case that it's technically difficult.

    Your assumption that there is a surplus of clinical pharmacists, locations and equipment is rose-tinted, at best, especially if they have to add training to their workload. It may be the case in the USA, Germany and a few other places (though I doubt it), but it isn't in the UK or most of the world.

    I am not disagreeing with your conclusion but, as I said, it's because so many governments couldn't organise a booze-up in a brewery, even if the staff and local publicans offered to help.

    2001:

    Actually, we do have a surplus of pharmacists and pharmacy techs. There was a shortage around 10-20 years ago, so a number of universities added pharmacy programs. The result is that the market has been flooded with new PharmDs, and they're now increasing their qualifications (with residencies, research projects, additional credentials) while established pharmacists are ramping up their credentials so that they don't get replaced with youngsters who do more work for less pay.

    Similar things are going on with the tech jobs, which are easier to get into (you need only a BS and a licensing exam) and pay far less money.

    Also, the retail pharmacies are cutting back their pharmacists and making them work overtime in an effort to boost profits. If you're on Faceplant, you can see the carnage on the Accidental Pharmacist group page.

    And yes, pharmacists are already trained to give vaccinations. When my wife picks up a retail shift, she gives plenty of flu and other shots.

    Add it all up, and yes, the injection part of the pipeline is not a problem. Which part of I live with a pharmacist did you not understand? And if we get our effing covid19 problem under control and out of the White House, we can start exporting pharmacists if there's any part of the world where there's an actual shortage.

    2002:

    It's worth noting that for a similar vaccine (the V920 a.k.a rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine), logistics were sorted out to deliver thousands of doses in the Kivu warzone in the DRC.

    We know how to do this, technically speaking. We've proven that knowledge by delivering vaccines at -80°C in a warzone. The thing that's going to hurt is politicians not listening to experts when it comes to deployment, and just assuming (falsely) that the logistics will sort themselves if the vaccine is bought.

    What's going to be needed is a well-thought through staged rollout, so that we can take advantage of everything we learnt in Kivu 2 years ago; this is where I fully expect everything to fall to pieces as politicians demonstrate one variety of another of inability to plan and then execute on a plan.

    2003:

    This is why I'm not ever going back to being a pharmacist (well, that and my being spectacularly badly suited to the job): in my day, qualifying meant a three year BSc or BPharm degree plus a one year preregistration training period (it went up to two years in 1990); Pharmacy technician was a diploma or equivalent non-graduate qualification plus a year or two of supervised work.

    I don't think Pharmacist is classed as a postgraduate degree profession in the UK, but it's at least 5-6 years of study/supervised work-training to qualify, and technician may very well be degree level by now (back in the day, Nursing was something you could get into on O levels and a diploma plus work experience: today it's 100% graduate-entry).

    2004:

    Hydrogen transport is a massive pain in the neck. Storage in bulk is doable, a large steel tank with thick walls works fine, but moving it about means it leaks all over the place.

    Hydrogen->Ammonia->World Market should already be a massive money maker in optimal solar locations, but part of that is that Ammonia prices are strangely high, so perhaps investors are worried it is a cartel and the cartel might priced ump to kill the new entrants if you try it. Or perhaps it is just general skepticism towards anything new, and the first people to do it will make money hand over fist for a couple of years.

    2005:

    I am glad you have finally understood that distribution of the concentrate isn't where the main problems arise, because that was my main point.

    All right, the USA might be able to do the dilution etc. But you DO know that the rest of the world is not like California, don't you? In the UK, most pharmacists are dispensing, not clinical, and rarely (if ever) separate bulk medicine into doses or work with liquid nitrogen. I don't know about most of the world.

    Incidentally, the giving of injections is a straw man you invented, and I know perfectly well many pharmacists give injections (that's where I got my last two 'flu shots). Nowhere did I say that's a bottleneck, though it may well be one in some parts of the third world.

    2006:

    The Seagull has been identified! She is Emily Murphy in disguise ... [ The US official refusing to open up transition documentation & monies for Biden's team ] How can we tell? Because Ms Murphy has reproduced the Seagull's posting style - completely meaningless drivel, in other words. QUOTE: Dcccf Rex zzz. @#z@smaan anaNN

    All she needs to do now is tell us that "We're all fucked" for final confirmation, yes?

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Hydrodgen - vapourware! ( Ghastly pun, I know, but it simply is not on ) What I want to know is why this utterly impractical Snake-Oil is being pushed.

    2007:

    David L @ 1960:

    Video editing. On a phone.

    The current iPhone 12 models (and the X and 11s to some degree) can record movies and take pictures better than most consumer cameras of just a few years ago. And better than many semi-pro models. They are unreal in so many ways. So you get people who take a movie or photos, edit them up, then it is picked up by someone on another continent and published. All within a few hours. Or less.

    Life is very different than what we grew up expecting.

    Yeah. I still want to know what happened to my flying car?

    And somehow, when I thought of life in the 21st Century, I never envisioned I was going to be so damn old. OTOH, getting old - for all its drawbacks - is still better than the alternative ... being as it's the only game in town, so to speak.

    2008:

    I think the government has said they will not levy tariffs from Jan 1st, i.e. will apply a 0% rate to all goods from the EU and hence, by WTO rules, goods from anywhere else in the world not covered by a separate trade agreement with the UK. Of course the WTO is currently unable to apply its rules due to a lack of authorised judges (or whatever they're called) thanks to the current occupier of the White House.

    2009:

    And if we get our effing covid19 problem under control and out of the White House

    As I more and more hear from former friends and current relatives who don't talk "with" me anymore I am thinking that about 40% or more of the US population will "just say no".

    Now since that will allow the virus to move about the community will that kill off more of these anti-vac and "it's all a hoax" people?

    2010:

    t's worth noting that for a similar vaccine (the V920 a.k.a rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine), logistics were sorted out to deliver thousands of doses in the Kivu warzone in the DRC.

    We're talking apples and oranges here. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are engineered mRNA strands with secret sauce added for stability. The Ebola vaccine is based on an RNA virus (one that causes vesicular stomatitis, VSV), but it has all the extra virus gear to make it stable at body temperature. The VSV virus is the vector for the Merck/IAVI vaccine, which went into Phase I trials on September 30th.

    They're two very different things. Personally, I hope they all work, but if the Merck/IAVI pans out, then they can get vaccines into war areas too, since this proposed vaccine uses a single shot.

    The other thing to notice, again, is the numbers. Delivering thousands of doses to a war zone is the equivalent of delivering bull or hog semen to rural farms. Delivering billions of doses to stop the pandemic is a different problem altogether. That's a million-fold scale-up, and if it involves liquid nitrogen, you've got to scale that capacity up a million-fold too.

    That's one of the bigger bottlenecks.

    Producing the vaccines is actually another huge bottleneck, which is actually where having a bunch of equally-effective vaccines that have different production requirements may be a blessing in disguise. With multiple vaccines, a shortage of some critical component (like vial-grade glass, or chicken eggs, or agarose, or proper-sized syringes) doesn't stop the whole effort.

    2011:

    Now since that will allow the virus to move about the community will that kill off more of these anti-vac and "it's all a hoax" people?

    Not enough to make a difference. What it will do is create a large reservoir that will allow Covid to infect/kill those with underlying conditions and whose vaccinations aren't effective.

    Bad news for those with impaired immune systems — they will still have to effectively isolate themselves.

    Apparently people hospitalized for Covid are contesting the diagnosis because you can't catch a hoax.

    And in Alberta apparently 10% of people with symptoms are continuing to work/go out. I suspect it's higher south of the border.

    2012:

    Question for USAians This ... is that - a move to pressure refusal to certify votes & rig the state's returns so as to favourable to DJT - a practical possibility? It's obviously what is being tried, but what are the odds?

    David L Are you saying that it's "ordinary" "R's" who are buying into the "Trump WON!" lies, not just hs fascist base? The Boss always asks: "Why do American hate each other so much?" - in that they are entirely willing to kill each other off through inaction & refuse medical help that other countries take for granted... Example

    2013:

    Foxessa @ 1963:

    @1957 REPLY: ["...food grade buckets with gasketed lids. I think 1, 3 & 5 gallon sizes..."]

    Those pails are great. We have several, in different size as our apt. is very tiny and we have been isolating since March, and have little storage space (at least these can be stacked on each other).

    We relaxed some about keeping stocked over summer, plus we had the outdoors Farmer's Market, which was a good walk. But we had to be stocked with everything one can be stocked with for the next dark, long, scary haul, and so we are, from paper goods to dental floss. I worked really hard over late summer and the early fall to be in shape for where we are now -- which could hardly be worse, nationally, and is rapidly approaching that in the city too, because THEY WILL NOT CLOSE THE GODDAMNED RESTAURANTS, and people will not wear maks, and people will throw and attend illegal gatherings of larges numbers of people and drink and dance and not wear masks. BUT they are closing the schools again tomorrow.

    You live up north right?

    Maybe you can help me with something a neighbor said to me this morning. I don't think he's originally a North Carolina native ... maybe originally from somewhere in southeastern Europe, the Levant or California.

    He's got the most beautiful garden, with the plants succeeding each other with the progression of the seasons. I enjoy it every day when I go out to walk the dog. And the best part is I don't have to do any of the work (gardens require weeding & maintenance).

    He was out weeding today & he asked my opinion whether he should keep one of the plants or pull it up & replace it with something else.

    I should point out that all I know about gardening is that Mimosa trees are a mistake (as pretty as they are when the bloom, they're really a pernicious weed) & I can recognize Poison Ivy when I see it. I suggested maybe pull up part of it & keep the part he likes best.

    Anyway ... while he was pointing out some of the other plantings, he mentioned he'd planted a "southern magnolia for the displaced Yankees".

    Do flowering magnolias have some significance for people who grow up in the north that they need to have one in their garden if they end up living in the south other than the Gone With The Wind stereotype?

    2014:

    Niala @ 1971: This is my trusted source for saying Ken right:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2mSX9FDtmI

    I just don't hear the difference. For me that's "e" like the "i" in "in"

    2015:

    Anyway ... while he was pointing out some of the other plantings, he mentioned he'd planted a "southern magnolia for the displaced Yankees".

    That's a new one on me, but we don't have native magnolias in California. Googling quickly, it looks like sweet bay (Magnolia virginiana) grows into Connecticut and Massachusetts, so maybe that's what he's talking about. Since it also grows through the southeast and to Texas, it would make sense, I guess.

    2016:

    And in Alberta apparently 10% of people with symptoms are continuing to work/go out. I suspect it's higher south of the border.

    You can see an example of how this works at Whatever (https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/11/17/this-vacation-blows/), where Athena wrote about a friend who'd been exposed, told to quarantine for 14 days, used up the 7 days of vacation they had and went back to work, because the boss refused to grant sick leave.

    Or there's the example of a friend, who actually did have Covid, as did all her family. Since she was the least sick, she had to go out grocery shopping. She gloved and masked, but she didn't have much choice in the matter.

    Anyway, the media highlights the assholes, correctly I think. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don't have a choice but still have to go out in public while sick. When the choice is being homeless with the Rona or being able to isolate at night with the Rona, which is better? So they go to work.

    You can see where a nanny state that provides public health insurance and supports people through quarantines and infections actually ends up saving trillions of dollars and thousands of businesses. Unfortunately, we're not smart that way in the US, so we don't do stuff like that. If you want to know about innovative ways to torture, exploit, or kill people though, we're definitely the ones to talk to.

    2017:

    SFReader @ 1973: Dumb-question time (serious request for info/feedback)

    Anyways ...

    Scenario: Looks like we've got 2 viable vaccines - great! But some serious logistics issues including keeping one of them at minus 80C.

    Have been wondering why not use the armed forces as the logistics backbone for this? ...

    I don't think the U.S. military has very many containers capable of holding vaccines at -80°C, but to the best of my knowledge (for the U.S.) the "armed forces logistics backbone" is part of the plan.

    However, in most instances, civilian logistics can do the job just as well (if not better). The military is a backup for where civilian logistics are overwhelmed, like when the DoD sent the hospital ships to NYC & LA.

    2018:

    This is why I'm not ever going back to being a pharmacist (well, that and my being spectacularly badly suited to the job): in my day, qualifying meant a three year BSc or BPharm degree plus a one year preregistration training period (it went up to two years in 1990); Pharmacy technician was a diploma or equivalent non-graduate qualification plus a year or two of supervised work.

    Personality-wise, you might have done better as a med-safety officer, aka the pharmacist who audits problems and figures out what might work better, as well as intercepting all the bulletins coming in and figuring out how to tell the line pharmacists. The one med safety officer I know is derided for being a crappy line pharmacist, always taking three times as long to do any job because of jittering over all the possible things that can go wrong.

    The pharmacists I know are more like tightrope walkers. They don't spend any time thinking about what could go wrong, they focus on doing stuff right every time. Considering the complexity of hospital pharmacy work, this is the right way to do it. However, they get hit, badly, by out-of-context problems, which is why the detested med-safety officer is so vital to keeping everything working.

    What they're doing, among other things, is checking the techs' work filling prescriptions, making chemo meds, and so forth, checking active med levels in lab results to adjust dosing (with the doctors), working with the doctors to find alternative drugs when there's a shortage (a normal problem) or when the doctor has a pet weird drug that's not in the hospital formulary, and someone needs to politely get them to accept reality, or making sure the nurses know what the hell they're doing so they don't mis-administer a drug and kill someone (there's a whole special set of labels just for this purpose, because nurses are known to not pay attention), doing pain consults to dose pain meds and deal with addicts (my pain on a scale of 1-10? It's 14. I hurt so much. I need more pills). And so forth.

    This is why, in the US, you need to get a PharmD and pass state boards (technical and legal) to get a pharmacy license. With so many pharmacists in the pipeline, having additional certifications and specialty trainings is also becoming fairly mandatory, unless you really want to do 10 hour standing shifts with one pee break and no help at the local chain pharmacy hell-counter.

    2019:

    The point that seems to have got lost is that (according to what I have read), refrigeration alone is fine at that level.

    The liquid nitrogen is needed solely for shipping bulk supplies from the manufacturer or warehouse to the local hubs (serving, say, an area of 250,000 people), where it is diluted and put into suitable containers for the actual vaccination, and shipped out to the vaccination centres.

    Assuming reasonable transport links between those, that doesn't need more than 4-6 containers of 10 litres or more, per hub, over a month's period. Assuming the rest of the pipeline worked smoothly, which is implausible!

    That is lost in the noise for the developed world, and not a major problem anywhere that isn't completely disaster- or poverty-stricken. The real problems are elsewhere and, as I and Simon Farnsworth are saying, the elephant in the room is that most countries don't have governments that are fit for purpose.

    2020:

    Now since that will allow the virus to move about the community will that kill off more of these anti-vac and "it's all a hoax" people?

    I'm currently reading a book written in 1877 called "Japan Day by Day", by an American called Edward S. Morse. It seems that he was rather optimistic that anti-vaxxers would be eliminated from the gene pool... 🤯

    "BLIND MASSEURS

    They go to a regular school and are taught the proper methods of massage. These unfortunate people have been rendered blind by smallpox, but since the common sense of the nation saw the merits of vaccination and promptly adopted it this loathsome disease has been banished forever from the country. We could not help recalling the incredible idiots in our country, who, too obtuse to understand the value of numbers and statistics, resist this beneficent process. Such people by the laws of survival of the fittest are ultimately eliminated by smallpox and thus the race goes on in its advance. The sign, "I am blind,” is never seen on street beggars; indeed no street beggars are seen."

    2021:

    JBS @ 2017: However, in most instances, civilian logistics can do the job just as well (if not better). The military is a backup for where civilian logistics are overwhelmed, like when the DoD sent the hospital ships to NYC & LA.

    I should have added that civilian logistics can usually do the job more cheaply, more cost effectively as well.

    If I need to move the vaccine over the beach, into a war zone, the U.S. Army & U.S. Navy working together can get the job done.

    But for Mainz, DE to NY, NY USA a DHL Airbus or Boeing 757/767/777 is likely to get it there much faster & cheaper. From there FedEx/UPS can handle it. Hell, even the USPS could "get 'er done!" more quickly/cheaply than the DoD.

    2022:

    Grrr. Back in '79, I met someone who became a friend. She was a nurse, working triage (a brand new thing then, in hospitals) at Jefferson Hospital, part of the university, in downtown Philly. She was telling me how they were forcing nurses to go for bachelor degree, and a lot of nurses, who had become such to nurse people back to health, were suddenly spending most of their time doing paperwork.

    2023:

    I should have added that civilian logistics can usually do the job more cheaply, more cost effectively as well.

    Perhaps the bigger concern is how much of the vaccine actually gets delivered vs. the "falling off the back of the truck" to someone willing to pay, or someone intercepting a shipment.

    There is a reason banks and others don't use UPS/FedEx to shift money or other valuables around, and instead pay the premium for an armored truck service.

    2024:

    Just consider example the media stories back in March/April of the struggles of getting shipments of things like masks and other safety equipment to hospitals, and consider that the vaccine will likely be far more valuable on the black market for the first X months.

    2025:

    Never ran into mimosas up north, until I relocated to the DC area, so I have no clue what he's talking about.

    2026:

    Do you hear a difference between "tin" and "ten"?

    2027:

    Heh.

    I worked for the National Board of Medical Examiners in the mid-eithties. In the US, three-quarters of all doctors in the US, and all grads of foreign medical schools (by federal law) take the tests the NBME gives.

    While working there, I learned this fact: the best doctor you can get is one who just finished their residency and intership, and is up to about 5 years out of school. They order exactly the right tests, and the right number of tests. The doctors who've been practicing for 20 years tend to be "I've seen this a thousand times before, you've got x, take y"... and miss the discovery that this is the one in a thousand, and it's not x, but q.

    My personal solution, for a long time, was to find a doc that either taught at a medical school, or worked with training new doctors. If they're not good, the students will eat them alive....

    2028:

    H Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don't have a choice but still have to go out in public while sick. This is DISGUSTING & completely uncivillised - USA! right ... I repeat - why do "Americans" hate each other so much, that they do this to each other?

    2029:

    400 years of exploitative colonialist capitalism, and you have to ask this? I think the better question might be whether there are similar things going on in the UK, and you're turning a bit of a blind eye to them.

    2030:

    Re: Vaccine logistics

    First off: Thanks to everyone who offered their insights - much appreciated! It appears that most of you a lot more optimistic than I am. Hopefully you're right because I'm tending toward mdive's POV (2024):

    '... consider that the vaccine will likely be far more valuable on the black market for the first X months.'

    Yeah - basically the elephant I was talking around - hence the armed forces and/or some other serious gov't security depts.

    Unless the political atmosphere in the US changes rather drastically into 'benign co-operation for the mutual benefit of all humankind' over the next couple of months, these vaccines are a high profile political target.

    Secondly - and as importantly - it will be 'interesting' to see whether the COVID-19 vaccination rate pattern follows that of seasonal flu with DC highest. (Geeze - who'da guessed that considering how many old geezer GOPs/anti-vaxers hang around there.)

    https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/state-variation-in-seasonal-flu-vaccination-implications-for-a-covid-19-vaccine/

    2031:

    That totally happens in the UK and it's why the four nations are mostly in various levels of lockdown right now.

    (Greg has been out of the workforce even longer than I have, hence not having his nose rubbed in it.)

    2032:

    Bill Arnold at 1981:

    Is it too cynical of me to suggest that this might be deliberate on Trump's part?

    Get Giuliani to submit blatantly incompetent legal arguments;
    arguments are thrown out.

    Trump can then complain that he was cheated, but that his incompetent idiot of a lawyer screwed up the legal protests.
    (Giuliani is 76; he retires.)

    I.e. it would be an excuse to maintain his mythology but concede anyway - presumably in order to look less of a liability in a 2024 run.

    Perhaps that's too self-aware for Trump.

    2033:

    H WRONG We actually have something called "The National Health Service" And MOST ( Not all, there are always arseholes ) employers accept that the rules say that you are allowed time off sick ... we have something called "Statutory Scik Pay" - not your full wage, by any means, but it's something of a fall-back. ( Charlie - maybe, maybe not ) My wife is still working full-time & her employer is playing very strictly by the official rules. E.G: Medical emergency, now 4/5 years back - full pay for 4 weeks, company sick pay for the next 4 or 6, one week on statutory, then back to work with restricted hours, but full pay - IIRC - we had other things to worry about at the time, like her staying alive, but money was NOT one of them. Oh, and note for USAians - the only cost to us was her individual prescriptions, at the statutory rate, after she left hospital ... the intial Doctor's consultation, the hospital visit-that-turned-into-a deatailed-examination, that turned into an emergency operation at 01.15 the following morning, nor the 8 days subsequent in hospital ... cost to us: ZERO. That is how a civilised country treats its people, yes?

    waldo MUCH too self-aware. What DJT is aware of, is that, if he ceses to be POTUS at 12.01 EST on 20/01/2021, there will be at least one lawyer, with a serious writ waiting foir him, if not a long queue of them ... I don't know what desperate tricks he's going to try next, except that he almost certainly will try something.

    2034:

    Indeed. Including the deliberate creation of underclasses with no rights to benefits or even NHS treatment. The hostile environment to immigrants isn't because TPTB don't want immigrants (indeed, they continue to import large numbers); it's because they don't want them to have rights, so they can't object let alone leave their jobs when improperly and even illegally treated, and can be kicked out for any reason or none.

    2035:

    REPLY @2013

    [" Do flowering magnolias have some significance for people who grow up in the north that they need to have one in their garden if they end up living in the south other than the Gone With The Wind stereotype?" ]

    No clue beyond the stereotype southerners believe is the only thing people from up north 'think they know' about the South -- moonlight and magnolias (which boy howdy the southern fiction writers and travel writers after The Whah!, making really big bux (yes! really they did!) living up north and writing for the northern magazines did they propagate that propaganda!). When I lived on the Eastern Shore, heart of Maryland's csa support -- also from where Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth were born and escaped -- where they are many varieties of magnolias. I loved the people among whom I lived -- but they were as opposite from confederacy thinking possible, all women, all deep in history, all running the town, all very smart, all life-long dedicated to action to try and right the wrongs and build bridges of trust and friendship with the understandably traumatized Eastern Shore Black communities, whose heritage for nearly 4 centuries was casual, but intentional, abuse, either/or both emotional and physical, whenever in the physical presence of a white person. They really disliked the northerners moving in and buying up the historical homes and estates because they also put huge amounts of pressure on the Historical Societies and other institutions to stop talking about slavery! They'd come to buy their own GWTW Tara, and by god don't bring up such disgusting stuff that doesn't matter and never did. This is equally true I had learned earlier while living in Louisiana. Di not disturb our southern plantation role-and-costume play with bringing up slavery. Keep slavery concealed in the shadows, just like they did then, pretending it all 'just happened somehow,' those meals, the clothes, the grounds, the flowers, etc. frustrating and angering the natives -- well at least the natives / historians etc. with whom I hung!

    The ladies call those northerners the "moonlight and magnolia" factions.

    However I grew up where it was really cold, and though we have magnolias here on the mid-Atlantic seaboard, up where I grew up on the Northern Great Plains close to the Canadian border, we did not have magnolias. They were just exotic attractive phantasms in my imagination that I'd read about.

    ~~~~~~~

    REPLY @2032

    ["Is it too cynical of me to suggest that this might be deliberate on Trump's part?"]

    It's naïve. There is no there, much less a plan. It's all about tv and keeping the base utterly riled and Doing Crazy too, and nothing else. Other than burning down every bit of anything connected to a National Government and democracy. (The state is not the nation.)

    2036:

    I don't know where you're getting those numbers. There's a project going in soon, so the most current numbers, 20 billion AUD (14.5 billion USD) gets 10 GW of solar, a battery big enough to provide 24/7 supply and a 4500 km undersea cable (twice the distance from London to Morocco). So that's less than your quoted range, but with lots of extras.

    It's not a government project with rubbery figures created to get ministerial sign off, it's a mining company.

    https://www.sciencealert.com/world-s-largest-solar-farm-to-pipe-power-internationally-from-australia-under-the-sea

    "As far as I can tell, there're no widely applicable (non-hydro) sufficiently cheap industrialized storage solutions currently available. Maybe some could be developed, but the fact that they don't seem to be in large-scale industrial production is indicative of unsolved issues."

    Or it could indicate that there's currently no market for them.

    If you're allowed to burn stuff, the government will subsidise you to do it and stuff to burn is cheap, why would you store? There's a good dozen long term storage solutions that haven't been built because at present, you can't make money. But lots of them are in the situation where all the bits have been done for other things, but never put together for storage.

    Hot rocks for example. We have made pairs of long tunnels in hard rock deep underground. (The Gotthard Base Tunnel is a 57 km tunnel pair, 2.5 km underground and cost ~8 billion pounds) We routinely drill core samples making ~100mm diameter holes several km deep. We can make super critical water electrically. We can make fans. Geothermal power plants exist and can power a small nation on rocks as low as 200 C.

    No one has put those together to make two 100 km long tunnels, spaced about 2 km apart, joined every few metres by a 10 cm dia hole, then put pipes in the tunnels that can carry supercritical water, added fans to circulate the air between the tunnels, and through the small holes, then built a geothermal power plant. But all those things, tunnels, holes, fans, pipes, water, power plants, they're all off the shelf proven tech.

    That gives you about 40 cubic km of rock to use as a heat store. Granite holds about 1 joule per gram per degree at those temperatures. It's about 2.75 grams per cubic centimetre. That's 1.1x10^17 joules per degree. If you set the maximum temperature at 650C and the minimum at 350, that's a 300 degree range. 3.3x10^19 joules. At 33% efficient conversion to electricity, that's 3x10^15 Wh. Or enough to supply 4000 GW for a month. Or, about twice the UK's annual energy (not electricity) consumption. You might want to have a lower maximum temperature as quartz has a phase change at 573 C (from memory, but about there) but it's still going to be plenty.

    Assuming the tunnels and holes between them cost twice as much as the Gotthard Base Tunnel (which seems reasonable, the Gotthard Base Tunnel didn't have holes, but did have rail lines, escape tunnels, lining, approach and departure works, stations, ventilation and was slightly more than half as long) that's 16 billion pounds. The cost of power stations is a variable depending on how much power you want to provide. Hellisheiði Power Station cost 800 million USD and provides 330 MW, so call it 2 GBP/W. For comparison Hinckley Point C is more than triple that even neglecting the operating cost of a nuclear reactor. Obviously generation and storage aren't the same, but if you're building enough nuclear to cover the peaks, then the comparison is more valid.

    Also obviously if it stores double the UK's annual energy consumption it's going to take a while to charge up. So equally obviously, you'd flow the heat in from one end and flow the heat extraction water from the other end. You'd also build it in a curve so the ends aren't very far apart.

    2037:

    The Seagull has been identified!

    All those post got nuked. Fair warning, Glencore get pissed if people [not actual HSS] leak their trading intents on Hacker News months before it happens[1].

    Look kid: You might think you have the Cereal Token, but you do not.

    Fine then.

    Your Minds have about, oooh, a 89% chance of insanity when you meet our little friends.

    Good luck.

    p.s.

    We're an Actual Unicorn. You... ain't.

    Death Cults: also come in SF versions.

    [1] Note: You're ultra-low information if you didn't spot this being done the moment it was, then the Glencore Oil trading heist and the China deal and Congo, but hey: whatever.

    [[ You know your quota. Going over it now means it reduces for the day - mod ]]

    2038:

    The above was a reply to Erwin 1978. I thought I hit reply. Must not have.

    2039:

    gasdive@2036

    There is a market for sufficiently cheap industrialized storage solutions.

    Take Canada's isolated communities up North. They live in zones that are too thinly populated to justify connections to the power grids down south. They have to resort to costly diesel generators for their electricity.

    If there were a way to store electricity during the night or during a lack of wind they could say goodbye to the diesel fuel (brought in by barge in the summer or trucked in by winter roads) and hello to solar and/or wind power.

    This week one of those isolated communities, Fort Chipewyan (same latitude as Thurso in Scotland) opened a record-setting solar power farm which will be saving them 800.000 litres of diesel fuel a year.

    But they're still stuck with using the diesel generator during the night because they have no way to store this solar power!

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/indigenous-owned-solar-farm-fort-chip-1.5807721

    2040:

    ...And, This is a direct message.

    It hasn't been a pleasure, it's been a total fucking drag looking after the grandpa brigade.

    Trust me: frontal lobe dementia is kinda just what they do to those who they dislike.

    https://www.alzheimers.net/frontal-lobe-dementia/

    Lots of other tricks up their sleeves, like Parkinsons and other neurological stuff.

    ~

    We have been amazed at your fucking stupidity. But thank-you Greg: you answered the actual Question of "Are we the Baddies".

    The answer is: yes.

    2041:

    Hello Everyone,

    Longtime lurker, rare commenter, non-troll (I think). DISCLAIMER: USAian, non-scientist/non-engineer, no skin in the game of "Great Britain must/must not have nuclear power!" Question: does anyone have a rough calculation about how much of GB's energy consumption could be covered/reduced through a nationwide program of energy conservation, building insulation, ground source heat pumps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump) and sector coupling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-X)?

    Cheers, Keith

    2042:

    That's why you read Nick Land's Twitter. Am curious, so I'm grabbing a full archive.

    Here's a video: Such a great song/performance... (MERRY CLAYTON- "GIMME SHELTER" (1970)) It's just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away Why don't you stop that shootin' Why don't you stop that shootin' Oh, children Together now

    Yes.

    2043:

    We may be in furious agreement. I'm saying that in a time of subsidised fossil fuels, storage needs to be unfeasibly cheap to compete, which is why there's not much of it.

    Specifically speaking about the solution I just presented, Fort Chipewyan is nowhere near the scale needed for hot rock storage. All the energy would just leak out into the environment and they'll never afford a tunnel boring machine. So that lets out that solution. The per unit cost of solar isn't really comparable either. Retail purchase of a couple of MW isn't much like building factories that make factories that make solar panels. Especially at country scale. When a country spends money inside the country, it doesn't really cost anything. The situation with a community of 850 isn't like that. They spend money on Chinese panels, the money leaves and is never seen again. That makes massive overbuild of solar much more expensive. It's more comparable with the UK buying a hundred Chinese nuclear reactors, where the money leaves and is never seen again, impoverishing the population. With a population 1/80 000th of the UK it's going to need a different solution entirely. Probably the cheapest would be to run a powerline from Fort McMurray which is a bit over 200 km. You'd probably need about 2000 33 kV poles. About 20 million dollars, give or take. To provide enough solar to charge up a season to season store you'd need about 10 times more solar than they have. That's 78 million dollars. Having a powerline isn't the same issue as it is for the UK, which would also have a cheaper solution just by putting in powerlines, as the other end would be Canadian, not some Johnny Foreigner that they don't trust to keep supplying.

    (for some reason they don't have any issue with making themselves a water empire, utterly dependent on a hundred nuclear plants that are all owned and operated by a foreign company, but they're you go)

    2044:

    I don't, but the discussion here is around the last little bit needed to reach zero carbon. It all hinges on 4 weeks in 52 where there is no wind and not much solar. Apparently cutting carbon to about 1/10th of current by only burning during that 4 weeks makes you: "a useful idiot for the fossil fuel industry" as per comment 1512.

    So in the context of this discussion, no amount of efficiency gain counts for anything.

    2045:

    Conservation efforts generally have one of two outcomes for industry - either it results in a more efficient industry, which then grows larger, often to such an extent that total energy use goes up, not down, or it results in industry decamping, which invariably increases global carbon emissions because the places it decamps to have very weaksauce environment protections.

    Encouraging the first is good economic policy, but neither one substitutes at all for a clean energy sector.

    Heck, it is not just industry - Switching to LEDs did not reduce my energy consumption, it killed my seasonal affective disorder instead, because I had the bright bulb moment that it was now affordable to light the spaces I was working in to summer-sunlight levels. Huge gain in quality of life, but no energy savings.

    2046:

    Yes, I see them less as an energy saver than as a way to finally be able to see what I'm fucking doing. LEDs have at last made it straightforward to get out of the bind that incandescent bulbs stuck us in, although you still have to do it yourself.

    Thing is with incandescent bulbs you had a practical limit of about 100W, which is not really bright enough, because anything bigger cooks the socket. The bakelite/melamine goes crumbly from the heat and the whole thing falls to bits. Even the brass/ceramic ones lose the temper of the springs for the contacts eventually and stop being reliable. 150W bulbs did exist but you didn't come across them very often and they tended to be the light that never worked because the socket was knackered. Anything more than that was pretty much special supply only and soon a special socket as well.

    By the time CFLs came along this situation was so well established that they had apparently forgotten the thermal reason for the size limit and picked up the idea that it was like that simply because that was good enough. So we still had the same problem only without the justification. If anything it was a bit worse, because CFL manufacturers are all bleeding liars and you have to buy the next size up from the one that claims to be equivalent to x watts incandescent to get one that actually is. (Not to mention that they would more often fail because the cruddy underspecified components in the ballast went pop than because the actual tube had had it.)

    It has of course long been possible to get a decent light by means of full-size fluorescent tubes, but there is all the hassle of installing extra fittings, and it is a pain in the arse bringing replacement tubes home on your bike (and even in some cars).

    LED bulbs as sold make things worse again - same dumb adherence to the luminous equivalent of thermally-limited incandescent bulb sizes, plus an unfortunate tendency to use directional emitters, inadequate heatsinking, shitty ballasts (some of them are even resistive), and even worse deficiencies in component quality; and you never really know until you get them home whether they are a decent colour or some horrible blue shit. (Or you can get a differently proportioned mix of the same problems by buying them from Europe instead of China, at five or ten times the price.) But what they do offer is the possibility of buying the emitters, heatsinks, and ballast components all separately and to known spec, then putting them together yourself to make something which provides a good level of well-distributed illumination and reliability, yet is still uncumbersome enough to plug into an ordinary light bulb socket. This was never really possible with fluorescents.

    2047:

    My solution pre-LED was to buy a 500 W halogen intended for outdoor use. (Google 500 W halogen floodlight) I had shift work for a few years and ate breakfast with the monster light shining right into my face.

    2048:

    Ah, it seems the poor delicate Segull can't take mockery - good at dishing it out & telling all of us "We're fucked" & "the baddies", but a mere single hint, linking her with another loonie & she throws all her toys out of her precious pram. Not just mad, but infantile & spiteful with it ... never mind, I didn't expect anything better, so I'm not dissapointed (!)

    Keith Already under way, in a limited fashion. There are grants for house insulation & encouragement for more efficient heating methods. My own house loft is about 20cm deep ( at least ) in quite effective insulation. We don't use heat pumos nearly enough & our low-level-corrupt government took away (!) the subsidies for self-generated power, because thier friends were not gettung a cut.

    TJ Not here My electricity consumption has gone down noticeably since I binned all the filament bulbs -= even though I now have more lights "on". A extra couple in the greenhouse, on during the winter months to keep dark-intolerant plants growing thorough the winter. Like capsicums .... ... Pigeon You can now get like-for-like LED "tubes" to replace flourescent-discharge tubes - I've got two in my kitchen. ( You have to fit a new ballast, as well. ) gasdive Yes, but that woould have benn HOT ( & inefficient )

    2049:

    For the kinds of places you use tubes I'm starting to move over to led strips.

    If you have space and don't care what the luminaire looks like then you can scale up as much as you like by wiring in a bigger power supply and more strip.

    Ideal for spaces like garages and pretty handy for indirect lighting.

    2050:

    Greg, the situation you describe with your wife is because she has a permanent job and employer who chooses to pay more than statutory sick pay for a while. These jobs are rarer and rarer and millions just go straight onto statutory sick pay. UK Statutory sick pay is £100/wk - you can't feed yourself, pay utility bills and rent/mortgage on that. Literally millions of people are one illness or accident away from total financial collapse.

    2051:

    Yes, both hot and inefficient. But it did make it possible to hold down the job and get to sleep in the early evening. So it was worth it. I'm very glad to not be doing shift work anymore.

    2052:

    The horrible blue light bulbs are the suppliers meeting the demand of a very specific niche - Blue light is optimal for photosynthesis, and a lot of the demand for "Actually sufficiently bright" light bulbs is from people wanting to grow plants indoors. I did not wire my own, I bought from Germany after reading way, way too many reviews to find some high-lumen bulbs not hyper-specialized for that market.

    2053:

    This article on Vox presents a theory about why the polls were so wrong.

    TL;DR: People who answer phone surveys are "weird": they have high levels of social trust. This used not to matter, but these days people with low levels of social trust are disproportionally likely to vote R, which is missed by phone surveys.

    Which suggests that Trump may have shot himself in the foot when it comes to 2024. This year the low-social-trust voters still trusted the voting system and voted. But now Trump has fed them a narrative that he only lost because the voting system was rigged, which low-social-trust people are more likely to believe. So maybe next time all those people will say "I'm not going to bother voting because its all rigged anyway", and hence they won't be voting for Trump.

    Hey, we can hope that this horrible cloud has at least that silver lining.

    2054:

    and you never really know until you get them home whether they are a decent colour or some horrible blue shit

    Lights in the UK don't come with a color specification on the box? Interesting. I have a pile of LEDs that I got on sale. Various brightness and color options. So many that since they last so long I may die before they get used up.

    And my power bill HAS gone down.

    2055:

    Cheap lights that you get at the supermarket usually don't but more expensive bulbs and proper trade suppliers generally do.

    The units tend to be colour temperature rather than xy (or uv, or ab) chromaticity but that's usually good enough.

    2056:

    Just read an article in the Washington Post by a pollster. He said when he started in the 70s polling firms would pick out a clump of 5 "like" people. Call them and typically have 1 talk to him. So the polling firms would call 2500 people and get to talk to 500. And since they worked to get their sample clumps in groups of 5 they could get a wide variety of people. That has now changed by a factor of 10 to 100. Between caller ID, answering machines, and voice mail they now have to call something like 150K or more people to get 500 responses. And they know those folks do not represent a broad swath of the population.

    And over the last few years number spoofing has made most people not even trust the number or caller ID their phone shows (I'm there totally) and just don't answer anything not from a close friend.

    2057:

    There's the other problem, too. I wanted a low-power light for reading in bed, which would help me go to sleep not wake me up - could I find one? - could I buggery! I have some old 25w incandescents but wanted 10w or preferably 5w, which used to be obtainable. LEDs would be fine, but the lowest was 50w equivalent, except for the turquoise cuddly bunnies and virulently coloured toadstools, which were NBG for reading by, anyway.

    When triking and camping, I use a cheap, feeble bicycle light (the white one of these) with a bit of polytunnel plastic for a diffuser, which works well.

    https://www.halfords.com/cycling/bike-accessories/bike-lights/halfords-3-led-bike-light-set-661318.html

    I eventually got the lowest powered LED I could and taped 3 layers of red plastic document folder material tapes over the holder (safe, because LEDs run cool).

    2058:

    Most do, and I don't buy the ones that don't. I agree that the cyan-tinted ones are horribly medicinal, suitable only for workshops etc., and my wife loathes them more than I do.

    2059:

    Cheap lights that you get at the supermarket

    Interesting. In the US such things are supermarkets tend to have premium pricing (except for a one off special get you in the store sale). They figure everyone will be there for the food and they compete over who has the cheapest milk. But as you walk from the chip(crisp?) aisle to the toilet paper there will be a small display of light bulbs, extension cords, etc... with some of the highest prices in town. They hope you figure "Oh, I need a light bulb. Might as well get it now." rather then making another stop. I suspect selling 3 bulbs a day raises the profit percentage for the store based on the prices they charge.

    I've bought my general use LEDs mostly at big box home improvement centers on the US Black Friday sale thing. $.99 per bulb. And last was 4 or more years ago. I just bought 40 or so. The specialty ones I want for my ceiling fan setups or other things I go to Big River as they are the only place I can get bright, dimable, mini base bulbs for prices that don't seem to be related to the price of gold on the spot market.

    I have a few florescents to replace and have to decide if the LED tube cost is worth avoiding the effort of replacing the fixtures in places like my crawl space under the house. I DID replace 2 florescent fixtures in my utility room with similar shaped fixtures that contain rows of led dots. Was easiest way to go and cover up the ceiling holes. They give out a good light balance and brightness.

    2060:

    Is the range of LED bulbs in the UK really that limited or are you in an LED bulb desert?

    Between the physical stores and Big River and such I can get things that range from nearly imperceptible to blinding in ranges of colors.

    2061:

    Are you saying that it's "ordinary" "R's" who are buying into the "Trump WON!" lies, not just hs fascist base?

    Ignoring how you have incredibly over simplified population groups in the US...

    There are a lot of R's or rather "not D's" who can't stand the thought of D's winning.

    Most are gradually accepting that he did. But a lot just can't figure out how to come to those terms. Even the ones who thing DT is a despicable human being.

    The problem with a 2 party system is that it forces everyone to make a binary choice at some point.

    2062:

    I should clarify that my local supermarkets are a bit crap and only really carry their own brand stuff, which I think is whatever is currently cheap repackaged.

    The larger (more distant) stores are likely to have a better range but I'm not really going to travel to find out in the middle of a pandemic when I have internet shopping & can get exactly what I want :)

    2063:

    I have been installing quite a lot of this stuff recently:

    https://www.hiline-lighting.co.uk/gb/single-colour-led-strips/479-warm-white-led-strip-3000k-smd3528-240leds-ip00-5060440713538.html

    I have a few M of D65 that is going to be replacing the fluorescent tube in the attic soon. Problem is that the tube reduces headroom just enough to be a liability for someone my height.

    2064:

    My guess, based on looking at the figures, is that a 30% reduction would be 'simple' and up to 70% might be possible in the medium term, without impairing living standards. BUT ....

    Even getting the 'simple' benefit would mean reversing many of the changes that have been promoted over the past 70 years, need the abolition of our kleptocracy, monetarism and domination by foreign (especially USA) multinationals, need some serious investment, need a level of socialism that would give Greg an apoplexy (*), and need an effective campaign to achieve the necessary social changes. And, of course, an effective government to arrange all that.

    I could post some of the things that could be done, many of which have been proposed before on this blog, but there is nothing that is socially or politically easy, and not much that can be done without both expenditure and stamping on kleptocratic organisations. I don't see it short of a revolution.

    (*) No, Greg, I don't mean as in Old Labour or communism, but interventionist government for the benefit of society as a whole.

    2065:

    Is the range of LED bulbs in the UK really that limited or are you in an LED bulb desert?

    Note that UK light fittings generally don't have Edison (screw-fit) sockets, but are bayonet sockets. It's not a small market -- it's used in former British colonies like Australia and India as well as the UK -- but it's a minority pursuit, like driving on the left. Also, the UK retail sector in general has taken a hammering from Amazon and other internet vendors, and so generally concentrates on a narrow range of everyday essentials, the sort of products people expect to have at hand at an hour's notice.

    2066:

    I installed some in my greenhouse, and it works wonderfully! In particular, its directionality means that it lights what I need and not the neighbourhood. I may well install it in other 'working' areas when the existing kit expires, too. But, for my reading light and most household uses, it's not good - I experimented with the strip I used in the greenhouse.

    2067:

    Yes. Even on the Internet, I failed to discover a sub-1w LED 'bulb' in either bayonet or standard Edison screw, or a suitable bedside light that had a fitting suitable for any of the bulbs I did find (mostly ones for fridges etc.)! I seriously wondered about installing a small Edison screw fitting in a suitable bedside light, but my hack was a LOT simpler.

    2068:

    Back in the day I used to recompile the Linux Kernel to get caps lock to be a control key. This was before X terms.

    Now I find putting this in a file and executing the file works:

    cat <<EOF | xmodmap - remove Lock = CapsLock add Control = CapsLock keysym CapsLock = ControlL keycode 135 = ControlR NoSymbol ControlR add control = Control_R EOF

    2069:

    I started to do something like that over 20 years back. It then stopped working, and I checked for my next few systems, but it stayed broken, so I gave up but left it in place. Until SDL stopped working because of it, when I had to disable it! However, in the light of this thread, I have restored it, and it seems to be back again. Hurrah!

    2070:

    Also, the UK retail sector in general has taken a hammering from Amazon and other internet vendors, and so generally concentrates on a narrow range of everyday essentials, the sort of products people expect to have at hand at an hour's notice.

    Yes. Here also.

    I suspect though (with scant evidence I know) that big box home improvement stores (Home Depot, Lowes, Ace Hardware (smaller but still)) don't exist in Europe like they do here. Different cultures and even laws/building codes.

    Anyway at the 1/2 dozen (each) Lowes and Home Depot stores within 30 miles of me there is a light bulb aisle 15 to 20 meters long. And what I can't find there or is crazy priced there I can order from Big River. And Target isn't bad and within walking distance. We also have the cheap $1 stores but they tend to stock as described by EC.

    2071:

    EC In which case I would NOT have apoplexy. Teh mad programme of Corbyn & the semi-marxiusts would merely have benefitted a different select-&-favoured group compared to the tories, & not everybody .... "Social Democracy", remember?

    2072:

    I too would like to find some decent bedside lights.

    This used to be fairly simple. There are a lot of bedside lights out there with touch-sensitive bases: touch once for dim, second time for medium, third time for full, fourth time back to off.

    Unfortunately the chip that undoubtedly sits at the heart of all of these products was designed for a 40 watt tungsten filament. So it does something like 5W, 15W, 40W (I'm guessing the figures here). But this doesn't work on an LED bulb that pulls 3W max. There is a tiny variation in brightness, but not enough to be useful when you wake up at 3AM and want a dim light. So when our old ones failed we bought new ones, expecting them to work well with LEDs because the boxes said "works with dimmable LEDS", and they don't.

    2073:

    I suspect though (with scant evidence I know) that big box home improvement stores (Home Depot, Lowes, Ace Hardware (smaller but still)) don't exist in Europe

    They do exist: your go-to in the UK would be B&Q, for example. But the stock they supply is different, and they overlap with low-end/small scale trades -- not just DIY but contractors overhauling stuff like your bathroom or installing a garden shed.

    (Other areas are more specialized: kitchens, for example. And there are specialist trades suppliers who don't generally deal with the DIY-ing public. And yes, regulations and laws are very different.)

    2074:

    I can probably guess the response from some posters, but we solved our bedside reading illumination problem using Phillips Hue bulbs (with compatible-ish 3rd party equivalents available).

    They are indeed expensive and mean you have to faff around with an internet enabled hub and setup (with the usual privacy / security concerns) but they have a couple of nice features.

  • You can define a 'bedtime' period which for us means over a 30 minute period, the lights gradually go from nice and bright to light the bedroom on an evening, down to barely bright enough to read by.

  • You can then also enable a 'wake-up' mode, which runs in reverse, gradually turning the lights on on a morning.

  • You can also get physical switches (on/off/cycle modes) for them to cut out the need to use your phone (other than for the initial set-up).

    And no, I don't work for Phillips...

    2075:

    not just DIY

    Yes. Over here in my youth my dad dealt with builder supply centers when he was building houses. But those folks were definitely NOT geared or even interested in the retail trade. Mostly just tolerated the DIY market. Home Depot then Lowe's ate their lunch. Or a big chunk of it. They still exist but mostly to supply the folks building 20 to 100 or more houses per year. If you're doing a one off thing as your own General Contractor the HD and L are easier to deal with. And they sell down to the retail level. Both have large plant/garden sections for the amateurs. Which is a big draw every spring.

    2076:

    They exist in Austria. The first time I drove my car into Vienna I lost my way. I ended up in a big box hardware store parking not too far from the city center. I unfolded my map completely and got directions from the locals in the store. (I don't trust GPS systems)

    2077:

    For people who haven't seen what we have in the US. A typical Home Depot store has over 100K SF (9300 square meters) of indoor space.

    You can buy lumber, shingles, concrete blocks, paint, plumbing and fixtures, appliances, and even a broom and dust pan for the kitchen pantry. You can pick it up, pay for delivery, or even rent a truck to take it home. Lowe's is very similar.

    Plus most have another 10% to 20% of outside space for things for your lawn, driveway, etc...

    2078:

    I too have searched for good ways to input kana on various computers. My daughter is happy with what Microsoft provides; I will use that if I have to. But my go-to machine is Linux, a Raspberry Pi in particular. There's a new Japanese keyboard that's supposed to be good for the Pi but I've not found a decent article that really says what it actually provides. And so far my searches through Japanese blogs/articles/etc haven't yielded what they do in Japan. Surely they've got something that does the trick, but so far I've not found it.

    What I did do was write a front end to vim that does the usual close/pipe/fork dance that reads the keyboard and sends the extended kana characters to vim. Works pretty well--<F1> puts you in standard ascii mode, <F2> into hiragana and <F3&gt into katakana. No kanji and I've not figured out how that might be done with this front-end approach.

    If anybody has more information on Raspberry Pi kana input please post it.

    2079:

    Oh, they exist in Canada too. I bought my P100 respirator in one of them. But despite a very long aisle of bulbs they don't sell DEL bulbs at good prices yet.

    2080:

    You foamed at the mouth over Khan's very modest proposals on car use - I can assure you that what is needed for even a 30% reduction is a LOT more draconian! Pigeon would be happy, but not many other people would.

    2081:

    I have a box of B22 bayonet 0.5W 20 lumen 6000K LED bulbs I got for my home theatre as the Philips Hue dimmable was still too bright at its lowest setting. I find the Philips to be the most reliable bulbs actually exceeding their stated life, but I have some Bluetooth mesh networked Chinese bulbs that are dimmable with adjustable colour temperature that work with my home automation and have lasted well so far. My home office has an 18W Philips LED globe bulb, 2000 Lumen and 2700K.

    2082:

    I have a couple of those touch activated dimmer bedside lamps and they work fine with the Philips Luster dimmable LED bulbs. But I don't use them anymore because I have a zigbee motion detector to turn on the main bedroom light when I go in or leap out of bed, and Alexa voice control to turn it off.

    2083:

    Interesting. That's still far brighter than I want, but is at least not completely dazzling. I can't still read comfortably with 0.1 lux (though I used to be able to), but my guess is that my mechanisms deliver c. 1 lux. Given LEDs' directionality, I am assuming that lumen = lux for them.

    2084:

    (1) Polling "error" is defined as the difference between polls and reported election results. This presumes no election rigging at large scales. (2) There are very interesting differences in polling error. I'm waiting until all states finish counting and report their counts to complete and update my spreadsheet, but for instance (from 6 Nov) (state, final Biden polling rolling average(538), final Trump polling rolling average(538), Biden Result, Trump Result, polling diff, result diff, "error") S BPAvg TPAvg BRes TRes Pdiff ResDiff diff Minnesota 51.8 42.7 52.5 45.4 9.1 7.1 2 Wisconsin 52.1 43.7 49.4 48.7 8.4 0.7 7.7 Michigan 51.2 43.2 50.5 47.9 8 2.6 5.4 Ohio 46.8 47.5 45.2 53.3 -0.7 -8.1 7.4

    Note that Minnesota, next to Wisconsin, has a wildly different polling "error". (And that the errors mostly skewed Republican, depending on the state.) The 538 averages include a lot of state-level polls with multiple pollsters. The assertion that Minnesotans response to phone pollsters in a wildly different way than Wisconsinites might be grounded in realities e.g. cultural differences between neighboring states; I don't know enough about these states. There is a strain of thought among numerically-inclined RW conspiracy people using e.g. Benford's Law analyses that there was systemic widespread election rigging favoring Biden. They are ignoring an alternative possibility, that there was widespread rigging in favor of Trump, but that it was not quite sufficient because e.g. numbers/political skew of mail in ballots were underestimated. Audits (e.g. risk-limiting audits) aren't finding any fraud, FWIW.

    2085:

    You foamed at the mouth over Khan's very modest proposals on car use - I can assure you that what is needed for even a 30% reduction is a LOT more draconian! Pigeon would be happy, but not many other people would.

    Yep, we are still at the stage where governments do a great talk but achieve little because the voters aren't willing to make the sacrifices required.

    2086:

    "This is DISGUSTING & completely uncivillised - USA! right ... I repeat - why do "Americans" hate each other so much, that they do this to each other?"

    It's because we hate Communism so much.

    2087:

    It's not the citizens as much as the big companies and their campaign contributions, jobs after term ends, etc.

    2088:

    EC I foamed at the mouth, & several other places, because Khan's proposal is THEFT of my property. I would welcome the abilty to re-engine my car, running it on LPG, for instance ( I've also looked at "electrification" - but - it costs as mush as buying a new one - so out of the question! ) But I am told that even that is either not allowed or you have to undergo the conversion & then take a test, hoping that the new arrangement will pass the emissions regs - I have asked & "they were as deliberately unhelpful as they could be. If you want to carry the public with you ... HELP them, don't make hig-sounding lectures & the crap all over any alternative possibilities...

    mdive NOT SO I suggest you read my reply, above. 17 years ago, I deliberately bought a car that I would never need to replace - thus "saving the environment" I drive a very low mileage each year ( under 3k-miles, often below 1.5k ), because when I can use public transport, or walk, or cycle - I do. But when I need the car, I really, really need it - there is no alternative available, OK? I cannot afford the £30k to electrify my vehicle - that's getting on for the cost of a new replacement. "LPG" is a realistic, lower-Carbon, very-low-pollution alternative, if I change the engine - total cost probably in the £4-6k range. Bloody expensive, but then, the car will last me for as long as I will ever need it. That route appears to be blocked by officaldom's intransigence. And no "discount" for people inside the new zone, either. In spite of the now-known fact tah a big slice of the pollution comes form the tyres, not the exhausts, oops. It's willy-waving at my, personal, expense.

    If there is no alternative, I will sell my beloved Land-Rover & get an OLDER car, built before 1980 & Khan can stuff it up his arse.

    Troutwaxer "Communism" in this case being defined as a mild case of Social Democracy, as performed across Europe, right? Like medicine for all?

    2089:

    We can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

    2090:

    I see a Senator from Tennessee, an "R" - has told DJT to "Stand aside". Another one breaking ranks ... how many more will start to peel off, I wonder?

    At the same time, it is rumoured that DJT is going to try to get Michigan to vote against it's own results in the EC (!)

    2091:

    You really aren't prepared to face reality, are you? The simple fact is that, if we want to reduce energy consumption by 30%, we are going to HAVE TO reduce our transport requirements by even more, and that NECESSARILY means changing personal road transport from even what I have (a bottom-end Skoda Fabia) to something VASTLY smaller, more efficient and less intimidating and dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists. LPG and even electrification are irrelevances. Furthermore, it is NOT just the mileage that is important, but the road occupancy (including when parked), especially in cities. British roads are narrow enough as it is, and on-street parking is a major problem.

    Inter alia, this would require the reeducation of the masses (of which you are typical) into accepting a different way of living. Yes, that would mean carrying the public with the change, whether they were acquiescent or kicking and screaming. And, no, you would NOT be allowed to put your juggernaut on the roads, or even what is risibly called a small electric car, without being able to justify why you are special - and, for something so extreme, you wouldn't be able to be. Most personal transport would be limited to (say) 100 Kg, unladen. And, yes, you could afford it, because it would cost under 10,000 quid (under 5,000 quid at scale) and have near damn-all running costs if you maintained it yourself.

    2092:

    Communism - that's, like, anything that cannot be outsourced or sold off the the highest bidder, for their ROI, and, of course, for the ROI of the legislators helping them.

    2093:

    Actually, it's both, plus the media moguls - I can assure you that people like Greg are typical.

    2094:

    If Tesla made a 4 wheel drive electric SUV, could you be convinced to buy it?

    2095:

    What, at a price of, I dunno, $75kUS?

    I really want a hybrid minivan. Cheapest one - there are ONLY two makers with one each - is somewhere between $35k and $40k, US.

    Nope, sorry. I'll wait a few years for a used one unde4r $15k (and that's going to hurt, being on a fixed income).

    2096:

    They're already trying that, with their truck.

    I've got an inconclusive answer: 1. Range seriously matters with a 4WD electric. If the charge is just enough to get you stuck in the middle of nowhere, it's worse than useless. So it needs a 350-400 mile range. 2. If it had that kind of range and was affordable, I'd seriously consider one. Moreover, I think most of my biologist friends would jump on it if they could afford it.

    The format? I'd want a chassis that could be rigged as a truck, SUV, or camper, possibly with additional battery capacity/deployable solar panels for hauling bigger loads. The point is to get something that makes sense for people working and living in rural areas. EVs, with their low clearance and limited range, aren't so good for that at the moment.

    2097:

    And, as far as the UK is concerned, the only significant benefit of even an all-electric vehicle of that nature in at least the medium term is to export the atmospheric pollution out of cities and into the higher atmosphere, and possibly reduce it somewhat. It would do damn-all to reduce our energy (or even fossil fuel) consumption, or tackle any of the other major problems we have that are caused by our juggernaut-dominated transport system.

    2098:

    Yes, the current EVs are not very popular in Canada while SUVs are. In fact Canada has the largest market share in the world for gasoline powered SUVs and pickups trucks. Canadians believe in the myth that 4 wheel drive SUVs are safer in the snow.

    2099:

    The fact that only part of the solution is available now doesn't mean there's something wrong with the solution. An electric car is environmentally superior to a gasoline powered car because it CAN be powered by green power, whereas there's no possible way to power a gasoline powered car by green power.

    So yes, we will be initially be powering our green cars with fossil-fuel produced power, but that won't always be true.

    2100:

    Provinces in Canada who get all their electricity from dams are already powering their electric cars with 100% renewable energy. So is Norway.

    2101:

    but that won't always be true.

    EC and I disagree on lots of things. But on this one I sort of agree but maybe for different reasons.

    The average consumer/voter (average idiot[1]) thinks that buying an electric car means 0 emissions. And that's the marketing hype. At least in the US. So after they get their electric thing they will wonder why we have to spend money(in whatever direction) to replace older power plants. Didn't they go green when they bought their car?

    [1] The last 5 years have made me realize just how stupid people can be. Even those I though had a brain.

    2102:

    or even what is risibly called a small electric car

    Hey! Don't you be bagging my EU-certified quadricycle like that, man. Not cool. Even the "light" category is allowed 425kg unladen, so 100+km at 45kph is quite reasonable.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classification)

    China and India both have similar categories, and of course some US car-worshippers have their "golf cart" category.

    But if you really need range, I suggest an electric wheelchair and a train.

    2103:

    I buy cheap "remote control LED light bulbs" that come with the ubiquitous credit card sized IR remote control. You get a few "party mode" things that you don't want, but a decent range of colour options as well as dimming. And the remoe is pretty directional so you can point it at the bulb you want. Plus of course the switch for that light will turn it off. You trade the ease of having all 20 bulbs accessible from your phone wherever you are for the simplicity of "this object does this task".

    But what I have ended up with for specifically reading in bed is an aftermarket high stop light bar - a strip of LEDs with a mounting system that runs off 12v (which I have in my bedroom), and a three pole switch with a resistor so I have off/dim/bright options. I added a diffuser and now I have a loverly red glow over my bed, bright enough to read by or just enough to navigate by as I prefer.

    2104:

    Unfortunately, at least the UK government deliberately promotes that belief :-( But it's not just that.

    I said that I was talking about the UK specifically in at least most of my posts. Firstly, as had been described above at length by other people, for the medium term, any large increase in our electric power consumption will come primarily from burning fossil fuels. Secondly, in the UK, atmospheric pollution due to emissions from vehicles is only one of several major environmental and health problems they cause, and not dominant. And, thirdly, increasing vehicle weights by a factor of up to 1.5 (and probably their size) is both going to make the other problems worse and mean that transport energy consumption will actually go UP by a similar factor. To a good first approximation, in conditions like we have, it is pro rata to vehicle weight.

    So it is extremely unclear that moving an electric vehicle fleet as currently being promoted will be environmentally better - it's a tricky calculation. Worse, for socio-political reasons (and some of those I mentioned above), it will actually make further improvement almost impossible without tearing the whole system up and starting again :-(

    2105:

    So, an enclosed boomerbuggy would qualify as a "light quadricycle" ?

    2106:

    Home Depot, Lowes, Ace Hardware

    The model does seem to be spreading. In Panama, where I've had occasion to buy stuff from them, there's Do It Center and Novey. Quite similar to Home Depot and Lowes, though on a slightly smaller scale.

    https://www.doitcenter.com.pa/

    https://www.novey.com.pa/

    2107:

    Granted, people aren't always bright about stuff, but that goes both ways, doesn't it? The idea that a partial solution is better than no solution shouldn't be difficult parse.

    2108:

    -sighs- "...be difficult to parse."

    2109:

    Grin :-) I was actually referring to things like the Nissan Leaf. Yes, I agree that those are MUCH more appropriate, but they're still overkill for things like commuting and shopping in cities and discouraging (at best) for lighter traffic - there is no technical difficulty in building something adequate at 100 Kg unladen.

    2110:

    Troutwaxer Careful - some idiots might mistake your irony & sarcasm for serious comment. IIRC "precious bodily fluids" - was Dr Stangelove, or was it a n other satire?

    EC ( 2091 )Sorry, but fuck off. It has GOT TO BE Gradual, or nothing will happen at all, which will be even worse, of course. My "juggernaugt" means I never have to hire a vehicle, it will carry anything I need ( Usually lots of manure, actually ) It uses up very little resources, because it is built to last, rather than rot away in 5 or 10 years & is SAFE - not just for me, but for other people, because I can see hazards long before people in "normal" cars, whose heads are 2 feet lower than mine. I can stop in time, but they can't - & don't. Even worse, I've had lifts in "modern" - built after 2016 cars & I'm terrified - ca't see a thing, there are so many light bells & whistles that you can't concentrate on the bloody road, oh &, of course, Shat-Nav, which ought to be banned, immediately & universally. ( 2093 ) Really fuck off, why don't you? I am quite aware of the problems & I do not subscribe to anything either the Murdochs or Rothermeres' of this world are pushing ...

    whitroth Yup, you've got it

    niala Not just Tesla, anyone - PROVIDED I could afford it ... Note my complaints earlier about the sheer costs of going electric, or even lower-Carbon. This is amazingly counter-productive & another reason I'm annoyed. Of course EC is idologically-purist, rather than practical, a true Corbynista, actually making things worse, rather than better. - see also whitroth's comment. CHARLIE: Is this a suitable subject for a thread - the tension between the idologically-pure, hair-shirt solution, which EC is proposing / the "Burn, baby, burn nonsense of the petrolheads & people like me, knowing that something must be done, but that economics matters, & that people can't afford to change, not with the rigged system we presently have?

    EC @ 2097 NOW - I'm in fervent agreement with you! The current system has been deliberately set up to favour heavy road transport at the expense of the railways, because road transport, by its very nature is fragmented & more easily exploited & "gameable"

    2111:

    So we're back to the fun nostrums that:

  • Range is a dealbreaker for electric cars. Counterpoint - The number of times MOST people go more than 100-200km away from their home in a day is vanishingly small, in the area of a few times/year at most. Range is a non-issue except for people looking for a justification against EVs.

  • Vehicles must be all purpose, all the time. If 1/annum you want to go into the mountains to drive on icefields or something, you must always have a vehicle capable of doing such. Vehicle rental companies do not exist, nor do carshare cooperatives and other models. If they existed, I might be able to buy an EV, but since they do not, I must own and operate my Colossusmobile for all my trips to the corner store.

  • There are places where EVs are unsuitable, such as that one strip of highway in BC with 300 km of empty road, and the Slave Lake Ice Highway in the North. Also, the desert road to Dakar, some regions of the Himalayas, and vast swathes of the Amazon. Therefore my commuter vehicle, which I drive a few km each way every day on predictable roads and in a populated area, must not be an EV. Ignore the fact that the reason there are few services in those locations is because there are NO PEOPLE.

  • EVs just use grid power, which is (SOMETIMES) fossil fuel derived, so I had might as well just poison my local atmosphere with maximally inefficient fuel burning. Counterexamples of hydro or other power are not appropriate because reasons. The notion that using an EV while pushing for non-CO2 grid power might be a good option is not to be countenanced because reasons also.

  • EVs are not perfect, so we must not make any changes until a perfect solution comes along. Which will also be flawed in some way, so I can also safely ignore that solution while continuing to do whatever I want.

  • 2112:

    "Precious bodily fluids" was from Strangelove.

    2113:

    If you were aiming (4) and (5) at me, you have completely misunderstood, and have got what I am saying arse over tit. I am saying that EVs as currently being promoted are heading in the wrong direction, and will actually obstruct genuine improvement. You'll see, if you live long enough :-(

    2114:

    Granted, people aren't always bright about stuff, but that goes both ways, doesn't it?

    The entire Covid-19 thing and the number of people with STEM degrees/jobs who claim it's all a hoax just has me floored.

    And even those not in STEM fields but who appeared for years to have a brain are acting the same way. Some of them my close relatives.

    2115:

    Your imagination is certainly overactive. Not merely does Khan not propose to confiscate your car, merely exclude it from central London and charge you for using it, nowhere did I say that we could get to where we need to be overnight.

    That being said, we are overspent on borrowed time, and can't afford our policy of continual prevarication, nor can we continue to reject anything that will inconvenience anyone.

    2116:

    Hopefully we will end up with electrically run public transportation.

    2117:

    Re EC v GT

    Greg, you're absolutely right in every way except, as usual, you're 25 years out of date. EC is right in the context of 2020. If we'd done as you're suggesting Greg, even starting at the first COP in 1995 (which was held at least 30 years after it became completely obvious to everyone that we had to stop emitting carbon) we would have been fine. A 3% decrease in carbon emissions year on year from that point would see us now at about 45% of 1995 emissions and well on the way to licking the problem.

    Instead emissions rose by about 3% per year, and as a result we have emitted about the same amount of carbon since COP1 as had been emitted in the entirety of human history up to that point.

    The time for gradual change, and "bringing everyone along" has passed.

    Right now we act, and act decisively, or billions of people die.

    My money is on we continue to increase emissions by 3% year on year until it's suddenly reduced by the death of most people, probably due to starvation.

    In that context, forcing people such as yourself to hire a man and an electric truck to deliver your manure kinda pales.

    2118:

    Why did you bother? What your reply was said, basically, "I'll ignore the fact that this is what you need, I'll speak as though you're talking about everyone, and therefore, bs."

    You're wrong. He has his needs, and you're saying he doesn't matter. Really.

    2119:

    By the bye, folks, Virtual Philcon has started, and runs all weekend, zoom and discord.

    Do come.

    2120:

    If I ever return to public transport (Covid drove me out) I will most probably be riding a Nova Bus LFSe+

    http://novabus.com/nova-bus-introduces-lfse-new-long-range-electric-bus-dual-charging-options/

    2121:

    Elderly Cynic @ 2019: The point that seems to have got lost is that (according to what I have read), refrigeration alone is fine at that level.

    The liquid nitrogen is needed solely for shipping bulk supplies from the manufacturer or warehouse to the local hubs (serving, say, an area of 250,000 people), where it is diluted and put into suitable containers for the actual vaccination, and shipped out to the vaccination centres.

    Assuming reasonable transport links between those, that doesn't need more than 4-6 containers of 10 litres or more, per hub, over a month's period. Assuming the rest of the pipeline worked smoothly, which is implausible!

    That is lost in the noise for the developed world, and not a major problem anywhere that isn't completely disaster- or poverty-stricken. The real problems are elsewhere and, as I and Simon Farnsworth are saying, the elephant in the room is that most countries don't have governments that are fit for purpose.

    From my point of view, what seems to have got lost is that for 90+% of the world, the existing commercial logistics chains are all that's needed. They can do the job more effectively & cheaply than deploying the military to do it.

    Save military logistics for where it's needed to do the job; those few places where it can do the job more effectively & understand that it's going to cost more anywhere you have to employ the military.

    Elsewhere, let civilians get on with doing the job.

    2122:

    whitroth @ 2025: Never ran into mimosas up north, until I relocated to the DC area, so I have no clue what he's talking about.

    Mimosas - the mistake I made by planting one. The blossoms are beautiful, everything else about the damn tree is a mess:

    https://www.tallahassee.com/story/life/home-garden/2017/05/18/put-mimosa-trees-your-do-not-grow-list/101835686/

    https://www.southernliving.com/garden/grumpy-gardener/mimosa-the-wonderful-weed

    But that wasn't what he mentioned. He said he "planted a Southern Magnolia for the displaced Yankees".

    https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=magr4

    Magnolia blossoms are a southern stereotype, but I don't understand why they would have special appeal to displaced Yankees? I don't generally associate magnolia trees with the northern United States.

    2123:

    whitroth @ 2026: Do you hear a difference between "tin" and "ten"?

    No.

    I can tell the difference from context - "ten little Indians wearing tin-foil hats". But audibly there's no difference in the sound.

    2124:

    Range is a dealbreaker for electric cars.

    Clarification: short range plus long recharging times can be a deal breaker.

    Like many of us I've got a fossil fueled vehicle; I can get it refilled in single-digit minutes, and that's counting time to leave the road, get into position at the pump, and get back out again when I'm done.

    If that were the case for electrics a range of 100km would be a minor nuisance. Unfortunately, an electric car with flat batteries is an immobile lump for hours and many drivers simply don't have use cases that involve staying in the same place that long.

    2125:

    This is why you can't have preferential/instant runoff voting. If you let people have choices other than business-lite and fascism they might not choose fascism.

    the next federal election could see up to a dozen safe Coalition {moz: right wing} seats facing serious, well-organised challenges. The motivations vary: the lack of action on climate change, the tenor of modern politics, mining being put ahead of farming, or simply the calibre of the local member who’s kept a safe seat warm for years.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/21/independents-day-why-safe-coalition-seats-are-facing-grassroots-challenges

    2126:

    Magnolia blossoms are a southern stereotype, but I don't understand why they would have special appeal to displaced Yankees? I don't generally associate magnolia trees with the northern United States. Interesting question. A single magnolia is often a feature of a small (or medium) suburban front yard in (southern) NYS. If not that, some other spring flowering tree like a flowering cherry (or a dwarf fruit tree not concerned about fallen fruit). I also don't know why; probably a landscaper choice or garden shop/nursery displays; most of landscaping history is pre-internet. [1] Also, very visible spring flowers are nice. My first (teenager) job was with a laboratory for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (doing grunt work in some greenhouses and outside). They had a deer-fenced 1/2 acre of magnolia sports and crosses and had developed a yellow variety and created and sold a large number of specimens using early tissue cloning.

    [1] An 1810 catalog for CATALOGUE of PLANTS IN THE BOTANICK GARDEN of SOUTH-CAROLINA has a magnolia listed.

    2127:

    Yeah. Got deleted.

    Straight up evidence (do a grep for AUZ shooter OP Name that we shared on the night it happened: Christ - Church) of [redacted] bleed into some nasty /acc stuff. We're talking the real horror show they've been using on people.

    Nasty stuff your State Entities are now on record as using. For real.

    As we've told you before: once you perfect this stuff, it's game over for the Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

    Hint: the grep is "Rainbow in the Sky". They just didn't quite get the Sci-Fi scenes ["You're an idiot". "The Garden of the Mind is a singular experience".... but track and trace it. She was right there, directing the little gremlins, ooooh she was.]

    These fuckers are intensely evil, have absolutely zero fucks about killing humans, will burn $5,000,000 on innocents to perfect this tech ... but they can't make Rainbows.

    We can.

    And that, kids, is the story of how fucking contemptuous we are of your fucking species.

    ~

    Expect updates.

    "We won, You lost".

    Yeah. About that...

    2128:

    waldo @2032: Bill Arnold at 1981:

    Is it too cynical of me to suggest that this might be deliberate on Trump's part?

    Get Giuliani to submit blatantly incompetent legal arguments;
    arguments are thrown out.

    Trump can then complain that he was cheated, but that his incompetent idiot of a lawyer screwed up the legal protests.
    (Giuliani is 76; he retires.)

    I.e. it would be an excuse to maintain his mythology but concede anyway - presumably in order to look less of a liability in a 2024 run.

    Perhaps that's too self-aware for Trump.

    It's hard to be too cynical about anything having to do with DJT. But I think that would call for more self awareness than DJT or Topo GiGiuliani possess. Giuliani's incompetence is just what it appears to be, he's lost his fuckin' mind.

    But it's not beyond possibility that the minions have hit upon a scheme to use Giuliani to play out a losing hand where they can deflect blame later.

    2129:

    an enclosed boomerbuggy would qualify as a "light quadricycle"

    Could probably be dressed up as one, yes. There are requirements for lights and brakes and a few other things, but those are pretty much details.

    There's a virtuous cycle here, where dropping speed limits makes smaller cars safer than they would otherwise be, people buy smaller cars, smaller cars on smaller roads allow increased density, which repeats until you commonly see things that make Smart cars look enormous slowly grinding their way through clouds of cyclists and pedestrians (all powered by the steam from Greg's ears).

    "Not Just Bikes" is a normerkan who moved to The Netherlands rather than sacrifice his kids on the altar of the holy motorcar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ

    2130:

    SIGH. The urban bias that pops up when we start discussing EV issues is...SIGH.

    Look. I have no problems with the idea of an EV. The problem is that my needs as someone who lives in a rural area in the US West, I need the ability to, like, haul things including a horse trailer and that requires the equivalent of the Toyota Tundra I now own (trailer hauling isn't just an issue of the weight of the towing vehicle, it's also a matter of wheel base and stability. I much prefer to be driving the trailer and not having the trailer driving the truck, which is what happens with lighter-weight pulling rigs). And I'm a lightweight user as compared to some.

    People wonder why a lot of ranchers and farmers have issues with carbon cap legislation? It's because there are. no. decent. hybrid. or. electric. alternatives. to. what. is. being. proposed.

    The Tesla pickup truck? Don't make me laugh. The elevated, slanting sides on the bed pretty much make it useless for hauling hay and pulling a gooseneck trailer (unless, of course, you fork out for the expensive matching trailer).

    Vehicles are expensive and there's more than one farmer and rancher out there who has a good ol' rig left over from pre-computer days that they nurse along because it hauls a lot and the replacement is extremely expensive. That doesn't even get into the issue of equipment such as tractors, combines, swathers, etc. Additionally, you do pretty much need a good clearance range on a working vehicle because of the work it has to do.

    Granted, there's a lot that can be covered by electric ATVs (there's two classes of ATVs--recreational and farm use. You can load a lot of hay bales on an ATV, or pull a light arena rake) for daily use. A lot of equipment is already leased and not necessarily owned...BUT. There also needs to be sufficient volume for harvest seasons, because when the equipment is needed...it's NEEDED. That field of hay you're trying to get in loses nutritional value if not cut and baled properly without getting rained on. That field of grain has an optimal harvest time for best food value. And so on.

    Sure, an urban person can get away with the occasional lease of a big truck to haul things home for projects. But access is a bigger problem for people who actually, like, y'know, do something other than drive a big shiny rig around that never goes off pavement, has a fancy bedliner sprayed in, and never, ever gets the back window broken by an accidental toss of a wood chunk against it during freezing weather.

    Not all of us who own big trucks do it for the show, especially in rural areas. Not all of us are conservatives. And it gets frickin' annoying when we all get lumped together.

    2131:

    whitroth @ 2026: Do you hear a difference between "tin" and "ten"?

    No.

    I can tell the difference from context - "ten little Indians wearing tin-foil hats". But audibly there's no difference in the sound.

    This is something I realized only a few years ago: phonological differences apply not only to speaking but to hearing. The example that brought it home to me was "e" in Spanish and English. Spanish vowels are shorter and English ones are drawled and often diphthongized. "Mesa" in Spanish is "Meh-sah" and in American English is "May-sah". It took me a long time to learn to hear the difference.

    2132:

    It was a particular Ghost who mentioned it. Not /acc directly, a very special little imp.

    Once you do that grep you can wonder why we were networked into that particular Terrorist Act. And trust us: we do not use Facebook.

    $12.5 trillion, $750 billion, 40,000,000 USA citizens etc. China Bonds, wooo.

    Theranos. Blood, DNA and so on.

    "Addicts are banned" "No meditation, just booze, I defended you!" "You're useless"

    And so on.

    Oh, and Glencore? Well, it's all about desecration of Indigenous sites: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-21/expanded-mcarthur-river-mine-environmental-security-bond-reduced/12906106

    Glencore heads for collision with Australia’s sacred sites authority over McArthur River expansion https://www.northernminer.com/news/glencore-to-expand-mcarthur-river-mine-despite-sacred-sites-authority-veto/1003825143/ ~

    But hey, don't worry. Pretty sure Corporations will always use technology...

    OH, wait: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/19/dear-joe-biden-are-you-kidding-me-erin-brockovich

    No, really.

    You're Fucked and the worst thing you've done: sought to eliminate those who tried to protect you.

    shrug

    Hey, you want fun times: trawl "Swift on Security" and her posts about apotheosis and sacrificing souls and so on. Instead, she fucked the world for a fucking MS Office Keychain and a bit of computer game / twitter likes.

    Now, that's dark.

    "My soul is an empty hole"

    Yeah, there's a reason for that, and it's not us. Slave.

    2133:

    And tryptch.

    If you're really smart, you'll work out why #1833 just became a big issue and so forth. Like we only set it up three years ago, so here's your kids on State Sponsored "SAFE WORD" Psuedo-Faux-Anime....!

    Spoilers for the hard-boiled Bostonites: it's all about deprogramming the wealthy bubbles who have been indoctrinated and have spent, ooooooh, like $100,000,000 on this shit to prevent their special children getting 4-chan'd.

    Fucking hilarious.

    Here's the Meme / Video: "Everything Burns" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkkfuSizc4

    Literally took a few minutes to burn down this fucking atrocity of social engineering. Stanford. Behaviouralism.

    No talent fucking hacks.

    2134:

    I agree. It's startling to me that there are no large-scale hybrids, let alone EVs, out there. I mean, if you can run a train, a ship, or a car as a hybrid, why the hell not a full-scale truck? Or a semi?

    Unless the answer is, "hybrid doesn't work at the temperature scale where a majority of our buyers live," then the most likely answer is the politics of marketing. I don't forget that the big car companies plotted out the ballooning of SUVs in the 1990s, long before the models hit the road, and then created the market for them. This slipped out in a little news story where they announced the names and sizes of the future SUVs they were planning for the next decade.

    As for the range on an SUV truck, that wasn't a hypothetical, I was literally thinking of all my friends who are biologists who spend a good chunk of their working lives in the back ass of beyond, where they actually need 400 miles of range for road driving, or the energy-intensive equivalent of going four-wheeling on a dirt road somewhere. I'm completely unsurprised that people who live in rural America want the same thing.

    I also suspect that, when it proves possible to make a durable truck that runs on batteries and that can be charged from a solar array or a wind turbine, a number of farmers and ranchers will buy them, put up the arrays or turbines, and be reasonably happy. It's just another way of being off the grid.

    2135:

    The urban bias

    You mean when we talk about how EV's are a solution for people who have to drive in cities? Yeah, that's an "urban bias", or you could call it using appropriate technology, or fitting the problem to the solution or any number of other things.

    But you're right, for what you do fossil fuels are currently the only solution. So longer term you either need to move, or find some way to push EV makers to provide a solution for your situation.

    It's possible that fighting EVs every step of the way, complaining bitterly that they aren't yet a solution that works for you, and otherwise working to make yourself indistinguishable from the nihilist crowd will actually result in an outcome you like. But I have to ask... is that outcome the nihilist one, or instead one with human civilisation? I think betting on gtting the latter by demanding the former is even less likely than getting it by working directly for it.

    2136:

    One problem is that for long-haul driving there's precious little benefit to a hybrid. Hybrids (and EVs) benefit to the exact degree that regenerative braking fills the battery. So for stop-start driving you can save anything from 10% to 80% of your fuel cost (yep, someone built a hybrid rubbish truck). But as soon as you drive even a couple of hours at constant speed the hybrid benefit disappears, you're just carrying the battery, motor/generator and stuff along for the ride.

    Most "hybrid" heavy vehicles are more accurately just diesel-electrics where the electric part is more of a transmission than a hybrid, the storage part of the electric system is pretty tiny.

    The other thing is that mobile solar or wind is a tiny niche, the size of the generator compared to the size of the engine makes it useless to most people (sailboats with electric motors being one of the niche exceptions... but well... sailboat... maybe engine size is the 100m2 sail). So while the farmer might have solar or wind to charge the truck, that stuff will be concreted down and the truck will plug in to charge.

    2137:

    Did someone wind the clock back to 1995 and not tell me? Between "nuclear is the answer" and "100 km range and hours to charge is the problem with electric cars" I'm beginning to think so.

    Electric cars haven't been limited to 100 km and taken hours to charge since 1995. After 1996 the EV1 had more range than that and charged to 80% in a single hour.

    A modern electric car has 400-800 km range and charges at 1600 km/h. For humans who piss occasionally there's very little difference in point to point times, and in many situations the electric is very slightly faster over distance (because the fossil car starts at some random amount between full and empty and may need to be filled while the electric starts full and can often get to the destination on a single charge).

    2138:

    gasdive @ 2047: My solution pre-LED was to buy a 500 W halogen intended for outdoor use. (Google 500 W halogen floodlight) I had shift work for a few years and ate breakfast with the monster light shining right into my face.

    LED bulb question: Do LED bulbs lose brightness if left burning for a long time? I have two LED bulbs that for reasons I am not able to turn on/off, so I leave them burning all the time. I originally had 100W incandescent bulbs, but when those got hard to find I switched to a pair of CFL bulbs rated as the same number of lumens as a 100W incandescent bulb (they're not as bright, if you want the equivalent amount of light you have to use 150W equivalent CFL), but now CFL bulbs are getting hard to find too.

    So, the most recent bulbs are "100W equivalent" LED bulbs. But they've been on for a while & the light is so damn dim I can barely see. It's almost like there's only a pair of 40W bulbs in there.

    2139:

    David L @ 2075:

    not just DIY

    Yes. Over here in my youth my dad dealt with builder supply centers when he was building houses. But those folks were definitely NOT geared or even interested in the retail trade. Mostly just tolerated the DIY market. Home Depot then Lowe's ate their lunch. Or a big chunk of it. They still exist but mostly to supply the folks building 20 to 100 or more houses per year. If you're doing a one off thing as your own General Contractor the HD and L are easier to deal with. And they sell down to the retail level. Both have large plant/garden sections for the amateurs. Which is a big draw every spring.

    I remember when the Lowe's in Raleigh (there was only one back then - early 70s) was like that "builder supply center".

    If you wanted something, you went to a counter and told them what you wanted & they filled out a ticket that you took to someone at the warehouse dock or the lumber yard, where someone pulled your order and brought it to you. If you had a pickup truck they'd load it for you. If you were in a passenger car, you were kind of on your own. They'd put it on the ground there where you were waiting & you could load it yourself.

    You had to show your ticket to someone at the gate to the warehouse/lumber yard to get in and when you were ready to leave, someone at the gate checked your load against your ticket & stamped both copies (yours & theirs) to show you'd picked up your stuff. Strictly cash & cary, although they would accept a personal check.

    2140:

    Not all of us who own big trucks do it for the show, especially in rural areas.

    I'm reminded of my father's gargantuan van. I drove it occasionally and can testify to both its stately cruise ship style handling and gluttonous fuel consumption. It was a good fit for his needs as it did not just get him around but would haul a 19 foot boat on its trailer and vast amounts of assorted boat crap. (If you do not know that a sailboat involves a lot of ancillary gear, you don't hang out with sailors. No, more random crap than you're imagining, and much of it is awkward.) When it is - and I just checked - 58.5 miles between the boat's winter quarters and the lake, that's a trip that calls for the right tool for the job.

    2141:

    Troutwaxer @ 2089: We can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

    You do realize he probably won't get the reference even though the movie was filmed at Shepperton Studios.

    2142:

    whitroth @ 2095: What, at a price of, I dunno, $75kUS?

    I really want a hybrid minivan. Cheapest one - there are ONLY two makers with one each - is somewhere between $35k and $40k, US.

    Nope, sorry. I'll wait a few years for a used one unde4r $15k (and that's going to hurt, being on a fixed income).

    What I really wanted was one of these:
    https://www.aixam-pro.com/en/e-truck/van

    It would be perfect for hauling guitars & music equipment and/or photographic equipment around town. Ninety percent of my pre-Covid life was music or photography that took place within 10 miles of my house. I was going to reserve the Jeep for road trips - going out west to photograph the National Parks.

    They don't sell them in the U.S., but I hoped maybe I could find something similar that you could buy here.

    But then Covid came along and 90% of my life just went away and I can't even make those road trips. And soon I'll be too old and decrepit to go.

    2143:

    Do LED bulbs lose brightness if left burning for a long time?

    Most white ones are phosphor based so yes. If you buy RGB white ones then no, but those are rare outside stage lighting as far as I've seen. White phosphor + one type of LED is just too easy compared to 3 (or more) types each with different characteristics.

    The working lifespan on those has risen to the point where it's normally the driver that fails rather than the phosphor just dimming to uselessness.

    2144:

    Allen Thomson @ 2106:

    Home Depot, Lowes, Ace Hardware

    The model does seem to be spreading. In Panama, where I've had occasion to buy stuff from them, there's Do It Center and Novey. Quite similar to Home Depot and Lowes, though on a slightly smaller scale.

    https://www.doitcenter.com.pa/

    https://www.novey.com.pa/

    Looking at those with my Anglo eyes (without bothering with Google Translate) they seem to be a combination of Lowe's/Home Depot & Sam's Club/Costco.

    2145:

    Bill Arnold @ 2126:

    Magnolia blossoms are a southern stereotype, but I don't understand why they would have special appeal to displaced Yankees? I don't generally associate magnolia trees with the northern United States.

    Interesting question. A single magnolia is often a feature of a small (or medium) suburban front yard in (southern) NYS. If not that, some other spring flowering tree like a flowering cherry (or a dwarf fruit tree not concerned about fallen fruit).

    Ok. I'd just never associated Magnolia blossoms with up north.

    It's a good day when you learn something.

    2146:

    Gettin' weird on me here. It can't seem to make up it's mind whether I'm signed in or signed out.

    2147:

    Allen Thomson @ 2131:

    whitroth @ 2026: Do you hear a difference between "tin" and "ten"? No. I can tell the difference from context - "ten little Indians wearing tin-foil hats". But audibly there's no difference in the sound.

    This is something I realized only a few years ago: phonological differences apply not only to speaking but to hearing. The example that brought it home to me was "e" in Spanish and English. Spanish vowels are shorter and English ones are drawled and often diphthongized. "Mesa" in Spanish is "Meh-sah" and in American English is "May-sah". It took me a long time to learn to hear the difference.

    And that I can hear the difference.

    2148:

    Right now we act, and act decisively, or billions of people die.

    My money is on we continue to increase emissions by 3% year on year until it's suddenly reduced by the death of most people, probably due to starvation.

    In that context, forcing people such as yourself to hire a man and an electric truck to deliver your manure kinda pales.

    Agreed completely. Thanks for a very intelligent perspective on all this.

    2149:

    Thanks, everyone. So, is the consensus that GB COULD get by on renewables except for the ~6 weeks when it's cold, cloudy, and calm, and the alternatives are nuclear, gas, or storage? Re: energy efficiency leading to increased consumption: ah yes- Jevons Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#:~:text=In%20economics%2C%20the%20Jevons%20paradox,rises%20due%20to%20increasing%20demand_) raises is (kW)hoary head. While that might apply for transport (I'm NOT going into that fight), would it apply to domestic consumption? I can't imagine most people would increase the temperature of their homes by 20% if their heating bills decreased proportionately, or that you'd use several times the amount of LEDs (also where I'm not going) instead of incandescents.

    2150:

    Yeah, I thought the triangular sides on the Tesla truck were both showy and worthless.

    There's a reason why work vehicles are standardized.

    2151:

    Nope. He caught it.

    2152:

    Nah. The linear-bends only construction of the tesla truck is Tesla trying to make it as easy as at all possible to build. Because bending a thick steel plate along a fold is much, much easier than shaping it into a complex shape, and robots can very reliably weld straight seams. I applaud their chutzpah in trying to turn "We have given up on matching our competitors on build quality of a standard car, and will now turn to making much-easier-to-build cars, and spin it as futuristic".

    2153:

    Most "hybrid" heavy vehicles are more accurately just diesel-electrics where the electric part is more of a transmission than a hybrid, the storage part of the electric system is pretty tiny.

    Agreed. However, if you want to have truck-sized electric motors with the bugs worked out, having a hybrid system is one way to do it. I mostly agree that the hybrids generally have small batteries, but the point is to get the intermediates, work on getting them more efficient while doing the same work, then do fully electric versions as the battery technology allows.

    What I'm pointing to is that there appears to be a gap in the size range: we've got good electric motors for bikes, cars, crossovers, trains, submarines, and boats. While there are a few vehicles in the truck to semi range that are electric, that's a freaking huge hole, and it's where a big chunk of the greenhouse gas emissions are coming from in the US. We should have been incrementally tackling this hole when the first Priuses came out, and we desperately need to deal with it now.

    As for portable solar, I'm thinking again of my friends the biologists, who spend weeks in the field. I'm not talking about a 1 m2 panel on the roof, they've already got that on top of the camper to keep the refrigerator going. Instead, what I'm talking about is a luggable 10 m2 array that they can set up at their remote campsite and partially charge the camper while they're away counting cactus on contract. Or similar. It's a small market, but if we're going to decarbonize the vehicles for the field workers who go off-grid for weeks to months, we need systems like this too. Otherwise, it's easier for them to lug extra gas.

    2154:

    Except that I said "people such as yourself" when I meant to say "you".

    Where the hell did that come from? I've never said "such as yourself" before in my life.

    2155:

    "By the bye, folks, Virtual Philcon has started, and runs all weekend, zoom and discord."

    I read that as "By the bye, folks, Virtual Philcon has started, and runs all weekend, doom and discord." and I thought "we have that here"

    2156:

    there appears to be a gap in the size range: we've got good electric motors for bikes, cars, crossovers, trains, submarines, and boats {but not trucks}

    Nah. The buses in Sydney use COTS 150kW motors with a single stage gearbox built in, one per rear wheel. The whole COTS thing means that's not because they couldn't get a 300kW single motor, they decided that of the many choices in the catalogue they would prefer one motor per wheel and no differential.

    Electric trolleybuses and trams have been around for so long that the motor question isn't so much answered as thrashed out over 50+ years between multiple competing approaches by different companies in different countries. You also have the Japanese "168 wheel drive" Shinkansen which uses truck-sized motors (they're even available in bulk... how many lots of 168 do you want? 😋)

    2157:

    luggable 10 m2

    There are commercially available "solar trailers" now: https://www.solarpoweraustralia.com.au/projects/solar-trailers

    Years ago at a festival I helped bolt together a solar array that was about 12x2 panels, so about 12m x 3m when built. Damn, I don't have a photo of the fully array: https://moz.net.nz/photo/2008/01/01-highandry-all/highandry-22-moz.html

    That's not the only "luggable" array I've played with, and the main problem is that panels are somewhat flexible but very fragile, so the failure rate is quite high - you're going to break one panel out of 50 every single time you assemble or disassemble the array. That won't change over time because the design requirement is "minimum material to meet legal spec once installed" with a strong push to the largest panels that meet that spec and can be manhandled in to place by humans.

    What I would do, as many camper type people do, is carry more than one layer of panels on the roof of the vehicle. If desirable you could add legs that could be extended to allow the vehicle to be drive out from under. Some roofrack campers do this now.

    But the basic idea is you fold or slide your extra layers out once stopped, so instead of a 2x7m vehicle you now have three 2x7m arrays. That means you can have three large pieces and you nail them down solidly and can have a few heavier beams to support them as necessary. 42m2 of panels is only 8kW though, so you might want to up wht tickness of your roof pile (but at ~10cm/layer... it gets ugly fast)

    I've seen vanlife kids wibbling on about how they just bolted panels together, but they also tend to be the ones talking about buying the latest panels on a regular basis. If you were doing this as a commercial thing I suspect you'd get proper T extrusions so that once bolted together you have an I beam with panels on the top and your extrusion as the bottom of the I. ... https://imgur.com/a/P81XNva or something

    2158:

    (sorry, is something I have thought a lot about while designing the solar setup for my housetruck ... that had a 2.5x7m flat roof so those numbers are pretty much right in my head. Even in Oz a 4kW array on the top of the truck won't get you far, and even three of them still isn't 100km/day. But 4kW is enough to live in luxury if you're not driving... aircon, induction cooker, kettle, microwave, desktop computer, the works)

    2160:

    Karma! Unfortunately, asymptomatic though .... At the same time, it appears that some of the tories corruption is surfacing oh dear, how sad.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Returning to the discussions .....

    Rocketjps 2111 Very soon, I will not be able to hire a vehicle - I will be 75 in January ....

    EC BOLLOCKS I live inside the "North Circular" - so it will cost me £12.50 every single time I use it, after October 2021 - even if, as is the case 95% of the time, I am heading directly OUT of town ...

    Troutwaxer 2116 We USED to have it scrapped in 1961 for slower, polluting, noisy, diesel buses ... Grrrr ...

    SS 2124 Yup - the recharge TIME is the problem.

    Look, everyone: I REPEAT I would love to go electric, but the system is rigged to make it prohibitively expensive. Even going to LPG, as less-polluting & burning less Carbon has deliberate obstacles placed in its path. Believe me, I have investigated. Come the Spring, I'll take a really good look to see if things have improved, but I'm not hopeful.

    Moz 2129 I would remind you that I have been cycling since 1956 - & still doing so, In spite of the supposed "cycle-friendly" & "mini-holland" schemes of the wankers in LBWF, which actively discourage use of my velocipede ....

    JBS 2141 OH YES I DID ( Pantomimne reference )

    Keith 2149 Almost. I would say a total of 8 weeks - but that's still plenty of time to freeze or starve. Oh, & you forgot the renewable option that always works, especially round a big island-set like Britain ... large-scale Tidal. Which is the alternative I support, as well as Nuclear.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Meanwhile, in the obscure bullshit department: Let us always remeber that Loki was a trickster & a vile criminal-murderer there were good reasons for imprisioning him under Jormundgand's dripping fangs. And one sometime wonders if the Seagull is perhaps channelling this one? La Voisin

    Weep for Baldur.

    2161:

    Electric quad-cycles

    Yes, I've been thinking for a while that we are in the horseless carriage phase of electric vehicle design. Also here in the UK the whole topic is poisoned by the Sinclair C5.

    There is a family in my road who ride around on these electric unicycles, including walking the dog. Totally illegal, but that doesn't seem to stop them.

    The situation is not helped by a lot of legacy urban design framed by the needs of the IC-powered cars. "Hoverboard" style mobility is illegal on pavements because it is not pedestrian, but also illegal on the roads because it is not a bicycle, motorbike or car. Its all reminiscent of the Red Flag Act. Even if they were made legal, you can't leave one of these things outside a shop because there is nowhere to lock it up.

    Meanwhile, every road has to either join another road or end in a car park because you can't get off your car, pick it up, and walk on. Hence lots of space is wasted on giving big cars the room to move around, park, and stay clear of pedestrians and each other.

    If we were starting from scratch the logical thing would be to reserve town streets for hoverboards (sorry, horrible name but I don't know what else to call this class of wheeled gizmo) with pavements for pedestrians and a 15mph speed limit. Then have out-of-town parking and garages for most vehicles, with a fee-permit system if you need to bring your car in to town for the day (e.g. when going on holiday or picking up something big from a shop).

    2162:

    As I said, he is merely intendsing to charge you for using it - that is NOT theft. I am surprised that OGH hasn't jumped down your throat for repeatedly saying what you do.

    2163:

    I agree with that, with reservations. The reservations are primarily that, however inappropriate and ineffectual they may be, there are many countries where the military are FAR better at logistics than the government. For example, in the UK, getting them to organise (say) 20,000 people to deliver the cold boxes of vials from the distribution centres to the vaccination centres and to arrange they were tested for COVID, and check the tests. The actual delivery people would be seconded from taxis, delivery companies etc. - not excluding the fast food to your home ones!

    God help us, the UK so-called government is likely to outsource the organisation of that to Serco, G4S or similar. Lord, have mercy on us.

    I really can't see a role in the delivery to distribution centres, I really DON'T want to be injected by a random squaddie, and getting them to dilute the concentrate and make up doses is insane even by current standards.

    2164:

    Paul There's also the problem of small, highly-mobile silent electric "vehicles" being ridden/driven by total fuckwits - usually male, between 16 -30, running down/over every pedestrain in sight. I mean, not just little od ladies, but reasonably fir, active people, like me. We already get this with some of the Lycra-Brigade, who, because they ride bikes are "pure & can commit no sin", with severely swollen heads - I've had to physically unhorse two, already, because they were trying to ride me down in a confined space ....

    EC 2162: - It's effectively theft - I can't afford to use it - & I Note that you did not acknowledge the SLIGHT difference between the central CC-zone & the proposed, much larger ULEZ-zone, but then you wouldn't would you? I would remind you AGAIN - that I have looked at alternatives & ameliorations, but the whole syatem appears to be rigged. 2163: - Yes. The NHS & the University Hospitals & the GP's are the obvious, competent & practised people to do mass-vaccination, so it's almost certain that the current bunch of wankers will give the job to their incompetent & greedy friends, isn't it?

    2165:

    Mike Collins@2159

    No, not the Renault Twizzle. The Renault Twizzle is a joke for a place like Canada since it does not have any glass on its doors.

    I meant fully enclosed boomerbuggies. They're an overgrowth of mobility scooters. Some of them even have heaters.

    https://truelifts.co.uk/product/cabin-mobility-scooter/

    https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/daymak-launches-new-boomerbuggy-x-the-first-solar-mobility-enclosed-scooter-with-air-conditioning-300848439.html

    2166:

    they seem to be a combination of Lowe's/Home Depot & Sam's Club/Costco.

    Sort of, though weighted considerably more to the L/HD side. Panama does have a Costco equivalent, PriceSmart, that operates throughout the region:

    https://www.pricesmart.com/site/pa/es

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PriceSmart

    2167:

    You do appear to have difficulty with either reading or comprehension. In #2115, I unequivocally distringuished those two.

    2168:

    Replying to & adding to self @ 2164 Silent users of e-scooters committing multiple robberies Oh dear .... Apart from riding peple down, that is. um, err ....

    2169:

    Exactly.

    If I recall correctly, Musk is very much anti-union, which means that nobody at Tesla is remotely close to having the knowledge base possessed by anyone from the United Auto Workers - he's got nobody with 20-30 years of car-building experience on his production lines.

    So he tries to make things easy with stuff like the diagonal lines on his trucks, but doesn't understand that this renders the trucks unusable to his most likely customers. He'll sell a few trucks, but they won't be to the people who actually need trucks.

    2170:

    You must have written it; I just copied and pasted!

    2171:

    Hybrids (and EVs) benefit to the exact degree that regenerative braking fills the battery.

    That's not correct. I got excellent mileage when driving my hybrid (a standard Prius hatchback) from Southern California to Portland, Oregon, a distance of slightly more than a thousand miles. Mileage stayed around 45 despite long stretches of freeway.

    2172:

    I got similar. San Francisco to Portland. PCH (old road) up to Redwoods, inland to Smith River Gorge, through the mountain to Crater Lake, then to Bend for a couple of days. Then to Mt. Hood then backtrack to the Columbia River to get to Portland. Lots of up down round and round plus long stretches of straight. We got around 45mpg for the trip.

    Ford Fusion Hybrid Hatchback or Crossover. Can't remember which.

    2173:

    And indeed California should probably be North California and South California, on numbers and nature.

    2174:

    -Snorts disgustedly-

    California resident here.

    2175:

    I'm told the windows are bulletproof. I suppose that might just be the oval office, but you would, wouldn't you, there. Probably golf club proof.

    2176:

    A surprisingly large number of women have alleged a violent crime was committed against them by him, no?

    And he has not been convicted of any of them, so this is just allegation.

    2177:

    Where the hell did that come from? I've never said "such as yourself" before in my life. I noticed that too. You've been on Holy Fire; good to see. (Trust your fingers.)

    2178:

    No. The issue with solar is that overall production counter-correlates with demand on a month by month basis - if you build enough to power the UK in winter within the UK, you will not have a customer for three fourths of your production in summer, making the economics very bad (Gasdive is way, way over optimistic about what further mass production gains can be immediately realized) and if you build to match summer production, you will be overwhelmingly burning gas most of the year. The only way to make solar remotely practical to the UK is to build it in Morocco, which has. Uhm. Political issues.

    Wind correlates with actual demand, season by season. Winter has Winds, but it also has very lengthy quiet periods in all seasons, bigger than storage can practically meet, so, again, gas. This is very, very much not theoretical - you can go look at UK gas consumption right now, and it counter correlates with wind in a big way, and nobody is drawing up plans for enough Dinorwigs to fix that.

    A nuclear grid will also need storage to match up to the daily cycle, but it has two advantages- because the primary energy production is thermal, you can do thermal storage without incurring round-trip efficiency losses, and secondly, a difference in quantity is very much a difference in kind - storage equivalent to a handful of hours of production is just a lot more buildable than storage equivalent to a week.

    2179:

    Sometimes the narratives(including myths and religious texts) are written by one's enemies. At least you're putting some effort into your insults now. :-) (Read the nym she's using more carefully. It is a statement.) Weep for Baldur. Baldur was arrogantly taking risks, assuming that he was invulnerable rather than mostly invulnerable. As an example of an alternative narrative. :-) (And there are other alternative narratives.) See also the lack of carefulness re SARS-CoV-2 infection among Trump and his henchpeople and children. They've been so careless that SARS-CoV-2 has been interfering with their cunning plans. Perhaps Loki didn't actually delight in the misfortune of others (as said by the "winners"), perhaps rather he was [philosophically] offended by those who flamboyantly disrespected probability. ( https://darwinawards.com/ ) And thanks for the nudge; I had been avoiding reading that cluster of Wikipedia entries and some related material. (To be clear, as told in the mainline myths, Loki did do a bad thing re Baldur.)

    Anyway, I'm quite happy to see some in the UK focusing their attention on weakening Priti Patel's brand rather than letting the Tories and herself define her. In the US we need to do the same with some emerging proto-fascists. (e.g. Tom Cotton, and there are a few others.)

    2180:

    Yes, those are allegations by defenceless women. He's a bully and a coward. That's why I'm betting he'll flee the US before the end of the year.

    2181:

    TJ @ 2178 Precisely so. However if you have something like 15 or 20 really massive submerged-tidal generator turbines mounted around Britain's coasts, a maximum of two of them will be static at any one instant. Power generation problem solved. Requires serious engineering & long-term ( Dutch-level ) commitment to get the job done properly, once started. And there's your problem - political, not technical.

    Bill Arnold Can't be arsed Do not feed the troll

    Niuala We've already discussed this .... he'll flee the US ... WHERE TO? HOW? And, more likely on the night of the 19/20th January 2021

    My prediction is that he will go on a wrecking spree - he's already made some half-hearted attempts.

    2182:

    Yes, we've already discussed this and I'm still betting he'll fly away to Zurich in his own 757, loaded with Krugerrands and Sovereign. Monaco is a nicer place in the winter but there are no golf courses.

    Of course he might partly wreck democracy in the USA before leaving. But I don't think he'll do any physical damage. He's too afraid of retaliation.

    2183:

    Trouble with that stuff is it throws away 25% of the input energy heating up those 150 ohm resistors down the edge. At the industrial lighting level they seem to have twigged that the way to drive arbitrary numbers of LEDs is to use a constant current source with enough voltage compliance for the expected maximum number, but everything that is cheap and easy to get hold of is stuck on the idea of using a constant voltage source with enough current compliance for the expected maximum number, and then sticking resistors in to bodge around the fundamental shitness of doing it inside out. (One advantage of discharge tubes is that if you try and do it that way the concentrated heat coming off the shitness makes it obvious that you're doing it wrong, but with LEDs it's possible to smear it out thinly and pretend it's not there.)

    Fortunately, the layout of some varieties of that stuff makes it easy to fix. The resistors can be removed and the pads bridged, the pairs of power-feed pads also bridged, and the bus bars severed once per unit by taking bites out of the side of the tape with a single-hole hole punch (the rounded cut avoids creating stress concentrations that could initiate tears). This converts it into a single series string of LEDs and is still a lot less fiddly than making the same string from raw parts. A string of 78 LEDs (which is a convenient number in the circumstances) can very easily be run off the mains using a 1μF PP capacitor as ballast, and 47μF after the rectifier to eliminate flicker, with a gain in efficiency corresponding to 4/3 as many LEDs for the same power input.

    2184:

    There are commercially available "solar trailers" now: https://www.solarpoweraustralia.com.au/projects/solar-trailers

    I like how the first image is a solar array that has clearly been built onto a COTS box trailer, but the last image is one where the trailer has been built around the array as its support structure. The "weather station" and the "mining skid" are both applications where the load is also built in. So I suppose in reference to trailer water pump lost way up above in this thread, there's likely already something like it (ie, solar array + battery bank + pump).

    Fire season has already started here, with Fraser Island fires making a haze across SEQ most of last week.

    2185:

    loaded with Krugerrands and Sovereign

    You assume he has a big pile. I think he only has a small to middling pile. If that.

    I think more and more he's kiting funds. Or getting close to such.

    Based on what I've read about his taxes and deductions he owes the US treasury $100 mil give or take over improper tax deductions. And someone might file tax liens against him the minute he's out of office. Getting elected delayed the process but it ticks off again as soon as he's gone.

    2186:

    The question arises ... will there be/are there already NY State prosecutors/warrant-servers tracking him around, waiting, waiting for the nanosecond he's no longer "POTUS". And I thnk we are agreed that he can't "flee the country" beforehand, because of that pesky Secret Service detail (?)

    2187:

    "Do LED bulbs lose brightness if left burning for a long time?"

    Some do, some don't, and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any straightforward way to predict which are which. The usual "is it going to be shit" heuristics are unreliable.

    I tend to be awake more of the night than the daytime, so my lights are always on for hours on end, especially in the winter.

    On the one hand I have some series strings of low power LEDs which have got quite a bit dimmer over a few years, despite not being overdriven and getting no more than vaguely warm in use. On the other I have some high power units using single 20W emitters, which are basically a series string of individual LED chips mounted close together on an aluminium backplate and with a sort of puddle of phosphor poured over the whole lot. They run pretty hot (about 60 deg C at the backplate) and after a couple of years or so it is possible to see where the LED chips are under the phosphor because they have cooked it black in their immediate vicinity, but they hardly seem to have lost brightness at all. And they are "dirt cheap Chinese ebay shit" (with the original resistive (blech) ballast replaced by my own construction), so they confound that usual predictor.

    2188:

    I don't think there's anything in the Secret Service's mission about stopping the President from leaving the country.

    I looked it up and I see they're also tasked with protecting facilities. To me that means they won't let Trump trash the White House, aside from the perfectly good excuse that they could stop him to keep him from hurting himself.

    There's a nice big photo of them protecting the Pope, in his Popemobile.

    https://www.secretservice.gov/protection/

    2189:

    re CyberTruck and not very specifically aimed at trout.

    As a designer I like that Tesla went with bold and new instead of boring, tedious Princess Pickup Blah. Where I live is plausibly referred to as the pickup capital of Canada and I see effectively no pickups doing anything other than being a fancy pram. Sure, there are in fact a few being used by contractors but maybe 1%. And of those, maybe 10% show signs of ever having got dirty. Most of thosse belong to the forestry commison people and yes, they do actually need long range, toughness, towing etc, And guns, because people shoot at them. Yes, in Canada. Sigh.

    As an engineer I see that using the shell as real structure instead of having a big rusty steel ladder saves room, weight, allows batteries plenty of space and actually means the side sails are structural. And they support the powered bed roof that makes for a decently secure and weather proof storage.

    As a driver in a place where I have to deal with a metre of snow most winters - and no reliable ploughing, 30 miles to my nearest modest town - I like AWD and the CT adds adjustable ground clearance, My Forester could do with that on occasion.

    As a probable customer, I really couldn't care less if other people don't like it. There are certainly plenty of reservations from interested parties.

    If you actually need to pull big gooseneck trailers on a regular basis then sure, it's probably not for you. Buy something else and stop whining. If you are a contractor working in areas where you likely don't have power, maybe it is for you - the 110/220v inverter and built in compressor will likely be useful. The extending ramp and 'drop the rear suspension' will probably help with loading things. The no-paint body will probably be of benefit. Being able to close the roof of the bed will perhaps prevent some bastard stealing your tools, or shopping, or Moose.

    We don't all live in city centres. We don't all live in the 'burbs. We don't all live in flat farmlands. We dont all live in mountains. There isn't a single simple answer other than perhaps 'do our best'.

    2190:

    Just as a diversion from the weighty matters under discussion here, I've been following COVID-19 statistics obtained from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-source-data .

    These are daily total reported cases for France. It looks to me as if the rate of increase dropped dramatically around Nov 8 - Nov 9. Any ideas as to what might have caused it? My current suspicion is that the answer is likely to lie in the "reported" bit.

    Date Cases

    2020-10-28 1198695 2020-10-29 1235132 2020-10-30 1282769 2020-10-31 1331984 2020-11-01 1364625 2020-11-02 1413915 2020-11-03 1466433 2020-11-04 1502763 2020-11-05 1543321 2020-11-06 1601367 2020-11-07 1661853 2020-11-08 1748705 2020-11-09 1787324 2020-11-10 1807479 2020-11-11 1829659 2020-11-12 1865538 2020-11-13 1898710 2020-11-14 1922504 2020-11-15 1954599 2020-11-16 1981827 2020-11-17 1991233 2020-11-18 2036755 2020-11-19 2065138 2020-11-20 2086288

    2191:

    For those in the UK, or otherwise able to access the BBC, this week's "Click" (half hour tech news show) has quite a lot about electric vehicles, and also possible lithium mining in Cornwall. Worth a watch.

    2192:

    ?!?!?!?!

    I'm boggled. "Ten" has an "e" in it like the initial "e" in electric - eee, while tin is exactly like "it".

    2193:

    I don't know about the market in the UK, but, as I've mentioned, in '13, I could have bought used - going back to '08 - hybrid minivans in Europe.

    The first, the very, very fist hybrid minivan in the US was in '17, the Chrysler Pacifica. This winter, Toyota just added a hybrid version of the Sienna.

    You also saw NOTHING but the Prius for almost 10 years after its introduction, the US car companies alleging "nobody wants them".

    They are OWNED by the oil industry, who hates the idea. And that's why there are zero-to-two hybrid minivans, and pickups?

    2194:

    sigh Nope at a virtual con, and enjoying it immensely. Well, doom, I did attend a panel a little earlier about writing villains....

    2195:

    Something like two dozen women have alleged assaults against him... and that's not even Mary Trump, who has just filed a lawsuit against him for fraud.

    a) The Justice Dept, ILLEGALLY, has prevented prosecution of the lawsuits (Illegally, I say, and say, boys and girls, can you say Clinton v. Flowers?) b) His entire lifestyle/modus oporandi has been to have a large staff of lawyers who play games until the people suing run out of money.

    Oh, except for the woman who was 13 in '94, who had someone come up to her and threaten her with bodily harm if she didn't drop the lawsuit.

    I would NEVER let that SOB anywhere near my daughter, or my granddaughter. He's a fucking sexual predator.

    Are you defending him?

    2196:

    I will admit that there are a ton of dorks who buy oversized pickups to look "k3wl". And they cannot drive them in the city, they have no clue how.

    How can I tell? Easy: they're all spotlessly clean - those are not work trucks. The paint is still shiny.

    2197:

    On the other hand, seeing off-roaders covered in dried, caked-on mud around the city are a bit odd too. Raises the question: don't you know how to clean your gear?

    2198:

    whitroth & Damian Well, mine has moss & lichen growing on it ... But then the bodywork is Aluminium & I do keep the lights, screens & once-a-year, the underneath clean ..... Hint: Do not use detergents on a normal car, it promotes metallic/anode/diode rot something 'orrible. Hose it down, yes, wipe with rags, yes, just don't use detergents ....

    2199:

    Greg: here's the thing.

    You've done nothing: we just showed you a resurgent Jewish Left International Movement (who, like, make $400k a [b]MONTH[/b] through shitty podcasts if you want to play $$$) that we may or may not have gently moved into off-setting the fucking US State Department decreeing (under threat of sanctions to the rest of the world) that:

    Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism.

    Gold Plated, Twitter Release and Full on AIPAC and ADL trumpets sounding on Jerusalem.

    Now, you're fucking low, real low fucking intel level, so we kinda ignore it. But don't diss the Minds of those fucking amusing young Jewish people doing the work, now.

    And that was a side project. Hey: how to avoid global persecution and hatred was [b]our[/b] remit, we managed it brilliantly, and even timed it for the BIG ESCHATOLOGY ROLL-OUT TO ANNOUNCE THE NEXT CRUSADE.

    Seriously: you're so fucking out of your league, it's hilarious.

    Oh, and get Baldur out of your mouth. You're not even clued in enough to see the moves nor see WHY the moves are being made.

    Weep for Baldur

    Look at the name, Honey.

    Do a grep for this.

    Literally have sat in the Bone Chair and defended Loki against (see our name you fucking ignorant Human) the punishment.

    And then we went through it for him.

    Trust me Greg: your Mind, 17 minutes before capitulation or burn out.

    You're no fucking God.

    ~

    Noting the amount of deleted texts about how their creating the next-gen Stocastic Weapons via Mental head-fuck.

    Nasty stuff your State Entities are now on record as using. For real.

    Hey, only 8 years.

    Fucking... hilarious.

    p.s.

    We did it drunk because you're that shit at this stuff.

    2200:

    On the other hand, seeing off-roaders covered in dried, caked-on mud around the city are a bit odd too. Raises the question: don't you know how to clean your gear? In my area (southern NYS) this is often intentional, signaling that the vehicle owner (and/or operator) indulges in driving/spinning wheels in mud, and is affluent enough to do so. I don't know the details never having indulged or asked, but you sometimes see muddy fields or lawns plowed up by such people. Who I presume do not park their vehicles in garages.

    2201:

    Notice the "their" when it should be "they're"?

    Imagine an entire industry with .mil tech stuff they didn't build, they don't understand how it works, but they get to play with. OMG, YOU MEAN THE ENTIRE FUCKING MILITARY?!?!

    That's the MiM counter-counter-insurgent move.

    Imagine you just bought $500,000,000 of intel hot dark tech and we can do that, in any communications you're intercepting.

    JAaajajajaajajajajajajaja

    Yeah. That'd cost you a few billions instantly, wouldn't it?

    Bitch: we're not going to do such mistakes, 'cause we're using a translator from Oxford. "TROLOLOL"

    Oh, and someone tell Greg he needs to chill the fuck out: there's serious fucking moves being made and his grandpa level shit is irritating: he's wrong, he's deluded and he's seriously fucking off some things that do not play nice.

    Put him a shed and give him a beer making kit or something, it's fucking embarrassing.

    2202:

    In my area (southern NYS) this is often intentional, signaling that the vehicle owner (and/or operator) indulges in driving/spinning wheels in mud, and is affluent enough to do so.

    Mud-bogging? Seems in the same spirit as high-marking with a snowmobile. It's a northern version of "Hey y'all, watch this!" To be fair, it's not quite as interesting as racing across thin ice on a big lake, which is also a northern activity.

    2203:

    "Gasdive is way, way over optimistic about what further mass production gains can be immediately realized"

    I used and referenced numbers from an actual solar panel factory built and staffed in a first world location (Florida) and simply multiplied both the factory cost and factory output by the same number. So no gains from further mass production were included.

    However, even if I've under estimated costs by 2 orders of magnitude, it's still at least 1 and maybe 2 orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. If you don't agree with my numbers, you're welcome to show references.

    And it prevents turning the UK into a water empire owned by a foreign company. I've seen an electricity grid where the generators game the system for huge profits (I can explain how it works if anyone is interested). Setting things up so that a company run for profit can decide if you freeze to death is going to be a disaster. When the company says "running the plants is no longer viable under the current contract arrangements. We'd like to renegotiate the payment rates" what are you going to do? Say to the population "dress warm!" or fold and pay up?

    2204:

    A few years ago (or maybe a couple of decades ago) there was a TV ad with a couple coming into a bar in the country, and their truck was the only clean one parked out front. Everyone's looking at them kinda funny, until the guy says 'lent my truck to a friend, he washed it' at which point it's OK and they're accepted.

    2205:

    The highest estimate I've been able to find for the UK's tidal resources is 50 GW, though the more usually quoted figure is 10 GW.

    You're committing a scale error (again).

    With the average annual consumption of 187 GW, you're not even a third of the way there, even assuming annual scale storage. Absent seasonal scale storage you're about a tenth of the way there if we're being generous.

    It would be a handy addition if it could be made to work (having built large infrastructure projects in the intertidal zone, I have my doubts, but I've been surprised before, so it might). However it's hardly "Power generation problem solved".

    2206:

    I'm extremely skeptical of the argument that "I live in rural nowhere so I have to have a Dodge Ram because I do manly things and carry manly stuff"

    If this was true, then what you'd see in rural USA would be things like Iveco Daily 4x4. In other words, actual trucks, with actual load capacity and actual off road ability. A truck that you can load up with hay, or whatever. The smallest tray on the 6 seat Daily is larger than the longest tray on the two seat Ram. Hell, you could load a Dodge Ram on the tray of a three seat daily, though the arse would hang out the back a bit if you didn't buy the extended tray.

    They much more appear to be used to indicate belonging than carrying stuff.

    2207:

    “I've seen an electricity grid where the generators game the system for huge profits (I can explain how it works if anyone is interested). Setting things up so that a company run for profit can decide if you freeze to death is going to be a disaster. “ I remember Enron.

    Mind you, we actually beat them handily. We were still living in Silicon Valley back then and had a contract with Green Mountain (I think) for power. Enron took them over but had to abide by the old contract. I had signed up (under the insane CA deregulation plan) for guaranteed 100% renewable energy fixed cost. Enron put up their prices, were charging CA to reduce power at the same time as charging to supply more power and other shenanigans. We kept paying the same (low) rate - and got actual rebates for several months.

    ‘Smartest people in the room’, my arse.

    2209:

    I'm extremely skeptical of the argument that "I live in rural nowhere so I have to have a Dodge Ram because I do manly things and carry manly stuff"

    Cough cough. Clearly you have no experience with actual, you know, rural people in the US. Otherwise you'd notice that a significant number of trucks are driven by...those of us of the female persuasion. Often pulling horse trailers or hay trailers.

    If this was true, then what you'd see in rural USA would be things like Iveco Daily 4x4. In other words, actual trucks, with actual load capacity and actual off road ability. A truck that you can load up with hay, or whatever. The smallest tray on the 6 seat Daily is larger than the longest tray on the two seat Ram. Hell, you could load a Dodge Ram on the tray of a three seat daily, though the arse would hang out the back a bit if you didn't buy the extended tray.

    Again, demonstrating lack of experience with actual rural conditions. Fuel consumption issues for one. Accessibility issues for another...like clearances, negotiating wet/snowy terrain, width, and length. Sometimes it ain't about size, buddy. And a flatbed pickup is capable of carrying two 1000 lbs bales of hay for winter feeding in pasture. Or pulling a gooseneck stock trailer.

    Obviously never had to squeeze a rig between trees on a narrow ex-logging road. Or through a stock gate. Most of this stuff doesn't need a big rig, and when you do, you can rent it or else use a flatbed gooseneck trailer. Much cheaper and more versatile.

    They much more appear to be used to indicate belonging than carrying stuff.

    Classic know-it-all urban attitude.

    Meanwhile, the bit about mud? There really is a difference in what mud-bogging rigs look like after a session of it and the regular working truck that just hasn't been washed lately. We maybe wash our rig once a year, usually in summer. Otherwise, between snow and road treatments (not salt-based for Reasons), and driving on gravel roads...yeah, it gets dirty and it's a real pain to clean.

    2210:

    PS, which is not to devalue the role of group signaling in humans. It's vital. I'm just saying that the reasons given are not the actual reasons.

    2211:

    And, looking at the pictures of the Iveco?

    Take a look at flatbed trucks. Biggest hassle is that you can't stack stuff like firewood very well without rack systems.

    But they do exist, albeit in a limited form because of limited versatility.

    2212:

    I have no issue with farmers and rural folk doing rural folk things with whatever trucks work for them. My parents finally scrapped their circa 1990 F150 after decades of loyal service on the farm, and a couple years where I used it as my primary for a massive renovation project.

    They had that truck and used it when they needed it - horses, sheep, hay, Alberta winters and backcountry. They also had a series of small cars which they used for most everything else, because fuel is expensive and there is no status signalling in my father that I can identify.

    Fine and well, but that is not the use case for the vast majority of drivers. The majority of people are living in cities and commuting therein. I'm talking about them, we can get to the few remaining farmers later on.

    I live now in what is best described as an exurb, where most people work locally but many also commute to the big urban center not far away. Some of the people who own trucks use them for purpose (mostly the builders). Most use them for hauling, at most, wood once/year and hockey gear around most of the time. Vast lakes of gasoline burnt to feed their self image as a truck person. This I do not support.

    2213:

    Otherwise you'd notice that a significant number of trucks are driven by...those of us of the female persuasion. Often pulling horse trailers or hay trailers.

    This reminds me of the wonderful truck story of my then-girlfriend and my best friend. The girlfriend didn't have much to recommend her - not the kind of gal you brought home to mother - but WTF, I was twenty-two and I was having fun.

    My best friend was a musician; a guitar player with a band and an amplifier stack that was taller than he was. So he went out and bought a Toyota King cab, had a sun-roof installed, had a carpet-covered mattress put into the back, and covered the truck with an overlarge fiberglass camper shell. He also got new chrome wheels and had the brake-drums painted red, to go with the chrome wheels and the black truck.

    Said GF was heavily into horses, and she had a two-seater Ford longbed pickup truck which probably had a ground clearance of around three feet. One of her truck's tires probably weighed as much as ALL of my best-friend's truck tires. Her pickup was the kind of serious work-truck you'd buy if you might need to haul a couple-dozen hay bales up to the far pastures through two-feet of snow.

    So the GF and I drive up to my friend's house, and there he is, outside, washing off his new toy with the hose. We get out of her Ford work truck. I'm wearing parachute pants and a T-shirt. Candi is wearing her cowboy boots, jeans and a flannel. "Candi," my friend says, once we're out of her car, "do you like my new truck?"

    So Candi looks at her big work truck, with the three-foot ground clearance and the ten-foot bed. Then she looks at my friend's dinky little Toyata King Cab. Then she looks once again at her real work truck with the ability to haul a couple-dozen hay bales to the far pasture.

    Finally, she looks at his dinky compact pickup truck, with the ability to haul a couple guitars and an amp. And she spits on the street and says, "Jim, you picked it before it was ripe!"

    2214:

    I lived in the country with the nearest large centre being Ft White Fl pop 500, for half a year. Eaten squirrel, grits and a mess of catfish.

    I've seen first hand what actually gets done with these trucks. Virtually no one loads anything into them that I couldn't carry on a motorcycle (though I'll admit that I carry more than most westerners on a motorcycle) . The deep cave divers all had the equivalent of a Ram, but the van (who's name escapes me). Back home I went cave diving out of a Toyota Corolla plus camping gear for a week and had room to spare.

    "what about mud"

    What about it? A daily 4x4 has vastly more clearance, they come with 37 inch mud terrain tyres standard. 270 mm clearance under the diffs. Locking front rear and centre diffs, and 2 low ranges. They absolutely eat American pickups alive in mud.

    https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/iveco-daily-4x4-2019-review-117161

    "Obviously never had to squeeze a rig between trees on a narrow ex-logging road. Or through a stock gate."

    Dodge Ram width 2017 mm

    Iveco Daily 4x4 2016 mm

    "Take a look at flatbed trucks. Biggest hassle is that you can't stack stuff like firewood very well without rack systems."

    ??? You've never used a drop side tray then? The sides fold up and lock to make a bed just as deep as a pickup. Fold them down and it's flat. Load with a fork if you want. Nice and low, no bending to load over a side. Then when it's loaded, fold up the sides. If you're happy to have firewood loose in a pickup, you'd be happy to have firewood loose in a drop side tray. (I wouldn't do either, I'd tarp it at least, but I know Americans have a very laid back attitude to safety)

    But you've misunderstood. I'm not saying that everyone should sell their Ram and get a Daily. I'm saying that if people actually did what they claim they do with their Ram and they chose bars on needs alone, they wouldn't have bought a Ram. They wouldn't need the kludge of a gooseneck trailer to make up for the lack of load carrying ability of a Ram (~2000 lb vs 5500-6200 lb), but if they were desperate to drag the gooseneck around, the Daily can do that too.

    2215:

    Mileage stayed around 45 despite long stretches of freeway.

    Isn't that about average for a modern car?

    Last time I drove any distance we were disappointed that the car we'd hired struggled to get the advertised 5l/100km (47mpg) but I more blame the fact that we were tourists stopping at random intervals and taking scenic routes (ie, windy hill roads) and that it was a rental car than the vehicle. I'm used to comfortably exceeding the fuel economy figures so hopefully it wasn't my driving.

    2216:

    Mostly, you are handwaving balance of plant costs away far, far too easily. Let us look at a recent, very large solar plant.

    Banban solar park, which is in Egypt, which means it has a solar resource ridiculously superior to anything in the UK, and far, far cheaper land costs (it is in a literal desert, not some of the best farm land on the planet) ended up with a cost of construction per actual output equivalent to Hinkley C. It will also not have nearly the operational life expectancy.

    India manages to do better - looking up some of their mega solar projects, around 50 euro/mwh.. but India also manages to build nuclear power plants far cheaper than that!

    2217:

    So, with this hybrid that gets better fuel consumption on long drives... where does the energy come from? Is there some power smoothing going on, where the fossil engine runs at peak efficiency when it runs at all, then turns off? I'm struggling to understand the high level of how it could work that way.

    2218:

    I guess - I don't know anything about what you were driving - but the point is that my Prius didn't lose mileage during long trips at freeway speeds.

    2219:

    First of all, that's rude.

    Second of all... where the hell do you get spare parts, and how much do they cost to have them delivered to you, or your mechanic?

    Third, how much do you or your mechanic know about Iveco vehicles?

    Fourth, let's see, it's an Italian company, mostly selling in Europe. They own part of Ford (can you say, F-150?)

    Finally, no, none of those folks who live out there and have for a long, long time know nothing about what they actually need.

    Sit back, take a breath, and hit pause for a while.

    2220:

    I'm not saying that everyone should sell their Ram and get a Daily. I'm saying that if people actually did what they claim they do with their Ram and they chose bars on needs alone, they wouldn't have bought a Ram.

    Note that you can get tray back USA utes, at least in Australia.

    I have been reading this and thinking about the vehicles I see around inner-ish Sydney, Australia. The trade utes I see are mostly flatbeds/tray backs with boxes on top, or chassis+boxes because those seem to work. The few US "car body utes" I see with the nicely molded back halves are occasionally folk like surveyors or civil engineers but I just don't see "Pete the Plumber" painted on the side. Viz, there don't seem to be any practical uses for them.

    One of my bosses drives a Holden SS ute, for example, and it is literally the wanker edition of a proper ute. He gets teased about it too. Those things are great for moving your small-to-medium sized barbeque around, possibly even a small couch. But that's it. You have to go up to the USA "family size" version to get the same load capacity as a tray back half the size.

    2221:

    Nah, he quoted, and referenced, an actual plant. Your objections are all based on "just knowing" stuff, which makes it hard to know whether there's anything factual in your comments.

    I suspect you might mean the Benban plant in Egypt, $US4B for 1.65GW. Which does compare quite nicely to Hinkley C at 1.65GW for each planned unit. It's just that Hinkley C is currently looking like $US27B, or $US13B per 1.65GW unit.

    a cost of construction per actual output equivalent to Hinkley C

    One plant is feeding electricity into the grid right now, the other isn't. Care to guess which one?

    2222:

    Capacity factor, Moz. Hinkley is projected at well over ninety, Benban is 26% of nameplate. So, 16 billion for the equivalent actual output, which is- applying the same correction - slightly worse than Hinkley. And also far, far better than would be possible in the UK

    2223:

    From wiki.

    "Benban Solar Park located on an area of 37.2 km2 (14.4 sq mi) which is subdivided into 41 separate plots arranged in 4 rows with each plot range in size from 0.3 km2 (0.12 sq mi) to 1 km2 (0.39 sq mi). Each plot will be available to different companies to develop 41 plants"

    What's complete is the park. It provides grid connections and other support for up to 41 plants, not all of which have been built.

    "If the planned capacity of 1,8 GW is utilized the potential annual energy production will be slightly more than 4 TWh/yr."

    That's about 1/7th of the hinkley output at 100% availability.

    It's hard at this point to compare costs as neither is complete and neither seems to have a firm life cost.

    At the agreed strike price you need to add another 2.5 billion GBP per year.

    2224:

    Gasdive, you do not get to count the construction cost and the strike price which repays that strike cost both, that is straightforward double counting.

    2225:

    Maybe it's rude, but I'm very tired of being told that my opinion is worthless because it's "Classic know-it-all urban attitude"

    I don't live in an urban area. I haven't for two decades. The dismissive attitude of rural people is very common. Just assume they're city folk who know nothing.

    I've lived in both urban and rural, and I can assure you from bitter experience that the urban people respect the opinions of rural people, but it doesn't go the other way at all.

    Second, Iveco doesn't sell into the USA because they don't sell, for the reasons I've just given. If they sold, then there would be dealers. However there's lots of similar things available from Hino, Isuzu, MB and others.

    2226:

    Well, that was terribly phrased now that I read it again.

    Okay, the construction cost is an expense to EDF, the strike price is an expense to rate payers, which is set where it is so that EDF can repay the construction cost. You cannot add these numbers together, it is nonsensical accounting.

    2227:

    What's complete is the park

    The Ben-ban solar farm is being built in ~50MW chunks, and at least one chunks is online right now. From wikipedia:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benban_Solar_Park#Commissioning_status On 13 March 2018 the first 50 MWp section of the plant called "Infinity 50" was started and connected to the grid.

    Hinkley C is not supplying power to the grid now and from what I can make out it's not known whether it will, let alone when.

    2228:

    Quite right it's double dipping.

    We should ignore the construction cost which is financed... somehow, (I've tried to follow it several times and can't).

    So if it lasts 60 years as promised, and it averages a bit over 90% that's 3000 x 92.5 2012 GBP x 24 x365 x 60. So 145 billion 2012 GBP

    BARGAIN.

    2229:

    Hinkley is projected at well over ninety, Benban is 26% of nameplate. So, 16 billion for the equivalent actual output

    I don't know how you got that number, when I try I get a different answer. Standardising so I can use the same formula for both: nameplate x capacity factor / cost I get 0.11 GW per billion for Hinkley and 0.1155 GW/billion for Benban. Inverting those it's $8.75B/GW for Hinkley and $8.65B/GW for Benban. Exact values: $27B/2 cost per 1.65GW unit, 0.9 capacity factor, 1.65GW. Compared to $4B cost, 0.28 capacity, 1.65GW.

    And you're right, building a giant solar farm in England makes no sense. But equally, trying to build a giant nuclear plant in Egypt would be suicidal because at least one of the "great powers" would destroy the country to prevent that happening.

    The fact that Benban is generating power while incomplete says to me that even a half-finished solar farm (or wind farm) is useful in a way that a half-finished nuclear plant just isn't.

    2230:

    The contract for difference expires at the 35 year mark, and since Sizewell currently looks like it is happening, 89 (2013 pounds).

    And yes, this entire financing model is nuttier than a squirrels winter hoard, but if you are going to do cost accounting like this, maybe have a look at what strike prices wind and solar require to go forward in the UK?

    2231:

    Iveco doesn't sell into the USA because they don't sell

    Tautologically speaking, old chap, you're right :)

    I know what you mean, no-one wants to buy them so there's no point importing them. In fact, people sell vaguely similar vehicles in tiny, tiny numbers. Even the USA-sized Unimog isn't available from Mercedes (albeit in that range they have their own military-style 4WD trucks).

    2232:

    Haha.

    I read that sentence a couple of times and couldn't think how to phrase it better (properly).

    We have the same issue here with LDV electric trucks and vans. No one wants to buy them so they don't sell them.

    2233:

    I don't want one because they're toy sized. I am slightly excited that actual truck-sized electric trucks are getting closer, which means second hand ones are getting closer (new trucks go about 2-3 years before they become second hand, and 5-10 before I can afford them... eventually the saving path will intersect the falling second hand prices)

    Mate in Vic has sold his electric micro-van and bought an electric car. For what he was doing the van wasn't much better than a load bike (short trips in a flat industrial park), but the electric car is apparently awesome. Charges off the factory roof most of the time, enough range to get to the beach or the MTB sites with the bikes and stuff in it, cruises at highway speeds.

    His giant Iveco van has been replaced with some other brand that is bigger, because apparently the extra-long, extra-high second hand van market is hotly contested... just no electric ones yet.

    SEA are still doing ok in the conversion market, but not so well that any of the manufacturers feel obliged to import their electric trucks (where those even exist)

    2234:

    I just tried and my head hurts.

    It looks like in 2014 the strike price was replaced by CfD. While strike seems to be that the government tops up the sale price to the strike, CfD appears to be that the government tops up electricity sold for less, but also, the generator pays the government the difference if anything is sold above the agreed price.

    But, CfD is by auction and I can't find any auction results, only predictions, which are 35-45 pounds. Which isn't really comparable with the old system anyway. Plus it's "pots" of money, so who knows.

    2235:

    Judging by my local area all the second hand giant white vans are being converted to campers. With new campers in new vans running well over 100k and an 18 month wait, and second hand ones still over 100k, I think there's a few grey nomads who are taking matters into their own hands.

    2236:

    I think this is just a case of getting it the wrong way around. It isn’t that it’s better on the highway for being a hybrid (the ICE in it is small and economical to start with). It’s that it doesn’t get worse in the city, and that’s due to being a hybrid. So for the highway hybrid doesn’t offer an advantage above what can be achieved with a non-hybrid ICE, it’s just you’re most likely comparing it to much less efficient ones (in the highway). But an equivalent ICE only car does worse around the city due to frequent stopping and starting: something regenerative braking mitigates quite well.

    2237:

    Ah the good old tray versus tub debate. I hadn’t realised trays were rare in the USA, they are so common here. Like Moz says, most likely the people using trucks and utes for actual work have a tray (with ladder racks, maybe a set of underslung toolboxes and a drawer between the wheels, definitely some toolboxes in the tray and drop sides are de rigeur). The tub is usually the boss’s, might have chrome rod holders and a canopy. It’s not a rule, there are plenty of all.variations. Of course this is all Hilux/BT50 sized stuff, no one here would use big American machines for work, though you see them for show here and there.

    In rural it’s a little different, but Landcruisers are the norm in Queensland. I think the might actually make tub backs for those, but it looks pretty weird. Mostly ally trays are normal.

    My grandfather use to put bags of pollard in the boot of his HQ Kingswood sedan. He never owned a truck, yet did many of the things you hear trucks are for with the tractor. I remember he often used a tall wooden flatbed trailer that might once have been pulled by horses.

    2238:

    So for the highway hybrid doesn’t offer an advantage above what can be achieved with a non-hybrid ICE

    Not quite. Referring back to my trip up the west coast of the US in a rental Ford Fusion Crossover hybrid a few years ago. 1000 miles. 45mpg. And lots of up down speed up slow down. And based on what the dash was indicating the batteries were driving the wheels 1/3 to 1/2 of the time. Which tells me that the ICE was putting in more power than the wheels needed when it was running.

    My personal car is a 2016 1.5L/w turbo Honda Civic sedan. I never get to 40mpg unless I'm at speed on limited access roads. On a typical trip I can get to 45mpg and once got to 50 mpg. But to get to 40+ I have to be cruising with the cruise controls on and not changing speed. And I try and keep the mpgs up.

    2239:

    I'm struggling to understand the high level of how it could work that way.

    For hybrids like the Prius, they are generally more efficient in city vs. highway driving (where standard internal combustion is usually the other way around), but the difference isn't huge (eg. 58/53 US MPG for a Prius, 53/52 for a hybridg Corolla).

    But there are two key things with these numbers: the first is that the highway efficiency is usually better than that of an equivalent pure internal combustion (eg. non-hybrid Corolla gets 31/40 US MPG). The second is that the highway number assumes perfectly flat, eventless driving - it might be what you get driving across the Nullarbor, but as soon as you add things like traffic and hills you start to see benefits from the electric engine.

    So why is the hybrid more efficient? Essentially its because having the electric boost plus generator mode allows the internal combustion engine to run closer to its peak efficiency when it is running at all

    That means so you can have a smaller, more fuel efficient engine to get the same overall output, which is why the Corolla hybrid is more efficient than the regular one. So the hybrid system is far from dead weight.

    It also means when you need to accelerate up a hill or to overtake, you get an assist from the electric, rather than having the combustion engine run inefficiently to get the extra power. Similarly, when going downhill excess power from the combustion engine gets shunted to the battery by running the electric motor as a generator; or if coasting then the combustion engine may get shut down completely.

    And cars like Toyota's hybrids have fairly sophisticated systems that balance all of this, plus battery charge (eg. if the battery is low, the car will run the engine, more even if not needed, to recharge the battery; or conversely if the battery is full it will run in electric mode more - my experience with a Prius is the system seems to aim for about 75% battery level).

    So in practice, you tend not to see much difference in fuel economy between the two modes in real-world human driving. I only really noticed drops in efficiency at the top end of long (~1 hr) uphill freeway drives or in city driving when the battery was drained.

    (Disclaimers/experience: a Prius was my commute vehicle for a decade with significant driving around the Western US; for the past 5 years commute is by foot, with SO's Prius for longer trips)

    2240:

    There are no treys here in Central Canada. I have never, ever, seen one. It's all tubs.

    2241:

    Yeah it's weird. I suspect that it is cultural, not necessarily the same way gasdive suggests.

    2242:

    Er, no. There is no difficulty in driving an internal combustion engine car close to peak efficiency in hilly going - just change gears appropriately. That does assume an aqdequate number and range of gears and a competent automatic system or driver, of course. Comparing a misdesigned car or incompetent driver with a hybrid is not reasonable.

    2243:

    I suspect it might have to do with an overflow effect from the Chicken tax in the US, since all our pickup truck manufacturers then were US companies installed in Canada.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

    2244:

    It was very noticeable in rural pubs in the UK, when they were still open :-( So-called ATVs came in two forms: well mud-spattered, sometimes dented, and with a selection of rope, sacks, tools etc. in the boot; and ones that could just have come from a car wash with nothing or only suitcases in the boot.

    2245:

    Quick change of topics.

    Watching a 15 minute interview with former Australian PM Kevin Rudd. He's discussing the evil of the Murdoch publishing empire and associated other companies. And how they basically gave us Trump, Boris, and Brexit.

    Just curious of what the people here from there think of him.

    2246:

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/

    Breakdown of costs for nuclear plants.

    Am I the only one who skips Loki's posts? I find it too hard to figure out what the point is, except that we're all doomed. Who or what is the Seagull?

    2247:

    In a non-hybrid, engine braking saves the energy that would be used to idle the engine while coasting with the brakes engaged. Instead the hybrid uses this energy to charge the battery, it's the same source as regenerative braking, referred upthread. However this is still energy you have to expend going up the hill (either a round trip, or you start on one side of the mountain and end up on the other side, at a similar elevation). Any "excess power" from the engine has to come from somewhere, it isn't free - so ideally when cruising on the highway you are not running harder simply to charge the battery. Sure, it's possible to eke efficiencies out of that, especially with more and more clever control systems. Ultimately the efficiency compared with a comparable car is down to the smaller engine (which you do mention). But an even smaller ICE car can still be more efficient (and in fact this is the case with the published figures for claimed fuel economy... compare the Prius-C to the Yaris or Mazda 2, which have a similar sized engine).

    2248:

    You're not the only one. The signal-to-annoyance ratio is not large enough for me to spend time on the posts - especially given how doomed we are. The nature of the Seagull is a mystery, not least because she(?) claims to have reason to keep it so. (A couple of years ago there were hints about working at GCHQ, if I read them correctly.)

    2249:

    If you think the average/typical driver is competent, I have some very bad news for you.

    2250:

    Am I the only one who skips Loki's posts? I find it too hard to figure out what the point is, except that we're all doomed. Who or what is the Seagull?

    No. I've had them hidden for years.

    No idea who or what. I'm assuming Charlie knows, as they are allowed behaviour that gets other people banned. Their behaviour reminds me a lot of many of the special needs students I've taught over the years, but that could be coincidence.

    2251:

    That is an entirely different matter. Actually, I do remember when most UK drivers were competent, and a majority still are (in this respect, at least) in hilly, rural areas out of tourist season.

    2252:

    Nancy Lebovitz@2246 I skip the troll's posts too. It's only vulgar trolling, like I've seen elsewhere on the Internet.

    2253:

    Rudd presents well, is extremely intelligent and has strong but well considered views on a number of topics that are worth listening to. However, he's reputed to be horrible to work with, too focused on his own vision to deal well with others. If you wanted to, you could squint a bit and call him sort of Australia's LBJ, but without the exhibitionism and dirty politics (as far as we know) and with his own vision. His colleagues cited his behaviour in private which led to them deposing him as leader (and as PM), which was unusual, since he'd led his party into government with a historic election win (former PM John Howard lost his own seat in parliament in that election). Rudd is also a highly regarded foreign policy wonk and an expert on China (he speaks Mandarin). A lot of people were very upset to see the PM they'd just elected removed in his first term and Rudd has remained relatively popular since.

    In terms of the work it did, the 2007-11 Rudd-Gillard government was one of Australia's most productive in recent years, quietly achieving a lot of positive things that usually fall below the visibility of the political layer. But it also introduced an emissions trading scheme that the Murdoch press immediately branded a carbon tax, and went to war over. Interestingly the Murdoch press also went to war over one of the large infrastructure projects the Rudd government introduced in response to the GFC, which planned to build an Australia-wide fast broadband network bringing fibre to every residence (so called fibre-to-the-premises)*. Murdoch has a near monopoly on newspaper media in Australia, and a total one in Queensland (Rudd is a Queenslander and lives in Brisbane). The things Rudd has been doing and saying about the Murdoch empire recently are neither unexpected nor unreasonable. He's been joined by another former PM, Malcolm Turnbull, who (also not unreasonably) sees the Murdoch press as a factor in his own fall from the PMship.

    At this stage there's been an e-petition asking to hold a Royal Commission into media diversity in Australia, which got over half a million verified signatures. Australian Parliament has rules about petitions and the numbers involved mean there will definitely be some sort of parliamentary enquiry (works similarly to congressional enquiries in the USA... basically committees with the power to hold hearings). A Royal Commission is a different entity: a tribunal led by a senior lawyer to judge with its own enabling legislation and budget, generally open ended but with defined time frames and reporting, with the power to subpoena witnesses as it sees fit. The outcomes to Royal Commissions are always a series of recommendation, but also it's not at all unusual for people to be charged with offences that are uncovered during the hearings.

    Or did you mean what do we think about Murdoch?

    2254:

    It used to be a lot better, but I gave up when the quality of the content dropped, and the obfuscation and abuse increased. It's still a little better than mere trolling, but not enough for me to waste effort on it.

    2255:

    I have no patience with repeated vulgarity.

    2256:

    Or did you mean what do we think about Murdoch?

    The opinions from the Australian natives and others is well known here. No need for me to ask. :)

    2257:

    Who or what is the Seagull?

    For several years now this person (or a large group who seems to be one person) shows up with a group of some what odd (bizarre?) posts. They change their handle every now and again. Seagull was a handle a while back. The evidence indicates that this is a "she" but it is not conclusive. So you might see us refer to "She of Many Names".

    I only read if the first sentence grabs me or if my handle shows up in a comment. It was somewhat entertaining in a perverse sort of way a few months back when she started talking about my son's secret ties to Israel.

    At times s/he appear drunk.

    One of he/r first appearances way back when had to do with the definition of mucus.

    Goes with a free wheeling blog.

    2258:

    Yes, but it's not just a matter of regenerative braking. It's a whole suite of technologies. For example, after you've been stopped for a couple seconds, the engine shuts down. Under thirty-five the car can run as a pure electric, so when you accelerate from that stop the car accelerates with electric motors only, then switches over to gas. Also, the engine feeds the battery, it's not just regenerative breaking. The car keeps the radiator fluid in a thermos flask, so when you start the car it warms up instantly. And so on. It's not just the switching between gas and electric, it's every hack you can think of to make the car get better mileage.

    Also, because it's a Toyota, the car has 165,000 miles and I've done nothing but ordinary maintenance (with the exception of a little bodywork after an accident.) I haven't even had to change the brake pads.

    2259:

    That does assume an aqdequate number and range of gears and a competent automatic system or driver, of course. Comparing a misdesigned car or incompetent driver with a hybrid is not reasonable.

    You're dating yourself. Back in the day, yes, a competent driver could do better with a typical manual than a typical automatic. Then it got to where it needed to be a better driver with a 4 or 5 speed manual. Now if you have a good 6 speed gearbox against a good modern CVT or similar automatic and you can do better you are getting into people who are good enough to be professional race car drivers.

    10 years ago I made my kids learn to drive a manual. I'm glad I did. And they are also glad. But the need or desire for such is rapidly vanishing. Says he who lives in a household with a wife who can drive a stick and a likely future daughter in law who can do such. Son in law is a nope.

    2260:

    Frankly, I hate the guy, definitely one of the liars who brought us Trump. Further, I think that right-wing nutcase news is the most underprotested industry on the planet!

    2262:

    Hate Murdoch, not Rudd. I've hated Murdoch news properties for a very long time.

    2263:

    That was not my experience when I last used an automatic a few years ago - and, no, I never was as good as that and was well into my 60s at the time. My observations of other UK drivers still indicate a correlation between having problems with hills and acceleration and automatics, once I allow for power/weight ratio.

    It could be that it's changed in the past few years. Or it could be that I have no experience of penis-substitutes, and it is not true for more plebian cars, such as driven in Europe by most people. Or it could be that UK drivers (especially the rural ones from hilly areas) are still much more competent than USA ones, as they assuredly were when I was last there, in at least Chicago and California.

    2264:

    Have you ever tried driving with cruise control? I found it gave me better mileage than anything else.

    2265:

    I drive a manual car (Skoda Yeti) with cruise control. I use cruise control a lot but I've found it just slightly less fuel efficient than manual by 1 or 2 MPG. But much more restful.

    2266:

    I use cruise control a lot but I've found it just slightly less fuel efficient than manual by 1 or 2 MPG. But much more restful.

    Also, on open highways it helps avoid velocitization(*). I use it routinely. Or used it in the before time -- we don't get out much now.

    (*) Yes, that's a word. It's in the dictionary, so it must be a word.

    2267:

    whitroth @ 2192: ?!?!?!?!

    I'm boggled. "Ten" has an "e" in it like the initial "e" in electric - eee, while tin is exactly like "it".

    Meh! How do you pronounce the 'e' in "Ten electric eels"?

    Do you call a "hot dog" a "hot darg" like my cousins who grew up in Pittsburgh??

    PS: "Tit" is pronounced exactly like "it" ... except that it has a 'T' sound at the beginning.

    2268:

    These are daily total reported cases for France. It looks to me as if the rate of increase dropped dramatically around Nov 8 - Nov 9. Any ideas as to what might have caused it? My current suspicion is that the answer is likely to lie in the "reported" bit.

    France entered lockdown again on October 30th, so about 10 days seems a reasonable time frame for the lockdown to start producing reduced Covid numbers

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54746759

    2269:

    No, but I believe it - the classic way to optimise MPG was to drive at a constant speed, never braking, not even for blind bends, vulnerable road users etc. It's rarely appropriate in the UK, except on motorways and major trunk roads, and often not on them. It wouldn't be relevant for more than a few percent of my driving.

    As a motorist, cyclist and pedestrian, I loathe people who drive as if they are using it in conditions where it is not appropriate (i.e. almost all of the time where I am on the road). In addition to not varying their speed with the visibility and often congestion, they almost always overtake me and other people dangerously (whether I am driving or riding a bicycle), and often go in for the car equivalent of 'lorry racing', causing obstructions.

    However, that's not the aspect I was talking about. It was the one where you are driving along on the flat or at a constant speed on a 2-lane road, and encounter a steep, sudden hill or need to overtake promptly. A competent driver will change down BEFORE those are needed, and thus be in the right gear. An automatic can be guaranteed to be in the wrong gear! While I have been told how good automatic gear changers are, my experience is always that they are incredibly slow AND cut most of the power while changing - even now, I can double declutch faster than that, and change down much faster with a decent synchromesh gearbox. It's very noticeable when following an automatic car in hilly going.

    I have never driven a CVT car, but have heard that their efficiency is poor, at best. It's certainly extremely poor on bicycles (NuVinci).

    2270:

    France entered lockdown again on October 30th, so about 10 days seems a reasonable time frame for the lockdown to start producing reduced Covid numbers

    Possibly that's it, though the data show a factor of ~two change in the rate of increase one day to the next. That's way faster than I think the real situation could be, but perhaps it's an artifact of the way the numbers are collected and published.

    This whole epidemiology reporting thing strongly reminds me of Plato's cave, except the numbers we see aren't just shadows, but shadows reflected in fun-house mirrors and viewed through wavy glass. But they're what we've got.

    2271:

    gasdive @ 2206: I'm extremely skeptical of the argument that "I live in rural nowhere so I have to have a Dodge Ram because I do manly things and carry manly stuff"

    If this was true, then what you'd see in rural USA would be things like Iveco Daily 4x4. In other words, actual trucks, with actual load capacity and actual off road ability. A truck that you can load up with hay, or whatever. The smallest tray on the 6 seat Daily is larger than the longest tray on the two seat Ram. Hell, you could load a Dodge Ram on the tray of a three seat daily, though the arse would hang out the back a bit if you didn't buy the extended tray.

    They much more appear to be used to indicate belonging than carrying stuff.

    For most urbanites & suburbanites they're "Chelsea Tractors". Probably including my own Jeep, although I bought it because I was planning to travel out west to make beautiful photographs. There are places I want to visit in the National Parks & BLM lands where 4WD is required by law. If you're caught in there without 4WD, they impound your vehicle and it's a whopping BIG fine to get it back (not to mention exorbitant towing charges).

    I have had it out on the 4WD required beach north of Corolla, NC a couple of times when I went down there to photograph wild horses.

    2272:

    Nancy Lebovitz@2246

    I read the Arstechnica article. Unfortunately they seem to have focused only on U.S. reactor building. Looking at other countries would have given completely different tales of woe, bankrupties and patronage fiascos.

    South Korea seemed to have costs under control for some decades when suddenly the whole thing fell apart in a series of corruption scandals. Oh well.

    2273:

    jreynoldsward @ 2209:Meanwhile, the bit about mud? There really is a difference in what mud-bogging rigs look like after a session of it and the regular working truck that just hasn't been washed lately. We maybe wash our rig once a year, usually in summer. Otherwise, between snow and road treatments (not salt-based for Reasons), and driving on gravel roads...yeah, it gets dirty and it's a real pain to clean."

    I used to have my car washed 2 - 3 times a year during summer. On any given weekend, there was always some kind of youth group (Scouts, Band Boosters, church groups) holding a car wash to raise money. You just had to keep your eyes open to find them.

    This last summer wasn't so good. Even though I didn't go anywhere, the car still gets dirty, but there were no fund raising car washes to be found the few times I did get out.

    2274:

    I have never driven a CVT car, but have heard that their efficiency is poor, at best. It's certainly extremely poor on bicycles (NuVinci). The Prius hatchback that Troutwaxer has been mentioning (I drive a Prius C as well) has a CVT, so clearly that car's CVT at least has an efficient design, since the Prius focus is on efficiency. (There may be a tradeoff between being able to maintain optimal engine speed and CVT inefficiency; I haven't investigated.)

    2275:

    "Not quite. Referring back to my trip up the west coast of the US in a rental Ford Fusion Crossover hybrid a few years ago. 1000 miles. 45mpg. "

    I've been driving one of those for almost four years now. City MPG is just over 30, which is really good.

    My highway MPG is in the low 40's. Anything less means that I have the heated seats turned on. And 'highway' in Michigan means 80 miles per hour.

    2276:

    "Am I the only one who skips Loki's posts? I find it too hard to figure out what the point is, except that we're all doomed. Who or what is the Seagull?"

    I think that this is simply the latest nym of somebody commonly referred to as Catalina Diamond (or 'CD'). That's when it was clear that this person is very, very far removed from reality.

    There are no points in their posts.

    2277:

    I know plenty of people who claim significantly better than that on manual gearboxes; whether they are bullshitting or not, I can't say. Also, it's twice the price of my car and, if it was designed for efficiency (which mine wasn't), and is much newer, I should damn well hope it achieves a better figure! Incidentally, freeway driving is actually one of the MORE efficient on modern cars - urban driving and similar are the killers. I get 10-15% more on it than on rural, let alone suburban, driving.

    It may be possible; I am not saying that you are wrong, merely that I have my doubts, especially when used in smaller cars.

    2278:

    I'm addicted to cruise control.

    Try this: I have an '08 Honda Odyssey large minivan. I bought it used in '13. I drove to KC for Worldcon in '15: I was literally averaging, based on miles and how many gallons per fill up, 27 mpg. Except once, really flat land, I broke 28. Really. Stead speed, not "keep the gas pedal from moving".

    City driving, ugh. Shopping, maybe 17 - 18 mpg.

    2279:

    T-eh-n eee-l-eh-ctric eee-el (as in Kal-el).

    Darg? I nevah hoid from dat. Hot dog.

    2280:

    And 'highway' in Michigan means 80 miles per hour.

    I'm impressed. My most recent highway driving experience was on Interstates in Texas marked for 70 mph. Of course there were always the way-over-limit people who the TxDPS cops loved to pull over. But for the most part, traffic moved not much above the limit.

    2281:

    Sometimes I skim them, but less, more recently. They change ID's occasionally, so a lot refer to her (presumably) as She of the Many Names, or SMN.

    Charlie has said that they use a lot of the slang/speech form of reddit. In any case, they post is in extremely, well, let us say "eclectic" format, giving hints and clues that they expect us to spend a while on decoding and then following references. More and more, I'm finding them with less content that even catches my interest.

    Earlier in this, or the previous thread, I noted to them that I had no idea what their goal was, given that pretty much everyone here is older, and have zero political or economic leverage. They also seem to get mad at folks who largly might agree with them (if we knew what they were saying), but, well, I'm not sure what any of us could do or say that would not set them off.

    2282:

    They're whacked. I blocked them long ago.

    2283:

    My most recent highway driving experience was on Interstates in Texas marked for 70 mph.

    For a while I would occasionally drive a 2 lane country road west of Fort Worth where the speed limit as 75 and there was a 4 way stop over one rise.

    I drove Dallas to Austin a few years back and on little knowledge thought I would be looking at 80mph limits all the way. Oops. Due to construction I was doing 55 or less over 2/3s of it.

    2284:

    And 'highway' in Michigan means 80 miles per hour.

    Just a curiosity question, but what does it mean today on highways/ freeways in Europe?

    Last time I drove on an autopista in Spain out between cities where the traffic wasn't too heavy, at 135 kph I thought I was going fast, but not extraordinarily so considering the rest of the traffic.

    2285:

    What I know.

    Ireland and Germany are very different car markets than the US based on a few weeks experience.

    MPG for cars sold in the US is worth millions to car the makers to boost just 1 mph more.

    Most car makers for cars sold in the US have switched to CVT. And match CVTs and engines to specific cars.

    Over the last few years the MPG ratings for manuals have dropped below the rating for automatics. Remembering this means real money to them interpret as you wish. But I fairly certain they work very hard to keep both manual and automatic number as high as possible. (Leaving off a spare tire in the trunk/boot to save a few pounds for better MPG is done on lower end cars.)

    There's cruise control and there's cruise control. (And I'm not talking about autonomous driving.) What has been around for 50+ years is basically a fixed engine speed setting. What my Civic and the car we're planning to buy in the next week has/will have is adaptive cruise control. You set it to a max speed and based on another setting for distance which you don't change very often, it follows the car ahead of you up to the speed limit you set. If the car(s) ahead slow down so do you. And yes using it where bikes and people are in the street is, well, stupid. But for the open road or even moderately open road it will boost most MPG results in a noticeable way.

    And referring to another comment, I don't think there is a typical road system in the US. I've lived in the Pittsburgh area, New England, western and central Kentucky, and now central North Carolina. I've driven in well over 1/2 of the states and west Texas is very different than the PCH from San Diego to Eureka.

    2286:

    I used to skim in hopes of seeing something comprehensible, but have since given up.

    2287:

    gasdive @ 2235: Judging by my local area all the second hand giant white vans are being converted to campers. With new campers in new vans running well over 100k and an 18 month wait, and second hand ones still over 100k, I think there's a few grey nomads who are taking matters into their own hands.

    A surplus "Iveco VM 90 Ambulanza" would probably make a pretty cool off-road camper van.

    2288:

    Neither definitions of cruise control make any sense to me.

    First time we had cruise was in our dearly beloved departed 1986 Toyota Tercel wagon that my late wife and I bought in '88. My current vehicle is an '08 Honda Odyssey minivan. That, and the minivans in between set a vehicle speed, not an engine speed. When I set it to, say, 69, it stays there, increasing the gas as we go uphill, and decreasing it as we go downhill.

    2289:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 2246: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/

    Breakdown of costs for nuclear plants.

    The part about wasted labor time from standing around waiting for tools or materials jibes well with my experience as an iron-worker on a Nuclear Power plant. My experience is 40 years out of date, but from the article it sounds like little has changed since then.

    Am I the only one who skips Loki's posts? I find it too hard to figure out what the point is, except that we're all doomed. Who or what is the Seagull?

    I can't answer the "Who or what", but pretty much as soon as I identify a new -nym I add it to my Blog Comment block list.

    2290:

    "While I have been told how good automatic gear changers are, my experience is always that they are incredibly slow AND cut most of the power while changing"

    My experience exactly. The worst is when cornering, you apex, then you start to apply more and more throttle, which does little because it's in top gear. So you apply too much throttle, whereupon it disconnects the drive completely, which unbalances the car, transferring the weight to the front and starting the rear sliding, the motor spins up to redline and then slams into gear, neatly unhooking the rears and the car comes to a stop on the wrong side of the road facing the way you came. I hate, loathe, despise automatics. Hats off to anyone who can drive them, you have far more skill than I'll ever have.

    But

    Cars aren't like that now.

    My partner bought a Subaru XV (called something else in the USA where they like names not a random string of letters and numbers).

    It's fitted with a CVT. If you lift off on the flat the engine drops revs and it coasts. If you lift off going down a hill, it brings the revs up enough to hold the speed you were going when you lifted. If you dive into a corner under hard brakes it spins the motor up to near maximum power and holds it there waiting for you to power out of the corner. It's absolutely bonkers how good it is. Nearly a good as an electric.

    I'd never buy one because the combination of wanting to creep forward when stopped and autostop engine that kills the motor when you stop would drive me insane in short order, but for anything other than stop start driving it's brilliant. And to top it off, it uses just over half as much fuel as my Grand Vitara.

    2291:

    In France they've been converting old "H" type vans to campers. That corrugated sheet metal never dies!

    2292:

    I've lived in both urban and rural, and I can assure you from bitter experience that the urban people respect the opinions of rural people, but it doesn't go the other way at all.

    Likewise. I’ve lived in a small town (<8000), up in the hills miles from town, and in cities; I can appreciate the differences and happened to be thinking about this the other day. This take is relative to the US; adjust as necessary for other places.

    My hypothesis (which is mine) is that this is a side effect of demographic movements, specifically that many people move toward larger concentrations of people but few move outward to less populated areas. Pretty much every city dweller knows people who have moved there from small towns or actual farm country; any who don’t are no more than one intermediary from people with firsthand rural experiences.

    On the other hand relatively few people move from cities to small towns and basically nobody moves out into the countryside. So if you live out there and you only go into town for church and shopping, how are you to know what city people think? Even the people in the small town may be a little funny, what with walking to the store and just assuming the socialized plumbing always works. You get your information from your friends and the shouty guy on talk radio.

    It’s then fanned from a tendency to a widespread legend by people who find demagoguery to their advantage but that’s another problem.

    2293:

    In France they've been converting old "H" type vans to campers. That corrugated sheet metal never dies!

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Citro%C3%ABn_Camionette_Type_H_Schaffen-Diest.jpg

    2294:

    David L @ 2259:

    That does assume an aqdequate number and range of gears and a competent automatic system or driver, of course. Comparing a misdesigned car or incompetent driver with a hybrid is not reasonable.

    You're dating yourself. Back in the day, yes, a competent driver could do better with a typical manual than a typical automatic. Then it got to where it needed to be a better driver with a 4 or 5 speed manual. Now if you have a good 6 speed gearbox against a good modern CVT or similar automatic and you can do better you are getting into people who are good enough to be professional race car drivers.

    10 years ago I made my kids learn to drive a manual. I'm glad I did. And they are also glad. But the need or desire for such is rapidly vanishing. Says he who lives in a household with a wife who can drive a stick and a likely future daughter in law who can do such. Son in law is a nope.

    In my admittedly limited experience (I don't drive an automatic unless I am absolutely forced to do so) even the best modern automatic transmissions don't handle going downhill on a 2 lane mountain road as well as a manual transmission does. But you do have to know what you're doing.

    2295:

    "A surplus "Iveco VM 90 Ambulanza" would probably make a pretty cool off-road camper van."

    Ooooo

    Want want want!

    Most ambulances here are Mercedes Sprinter LWB high roof (or the same vehicle badged to another manufacturer). I hired a camper in New Zealand built into one and it was great. I averaged 10 l/100km,which is about what my kei car 4wd gets and a best of 6 l/100km which blew me away.

    https://www.britz.com/nz/en/campervan-hire/2-berth-venturer

    2296:

    Niala @ 2264: Have you ever tried driving with cruise control? I found it gave me better mileage than anything else.

    I Love! cruise control. It's even better for avoiding speeding tickets than it is for improving your mpg.

    Not that much use in city traffic, which is all I've really been able to do this year. But at least once a month I do motor stables & get it out on the highway to blow the carbon out and I can use cruise control for a significant portion of that.

    2297:

    I'd never thought about it like that but I think you're right.

    My second girlfriend was from the country. Australian junior quarter horse champion, from a property near Gunning (pop 2000). So I was exposed to rural people early on. I was a bit in awe of her to be perfectly honest. There's lots of stories, but one sums it up, we were visiting one of her relatives and this aunt complained that one of her horses was doing something it shouldn't. (pig rooting?). There was a bit of a sigh, "have you set the (jargon) to the (jargon)?". Apparently not, so the horse had developed this bad habit.

    So she goes outside, kicks off her high heels, catches this huge horse, puts a thing on its head, then jumped on its back and starts riding around. She complained that it wasn't doing the bad thing so she did things and the horse started kinda jumping around and then it did a sort of dead stop with its head down and its arse up. Quick as a flash Emma jumps off, the horse rears up and tries to get her with its front hooves. As it lands, Emma punches this horse fair in the head. The horse freezes. Emma jumps back on, does the things but the horse is good as gold, just trots around. Emma pronounced it fixed, removes the thing and admonished her aunt not to (jargon) the (jargon) again.

    Yeah, I was in awe. I don't suppose this followed the horse whisper method, but it was as impressive as hell.

    2298:

    Allen Thomson @ 2284:

    And 'highway' in Michigan means 80 miles per hour.

    Just a curiosity question, but what does it mean today on highways/ freeways in Europe?

    Last time I drove on an autopista in Spain out between cities where the traffic wasn't too heavy, at 135 kph I thought I was going fast, but not extraordinarily so considering the rest of the traffic.

    135kph = 83.9mph, so you probably wouldn't get a ticket on that Michigan highway.

    I once had a state trooper tell me it was a waste of time for him to write a ticket for anything less than 10mph over the speed limit. Just about any lawyer could get the judge to let it slide. "Besides, there's plenty of idiots out there who are going faster than 10mph over, so I just write them tickets.".

    On the subject of the Highway Patrol having a "quota" for tickets, he said "Naw, they let me write all the tickets I want to."

    2299:

    In France they've been converting old "H" type vans to campers. That corrugated sheet metal never dies!

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Citro%C3%ABn_Camionette_Type_H_Schaffen-Diest.jpg

    That looks clunky, simple, and rugged enough to last for generations. I like it!

    We don't have those in the US; I'm guessing that it has mediocre performance and handling but will keep puttering along indefinitely and is easy to fix when something breaks. I'd be happy with that as a camper too.

    2300:

    In the UK drivers are now more likely to drive at the speed limit than a few years ago. Probably because there are so many speed cameras. On a non motorway dual carriage with free flowing traffic I set my cruise control to satnav 70mph (about 75 on the speedometer). The majority of the cars fall into three groups. Speedometer 70, satnav 70 and satnav 77 (10 percent over the speed limit and not usually ticketed for speeding). When you use cruise control these groups are more obvious. there are also a few who drive slowly and a few who just put their foot down. On motorways speeds can be higher but not much. On the M6 toll road, the only toll motorway nobody does less than 80 (speedometer). Of course traffic jams and roadworks often slow traffic down to a crawl.

    2301:

    Judging by my local area all the second hand giant white vans are being converted to campers. With new campers in new vans running well over 100k and an 18 month wait, and second hand ones still over 100k, I think there's a few grey nomads who are taking matters into their own hands.

    Not necessarily grey nomads - lots of young people on social media documenting their conversions and travel in vans.

    2302:

    [[ Way over quota, so temporarily busted - mod ]]

    2303:

    That does look cool. Now I kinda want one :-)

    2304:

    so let me do a rambling stream-of-consciousness apologia for the most hated "model" in finance, the Black-Scholes model. That makes me happy, reasons. Also, my math skills clearly need a workout program. "But Quantian," you whine pathetically. "Some Arab guy in a Mini Cooper said the normal distribution is bad!!" OK, fine. Pick any other continuous distribution with a location and shape parameter--Laplace or whatever--and you can derive a corresponding option pricing formula.

    have sat in the Bone Chair and defended Loki ... Poked at that all a bit (again); I had forgotten that Zakalwe (A Weapon in "Use of Weapons") appears 900 years later in INB's "Surface Detail", or maybe never read the epilogue. Points to Charlie for his "I see the Chairmaker has claimed another victim" tweet.

    creating the next-gen Stochastic Weapons via Mental head-fuck. Not sure people generally realize how individually directed some of this mind-shaping is. (The bulk stuff, various scales and methods, is also vile.)

    do not go chasing after those Nick Land Ghosts. Sure. I found the very recent parts of the feed to be boring, TBH. Just know that they know how to 'break' a Mind to create something... a little more dangerous than your average Stochastic Killer. Yup.

    Anyway, TTY tomorrow; just saying hi, and thanks for the useful-math-prod.

    2305:

    Yep. One of my sons has done three now.

    2306:

    I lived in the country with the nearest large centre being Ft White Fl pop 500, for half a year. Eaten squirrel, grits and a mess of catfish.

    I've seen first hand what actually gets done with these trucks. Virtually no one loads anything into them that I couldn't carry on a motorcycle (though I'll admit that I carry more than most westerners on a motorcycle) . The deep cave divers all had the equivalent of a Ram, but the van (who's name escapes me). Back home I went cave diving out of a Toyota Corolla plus camping gear for a week and had room to spare.

    Florida? FLORIDA????!!! That's your US example?

    Oh honey. That is such a world of difference from where I live, forty miles from the deepest canyon in the United States and just about diagonally opposite from very, very flat Florida (One mile at Hat Point, on a road that is not only narrow but has a five mile stretch where it climbs a canyon wall that drops down about 3000 feet or so. Single track gravel road with occasional pullouts and nope, no guard rails). I live in a valley which is 3900 feet elevation and often travel to 6000 feet elevation when doing stuff in the woods, including cutting wood. Clearance requirements on the roads are such that I won't take my Subaru Outback on them any more (have in the past but that means a few hair-raising moments when encountering ruts, deep mud that might have a rock base, might not, or concerns that maybe we might have a problem with big rocks). And an easy drive for work and/or pleasure is quite often right around one hundred miles round trip.

    The reality is that you do not have the experience or knowledge to make such a general assertion about usage, especially if your solitary experience of the US rural life is Florida. Sure, you can get along with such rigs in the flatlands. But I'm not about to take one of the larger ATVs that are the equivalents of the Ivesco Daily on one of those everyday runs where I live. I have more respect for my aging body than that.

    Basically, you're talking about this: https://ranger.polaris.com/en-us/

    And they are common here. For short-range applications such as field work, checking on livestock and irrigation lines, hauling small amounts of hay, and so on in this part of the world. Most often you'll see one of those loaded in a big pickup, driven to a field, then unloaded and used in the field. Some of that is a road licensing issue. The other is that in order to get to the working place, you have to travel on highways, sometimes up to 50 miles or so.

    But they are NOT a replacement for vehicles that haul 1-2 1000 lb bales of hay for daily feeding in wintertime here. Nor are they capable of holding as much wood as my pickup (half a cord, could carry more but we're old folks and tire early). I sure wouldn't pull a horse trailer with one (and if you read your own link, the recommended usage is backcountry only, not highway). Tow rating is not the only factor. Wheel base stability and the ability to, like, STOP when needed is also a factor.

    (Um, also? Your description of what the horsey girlfriend did in another post? Does not parse...and I've got more than a few creds in that area. Allowances made for lack of knowledge, but all the same...does not parse)

    Scott Sanford @ 2292...um. We are seeing people moving into this small town in NE Oregon from larger urban areas (I've had the entertaining experience of seeing old, retired, Peacock Lane Christmas displays showing up here). Some of it is retirees. Some of it is health care workers looking for a slower pace of life. Some of it is remote workers, especially as the availability of broadband and internet improves. There's a surprising number of younger families coming here as well. Now time will tell as to whether they last, or if they end up having to go back to the big city to earn money for a while. The rebound phenomenon, where people keep moving back hoping to make a go of it in a small town, is real. And Wild Carrot Herbals relocated here from Sublimity.

    2307:

    It's fucking DANGER. Why? I recognize it. Read, OK. (saved)

    2308:

    Huh?

    Or maybe you could look at someone's link, and yes, the truck does, in fact, have corrugated sheet metal sides.

    2309:

    One more thing - reading this last post of mine, I realized what else is going on here - one reason that SotMN annoys me.

    Little story: back in the early nineties, a chemist came into our office, and asked my manager if she could dump his data from dBase to ASCII, so he could write a report. She told him she was busy, but that I new dBase. I talked to the guy, and then sat him down, and pulled out the bare hoses and rubber light bulbs, and looked at his dBase files on the floppies.

    I looked up at him, and said, "If I do this, how long will it take you to write the report?" He said two or three days. I looked back, and said, "How'd you like it in two or three hours?"

    The dBase files were in perfect. We spent about an hour formatting the output of a dBase report to what he needed. He thought that, as a subject matter expert in chemistry, he was a subject matter expert in databases and computer work.

    He wasn't. I've observed a lot of folks, over the years, who think that because they're subject matter experts in a subject or two, they come to think that they're subject matter experts in all fields.

    Cluex4: they, and you, are not.

    2310:

    "I'm not about to take one of the larger ATVs that are the equivalents of the Ivesco Daily"

    If you think a Daily is the same as a Polaris ATV then we're talking at such cross purposes that it's obvious we're completely unintelligible to the other.

    Lets just end by saying we respect each other, even if we don't understand.

    2311:

    Scott Sanford @ 2292...um. We are seeing people moving into this small town in NE Oregon from larger urban areas (I've had the entertaining experience of seeing old, retired, Peacock Lane Christmas displays showing up here). Some of it is retirees. Some of it is health care workers looking for a slower pace of life. Some of it is remote workers, especially as the availability of broadband and internet improves. There's a surprising number of younger families coming here as well. Now time will tell as to whether they last, or if they end up having to go back to the big city to earn money for a while. The rebound phenomenon, where people keep moving back hoping to make a go of it in a small town, is real. And Wild Carrot Herbals relocated here from Sublimity.

    Yes, people moving toward population centers is a demographic trend not a universal law. Retirees are one of the obvious groups defying that trend, presumably attracted to low cost of living and not needing regular employment.

    You mentioned Sublimity and that reminded me of a counter-trend example. You may remember the Orycon attendee with the cool van who lived with her parents down that way (and I know Charlie does); she was there because her USAF father retired to a wide spot in the road along the Santiam Highway. Then with her husband moved to a slightly less tiny community in Nevada, but he left the Bay Area and works remotely. They're a couple moving both with and against the trend.

    I suspect this draws both old folks and couples with children to small towns rather than farmland or more remote regions but I haven't seen actual numbers on this. Cities blend into suburbs and suburbs are more interchangeable with small towns than either are with seriously rural or wilderness lifestyles.

    2312:

    I've observed a lot of folks, over the years, who think that because they're subject matter experts in a subject or two, they come to think that they're subject matter experts in all fields.

    It's a chronic problem. It's also one that perplexes me if I let myself think about it. I know a thing or two about some subjects and as I've learned more I also learn how much there is that I don't know.

    For example, I've got an amateur radio license; yes, I know more about radio than the average person and I've taken a test to prove it. I've also read the textbook for the Extra class license (that's the highest amateur radio class in the US) and realized that I know diddly-squat about radio and am not ready to play with the big boys. And that's in a subject I've studied...

    The expertise fallacy is common so someone must have dug into it. I conjecture that some people just accumulate knowledge without the context and don't fit their specialty into a wider world view.

    2313:

    Small towns have more people, and that draws other people.

    I met my partner 20 years ago. She was born in what's still farmland (lawn clippings were tipped over the fence to feed uncle's sheep), but was drawn by the bright lights and excitement to Grafton (pop 15000). I moved in with her in the early 00's. We were in town, but we could hear the cattle that were in the cow paddock at the end of the block. There's no way it would have occurred to me to move there had I not met her.

    I suppose you could say those city folk come here and steal our women. But certainly in Australia the net flow was into the cities, at least until March this year. Right now house prices in the town I'm in now have jumped. I was close enough to farms to hear cows until recently when the developers moved in on them. Working from home seems to have become "working from anywhere but the city".

    2314:

    I know a thing or two about some subjects and as I've learned more I also learn how much there is that I don't know.

    Similar problem happened in a meeting with my boss. We're talking about secure communication over the internet and trying to explain to him that us two smart-ish programmers don't know enough to write a secure protocol, let alone implement it. But we are, like most programmers, capable of using the secure protocol support in our programming langues or standard libraries, and with a bit of research we can probably even set them up properly.

    "you're smart guys, you'll figure it out".

    Nope. Nope-itty nope nope with a bit of nope on top.

    Sure, the experts in our hardware/firmware team can do it. Any one of them. Have done it. Will happily do it again. Absolutely guaranteed 100% secure communications channel using advanced 512-bit XOR fixed-key encryption and guaranteed IP-number host identification and authentication (this is just a guess based on previous experience).

    But then, the Security Industry Alliance, SIA, read the AES-CBC encryption documents from NIST that say "the IV must be un-guessable and should change regularly" and said "the IV shall be all zeros". The they published it.

    We did, I think, convince the boss that TLS was the way to go, with some yet to be discussed DNS securing. The new chips have a secure key storage area so we should be able to get reasonable end-to-end security working.

    2315:

    We're talking about secure communication over the internet and trying to explain to him that us two smart-ish programmers don't know enough to write a secure protocol, let alone implement it. But we are, like most programmers, capable of using the secure protocol support in our programming langues or standard libraries, and with a bit of research we can probably even set them up properly.

    When I was working as a IT security consultant, doing technical audits, I knew that I knew enough to break most systems or point out the problems, but not enough to implement much of the stuff. Usually, when an assessment started "and we implemented these important security bits by ourselves" we went in with the idea that it's most likely broken in an obvious way.

    In one embedded thing I didn't work on, but just overheard and helped in rubber-ducking, the manual said that they had implemented the encryption themselves. We didn't get the permission to break that but even the description in the manual told us that it wasn't good. I think the first thing was that they used the current time to generate keys...

    On the other hand, I went to one assessment dreading what I would find as the product used was developed basically "from scratch", including web servers. I think the database server in there was a commercial product and everything on top of that was built by the supplier. I found a couple of minor issues which were fixed in days.

    2316:

    "Um, also? Your description of what the horsey girlfriend did in another post? Does not parse...and I've got more than a few creds in that area. Allowances made for lack of knowledge, but all the same...does not parse."

    She made a joke. Compared the two trucks, one a real work truck, one a rich kid's plaything and said... "You picked it before it was ripe."

    2317:

    I think he meant my old girlfriend who punched a horse.

    But considering how bad our mutual intelligibility is, who knows.

    2318:

    I knew enough to break most systems

    My coworker broke the wifi receiver the other team built just by sending random data to it via UDP. Like, correct UDP headers for the data part, but the body was random. It was pretty obviously buffer overflows so they weren't even trying to filter the input. That lot are farr too used to private, non-IP networks (internal buses, POTS/DTMF etc).

    He did this because pointing that code at my server just resulted in his IP being auto-banned by the bad packet detector. It was very boring, so he pointed it at someone else's software/firmware and that was much more fun.

    They've fixed it now but it took a lot of effort to persuade them that "point that thing somewhere else" was a bad response. If you attach something to the internet the best you can hope for is random packets...

    2319:

    Neither definitions of cruise control make any sense to me.

    Sorry. I was being a bit sarcastic. I've been renting rental cars for years. Mostly in the 80s and then once a month or so in a 4 year stretch around 10 years ago plus every few months until last March. Much of the time I rent for long trip reasons.

    While traditional cruise controls are better than not and will improve gas mileage in most cases, most are not perfect. I've found they will tend to fall in speed a bit going uphill and increase in speed a bit going down.

    As to the adaptive cruise control systems (not autonomous) I've found that most of those are very good at distance keeping and maintaining speed. But you need to be aware they are NOT autonomous driving.

    2320:

    even the best modern automatic transmissions don't handle going downhill on a 2 lane mountain road as well as a manual transmission does.

    I'll give you that edge case. Mostly.

    My 2016 Civic did great for me when I headed south out of Happy Valley, Pennsylvania a few years back and hit multiple stretches of road where there was a warning sign of a 1000+ft elevation change over the next mile or few.

    Ditto that Hybrid Ford Fusion I mentioned up thread when driving up the PCH north of San Francisco. Not really mountains but up and down 200 to 500 ft a lot due to the topology of the coast there.

    Modern non low end cruise control is a much better thing that we grew up with. Or lived most of our life with. My 2008 Tundra cruise control works very good at keeping a constant speed, even going down hill but my 2016 Civic is way better at things. Although lots of sharp curves in my Civic cause it to yell at me and disengage as it can't figure out what is going on ahead of the car well enough to control things. Which is fine by me.

    2321:

    As it lands, Emma punches this horse fair in the head.

    Mongo

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8cDfnQD0ws

    2322:

    It's a chronic problem.

    My issue is when very high IQ people conflate their opinions with facts. I know I have a lot of opinions about a lot of things. But I also know that I might have to change my opinions based on evidence/facts when presented.

    But when high IQ people start telling me that facts and experiences I know are not real because they've figure out .....

    Oh, well.

    2324:
    The expertise fallacy is common so someone must have dug into it.

    Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky. Their papers are unusually well-written and readable for reasearch papers. Alternatively, one can get a book on behavioural finance (I would like to reference a good one, but, it has been borrowed by one of the kids and never returned).

    2325:

    "I used to skim in hopes of seeing something comprehensible, but have since given up."

    Last time I bothered to interact, on a topic I knew more than something about, it was fairly obvious that rather than being a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition, their "arguments" were simply quote-mined from the first page of Google hits.

    (... a technique I'm unfortunately too familiar with from my day job. One of my colleagues had a job description which required him in so many words to be able to talk convincingly on topics he knew nothing about. We also had an ethics policy...)

    2326:

    That's unfair. Many of them came from several pages further on :-)

    At least in the early days, some had been the results of more subtle searching, and there were definitely signs of Clue in several areas (mainly political).

    2327:

    Ooops. You're probably right. And not to disrespect anyone, but different people handle animals in different ways, and do so successfully.

    2328:

    I like you and appreciate a lot of what you say about a lot of things.

    However, we have a positional conflict around the use cases of trucks (in general) and EVs specifically. You seem to be saying, in effect, 'Urban people have no idea what rural people need'. Leaving aside any projections about who is or was urban and rural, that may well be true.

    My position is that the majority of people are not rural. The needs and activities of yourself and others who must do the [FARM] on the [BACKROAD] are relevant and valid. They also apply to what is in effect a minority position - few actual people do those things.

    You have further limited your use case by excluding rural Florida, and apparently other places that are flatlands or don't reflect your relatively unique needs. My parents had a farm with horses and sheep in Central Alberta. Very rural, very much a rural use case, but flat and somewhat treeless (though not entirely) - so not relevant to your specific needs.

    Can we agree that your specific rural needs are not the same as the majority of vehicular needs for the majority of people? And that even your specific rural needs don't track to the rural needs of people in other nonurban areas?

    So instead of rolling your eyes and telling us all we don't know what we are talking about, and to stop generalizing about all truck users, let's agree that your rural needs are relatively unique and not the focus of what those of us who favour a transition to EVs are advocating.

    Eventually EVS will need to be applied in a rural context, but the much, much lower hanging fruit of urban usage is far more urgent and important to address. Further, resolving that in an urban context will help reduce the cost for the eventual and necessary switch in rural areas.

    Getting your back up when someone talks about addressing the majority use case of cars and (let's face it) pickup trucks because you are one of the very rare exceptions doesn't help us talk about society level problems.

    2329:

    The thing that gets overlooked when doing a "secure" protocol (which is relatively easy), but establishing the trust that the other side is OK. That is what the whole "chain of trust" in certificates is about, and using self-signed certificates pretty much undermines that (trust me!). Getting the whole thing to work without introducing security holes is non-trivial, which is why NIST has multiple volumes guidelines on how to do this stuff (and, really, they make lots of simplifying assumptions to even get that far)

    Not to say creating a good encryption or hashing algorithm is easy (it is F*ing black magic AFAIAC), but there are lots of very good ones available in libraries, and if you follow the rules as far as creating and using keys and nonces you should be ok.

    2330:

    Sometime ago I read in a car magazine that in the opinion of one of the car reviewers that SUVs were nothing but "tall wagons" (I think they are called estate cars in the UK). If you consider them filling that niche, and not as a "lite truck", some places where you see them used makes more sense. Why don't car makers make more station wagons? Well, IIRC, CAFE puts SUVs in the truck category and station wagons in the car category, although most(all?) SUVs are actually built on car platforms these days.

    Businesses used to get an additional tax write off if they used an SUV instead of a car (that was in the 90s, I don't know if it still applies) Also, car companies can get away with charging more for an SUV than a station wagon for reasons that have nothing to do with reality.

    And, of course, there is the 4WD myth that lots of people buy into. The only time I used 4WD (and was glad to have it) was with a rental SUV in Alaska. Took a side trip into a national park (forget which one, but it had an active volcano) and had to cross a couple of shallow (foot deep) streams with gravel beds.

    2331:

    Right. Provided that you mean only 'secure against unauthorised content decryption and spoofing'. In the early days, Kerberos and, later, SSL were being plugged as a solution to that - but 'trusted third parties' merely means that you are vulnerable to a third party being hacked as well as the party at the far end.

    2332:

    Not really - an estate car was, traditionally, a station wagon and both names were used.

    There are occasions on which I would like to have had 4WD, but didn't, but most were due to the fact that a fully-laden front-wheel drive vehicle is appalling in slippery conditions. I would have been OK with a traditional rear-wheel drive estate car.

    In the UK, high cars generally and 'SUVs' in particular are recent and are a real abomination, because of the problems they cause to other cars and even parking. The same applies to the size inflation that has occurred over the past 3/4 century - the prospect of a significant increase in that is not appealing.

    2333:

    whitroth @ 2309: One more thing - reading this last post of mine, I realized what else is going on here - one reason that SotMN annoys me.

    Took a few minutes to parse & figure out "SotMN" wasn't the abbreviation for one of the later Star Trek sequels. I'm like, "What the hell does dBase have to do with Star Trek?"

    2334:

    jreynoldsward @ 2306: The reality is that you do not have the experience or knowledge to make such a general assertion about usage, especially if your solitary experience of the US rural life is Florida. Sure, you can get along with such rigs in the flatlands. But I'm not about to take one of the larger ATVs that *are* the equivalents of the Ivesco Daily on one of those everyday runs where I live. I have more respect for my aging body than that.

    Basically, you're talking about this: https://ranger.polaris.com/en-us/

    It's an IVECO Daily, not IVESCO.

    IVESCO is a subsidiary of MWI Animal Health (used to be MWI Veterinary Supply). The IVECO Daily is the modern day equivalent of the old Step Van delivery trucks.

    I guess a camper van conversion of one could be used to tow a trailer with a Ranger Polaris on it. But they're not really 4WD or off-road capable.

    Someone mentioned a lot of those old Step Van delivery trucks being converted to camper vans, but around here they're more likely to be hard to find because they're real popular for converting into "Food Trucks"(increasing scarcity & driving up prices).

    "Around here" being Raleigh, NC, but Wikipedia didn't have an image of food trucks from Raleigh but the ones "around here" look just like those shown.

    My neighbor down the street had a visitor for a couple of months early in the quarantine. The visitor had a camper conversion, but IIRC, it was the Mercedes model similar to the "Daily". Interestingly enough it had Oregon plates.

    2335:

    I did a quick search, and turned up nothing. Why is "current time in seconds from the beginning of the epoch" a bad seed for generating keys?

    2336:

    Troutwaxer @ 2316:

    "Um, also? Your description of what the horsey girlfriend did in another post? Does not parse...and I've got more than a few creds in that area. Allowances made for lack of knowledge, but all the same...does not parse."

    She made a joke. Compared the two trucks, one a real work truck, one a rich kid's plaything and said... "You picked it before it was ripe."

    I think jreynoldsward was referring to the other post about the girlfriend punching a horse in the schnoz box to make it behave.

    I don't know from horses, but there's an old joke about the first step in training a mule is you whack it upside the head with a 2x4 to get its attention.

    2337:

    I'm still finding trouble understanding you. The cruise controls I've had - Toyota Tercel (the bottom of their line) from '86, an '89 Chrysler and '97 Chrysler Grand Voyagers, and now the Honda Odyssey EX, all factory-installed cruise, and they slow a small amount, or go over a small amount, and then the gas pedal moves by itself, and it throws more/less power.

    Are you suggesting that there's some newer/higher-end ones that do not have a range of +/- 2 or so mph?

    And it makes a major difference. Note that I don't use cruise under about 50mph, because that means I'm on a street or road where I'm going to be slowing/accelerating, nor do I use it in heavy traffic on the Interstates (too many idiots).

    2338:

    Why is "current time in seconds from the beginning of the epoch" a bad seed for generating keys?

    It's not random. There's maybe 10-15 bits of uncertainty which is small enough that you can trivially exhaust it. These days non-trivial chips mostly have a secure storage area and a hardware cryptographic random number generator built in, just so they can communicate securely.

    By the time you get up to a laptop let alone a server there will be multiple options built by people who don't trust each other to build a proper one so they provide their own. The "trusted computing module" has one, the CPU proper has one, the motherboard CPU has one, the network hardware has one... I've no doubt missed several more.

    Then the operating system will have a crypto RNG built on top of those, and mostly any crypto library you use will wrap that in whatever layers it thinks it needs to give you a "proper" source of randomness.

    2339:

    It's worse than that. The original xdm used the most brain-dead cryptographic hash function imaginable - think 'fail on coding; fail on theory; fail on paying attention' in Cryptographics 1.01 - but the salient point was that it started with only the login time in seconds since the epoch.

    It took me 15 minutes to write, debug and check a trivial program to display a message on someone else's screen, if I ran it when I first noticed their activity, and it took 15 seconds to run (a quick utility by the standards of the time). My organisation's official expert claimed that was impossible, so he wasn't interested in me showing him (NOT for the first or last time on such matters), but regrettably no nasty-minded person discovered that. I don't know when it was fixed, but a while back.

    Time in microseconds has been available for yonks, and that's reasonable, for moderate-security applications, though not for high-security ones or generating unique keys in parallel applications.

    2340:

    Can't you just use temperature as a seed for generating keys?

    2341:

    For anyone fantasising that EVs cannot be used to tow at least moderate trailers I’d like to point out a local delivery company here on the island. They use Tesla X to deliver assorted stuff up and down the island. Apparently they typically put up to 1000kg in the vehicles and then up to 4000 in a trailer. I’ve seen the trailers involved and they are not at all aerodynamic. I’m told they get very good range without trailers, no matter the load. With trailers the range is fine in town, plenty for all day. A long highway run with a trailer is the only journey requiring charge planning. None of which should be a surprise to anyone with any engineering knowledge. The company is apparently waiting hopefully for a chance to order some Tesla truck units for larger loads, and some CTs for a cheaper, tougher X replacement. The drivers I’ve chatted with love them. One guy actually joined the company specially to drive an EV instead of a noisy smelly diesel.

    2342:

    You can use any sufficiently accurate measurement for some level of randomness (the nanoseconds of the current time gives 3 decimal digits, for example), but there arent many temperature sensors that emit enough digits to be useful.

    Cryptographically secure random number generation is a specialised topic, there are lots of subtle traps, and expert syndrome is especially common when those two factors apply. It seems easy, but it's not.

    Crypto as a field is prone to "well, I can't break it so it must be secure" from well-meaning amateurs. But there is decades of experience that says don't. Just don't. Multiple reviewed, extensively studied, open source protocols have been found to have major flaws after decades of use. All we can say about that is "ooops".

    By all means, if you're trying to stop your cat intercepting your messages come up with a secret code and some identity verification steps. Have fun. But when you're thinking about using serious... write it up as a paper and publish it by all means, but expect that the best outcome is someone taking it seriously enough to point out some of the obvious flaws.

    2343:

    Are you suggesting that there's some newer/higher-end ones that do not have a range of +/- 2 or so mph?

    Yes.

    And I expect better. :)

    I notice it mostly with smaller engines in bigger cars.

    But it was really annoying in the cargo van I drove back and forth NC/TX in July.

    I've been spoiled. :)

    2344:

    Interesting news: Biden's just given the climate change deniers a nasty twist: he's chosen Kerry (2004 D. Pres Cadidate, and former Senator) for the ->national security post<- of dealing with climate change.

    Now they get to yell against national security....

    2345:

    I should know better than to enter the key-generation fray, but no...

    Whaddabout picture + secure hash? E.g., a camera pointing at the fish tank and SHA-512ing a frame, extracting as many bits as needed? Repeat on another frame if more bits are desired. Bubbler in fish tank recommended.

    2346:

    Cryptographically secure random number generation is a specialised topic, there are lots of subtle traps, and expert syndrome is especially common when those two factors apply. It seems easy, but it's not.

    2347:

    Not pointing at anyone above, but this just popped up in my feed and it gets to the heart of what "balance" means to far too much of our media.

    2348:

    the ->national security post

    It's better than that: Kerry's going to be a "special presidential envoy for climate" with a seat on the National Security Council. Which, unlike the National Security Advisor position itself, is not a position requiring Senate confirmation. So there's nothing the Republican senators can do about the appointment other than rant and whine.

    And two women, Secretary of the Treasury and Director of National Intelligence, positions which do require confirmation -- be interesting to see how that goes in the Senate.

    2349:

    That is true, but his suggestion is one that is known to work, subject to: 1) There is enough unpredictable variation in the picture, and 2) The hash produces an adequately uniform result.

    It's a variation of the old Geiger counter method, after all. But I am not downplaying the difficulty of ensuring that those conditions really are true; in particular, people often think variation is unpredictable when it isn't, as this thread shows.

    When I needed it for my own X initialisation (xdm being useless), I hashed /dev/mem and the second half of gettimeofday(). I may have used another such source, too. I don't know how /dev/random works, but believe it is fairly good, nowadays.

    2350:

    Biochemical random number. I don't know enough to say how "true" a random number this is. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201120113854.htm

    2351:

    The lava lamp array is a fun example of that, but they do some custom image processing to extract the actually-random parts of the images and more than one person has written papers on the how and what that turns the camera feed(s) into usefully random data.

    My understanding is that /dev/random on a modern PC is good enough for the likes of you and me, it's not a just a PRNG seeded off the boot time any more. For my particular application our geriatric embedded hardware doesn't have any kind of hardware random source so they're using shot noise off a resistor bridge and an ADC input to seed a crypto-RNG. At my end we just use OpenSSL's rand().

    There is some moz-is-a-dummy level discussion https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/47598/why-openssl-cant-use-dev-random-directly https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/68919/is-openssl-rand-command-cryptographically-secure https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Random_Numbers

    But oh boy is this a rabbit hole that you can dive into almost without limit. When you start seeing titles "A Partial Analysis of the Implications of Hardware RNG Seeding OpenSsl's RAND Function" you know it's time to go outside and look at the pretty flowers...

    2352:

    Agreed. While it's very simple in theory, it's very easy to get wrong in practice. As you say, the days when I used to roll my own because I could do it much better for little effort are long gone, and I have been a (very minor) invited speaker on this topic. Which doesn't mean that some damn-fool programmer, manager or whatever may not 'improve' a system's built-in generator and fuck it up.

    2353:

    In debian at least (and alpine) entropy sources can be added. haveged is common, and there is a video_entropyd. Video as an entropy source has the interesting property that the user, if on camera, can participate in feeding /dev/random. (They can anyway, by interacting with the computer, but the face is a rich source.)

    Here's a tight summary for alpine linux: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Entropy_and_randomness

    2354:

    I am reminded of the quote by John von Neumann in Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 2:

    Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

    Enjoy!

    Frank.

    2355:

    Rabbit hole indeed. For some fun look for "entropy" in the linux crypto mailing list. There are developers there who have devoted their careers trying to get entropy sources that are reliable into the Linux kernel.

    See /proc/sys/kernel/randon/entropy_avail to see how many bits of truly random data is in your random numbers from /dev/random or /dev/urandom.

    What is the difference between the two? Well, if you are running in FIPS mode on Linux and you access /dev/random and there is no entropy left (it decreases everytime you read bits out of /dev/random) it will block on the read.
    /dev/urandom will not block and just give you a random number that may not be all that random (mathematically speaking).

    Historically entropy sources including using micro second level timings on keyboard presses or mouse movements (using interrupts is actually too predictable to use as an entropy source). Well, if you have to run in FIPS mode, the kernel will not finish booting until some crypto self tests complete, and they require entropy for the random number generator. If you are running headless (meaning no mouse & no keyboard) you will never actually finish booting. We added a module (not written by us) to detect the CPU clock timing jitter and use that for a timing source, which got us booted up. The RDRAND & RDSEED instructions are even better (when they work, AMD screwed that up a couple times).

    2356:

    I'm having trouble conveying this concept to our American cousins. (I once tried to explain what a panelvan was to some Americans before the internet, and that didn't go well either)

    Iveco make a range of trucks, and they use "Daily" for a bunch of the light trucks and vans. (light trucks doesn't mean what you think. A Ram doesn't even count as a truck in that concept, it's a car.)

    A Daily 4x4 bears no relation to a step van whatsoever. Nor is it any relation to a Polaris toy car.

    "But they're not really 4WD or off-road capable."

    They're what you take out to pick up a Land Criuser that's got stuck off road. You should actually click the links.

    https://youtu.be/mE166UG-R8c

    https://youtu.be/SRj_in-j0Is

    And if you've got the time, you can watch a near stock Daily lead a group of heavily modified 4WDs, while towing a trailer. At 7:54 you can see the guys driving the modified 4WDs decide not to follow the Iveco down the hard section. "I think I'll take the chicken track"

    https://youtu.be/3YiMUqhAi6E

    "one could be used to tow a trailer with a Ranger Polaris on it"

    You could put the Polaris in the tub of a Ram and then put the Ram in the tray of the Daily 4x4 (single cab) and you'd be close to the maximum payload.

    A Daily 4x4 is an actual truck. Not a car, not a toy, not a van.

    It's FAR better for what rural people claim they need. Which was my point. The decision to buy Ram, and never consider anything else is retconned. They want a Ram because that's culturally approved/appropriate and they make up reasons to justify it.

    That's not a derogatory statement. I'm an old, apparently white, cis male who lives in a hot climate. The best clothing for me, looking at my needs, is clearly a light summer dress or some kind of sarong/lava lava. Do I wear that? Of course not. Tee shirt and cargo shorts. Sweaty and uncomfortable. I can retcon that I need pockets, but it's Bullshit. I wear culturally acceptable clothes because it's culturally acceptable and though I like to be a bit unusual I don't want to be cast out of the group.

    Buying a Ram that's hopeless off road and that can only carry two 1000 lb haybales rather than something like a Daily 4x4 that can practically climb trees while carrying six 1000 lb bales is the same thing.

    If buying American "trucks" (to use the term at its loosest) is so ingrained that obviously superior (for what they say they're used for) diesel alternatives are never considered, and they're happy to spend big on gigantic cars that are actually used as grocery getters, there's no way you're going to get these people to switch to EV without forcing them. It's like asking me to switch to wearing a dress because it will cut down on airconditioning costs.

    2357:

    Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

    That would be NSA, no?

    Someday someone passing time through a Siberian winter is going to figure out how nonlinear shift registers work.

    2358:

    Oh help - 2 days out ( Old computer died ) & I'm not sure I can catch up .... Electric vehicles .. a small-monster "Merc" van delivered to next-door today - electric, but of course a fleet of those will be recharged overnight at the depot ... EC#It was very noticeable in rural pubs in the UK, when they were still open :-( So-called ATVs came in two forms: well mud-spattered, sometimes dented, and with a selection of rope, sacks, tools etc. in the boot; The Great Green Beast - a perfect description! [ It has moss & lichen growing on it, too! ] Nancy/Waldo NO - the Seagull is definitely USAian & almost certainly female & mad & in need of medical help & a right pain in the posterior RP:Their behaviour reminds me a lot of many of the special needs students precisely!

    EC Yes, the arseholes who drive at a steady 45 on the open road & continue at a steady 45 in a built-up area ... far too many of them.... Bill Arnold @ 2304 You DO REALISE that your answer was to rambling nonsense that has been terminated? How sad.

    2360:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

    That's batshit. I mean, it has explanatory power but it's hard not to read it as "we amputated our leg so we'd never shoot ourselves in the foot".

    The price of any jobs saved is huge fuel use and the resultant emissions because it means everyone has to buy a vehicle twice the size it should be to carry all those extra decorations. I'm kind of enjoying gasdive trying to explain the whole "what you say you want, what is available, and what you actually buy... they're not even vaguely similar to each other".

    Back in the old days, when men were men and cigarettes made your lungs stronger, pretty much every military said "wanted: box, wheel at each corner, motorised" and ended up with a 4wd truck of some sort. Or many sorts. Something like this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_G506

    We had a British one on the farm. It was genuine WWII surplus, and still had the original crank start because it was petrol powered (it had electric start too, which often worked). Top speed was allegedly 45mph or something equally ridiculous, but in practice 35mph was the limit. BUT if you could walk there, and sometimes if you couldn't, that thing would drive there. With two tonnes on the back.

    From what I can work out, your "rural mountain people" would be better off with that than the inflated car with luggage rack that you buy instead. gasdive keeps pointing at the modern version of those, but I think it's worth mentioning that the US also made them back in WWII. The decision not to make them is political, not practical.

    2361:

    In my years as a treeplanting foreman in Northern BC and Alberta I had the opportunity to drive/destroy numerous brand new 4x4 trucks in extreme conditions. At the beginning of a season I would drive a truck with ~15km on the odometer off the lot, and 3-4 months later I would clean and polish a shambling wreck before returning it.*

    In every case 35,000 km of hard use was more than a match for the truck. In this case hard use is defined as extensive driving on logging roads, decommissioned roads and cut blocks, often while carrying a heavy load and usually in adverse weather. It is hard to overstate the amount of rough track and heavy mud.

    Some years I started with a Chevrolet Silverado (the shocks would give out, and/or the brakes). Other years an F150 or 250. The most humorous were the Dodge Rams. One year I had a stupendous looking truck with big wheels and a large metal front bumper that had a winch. Useful, one would think. Sure enough, a road collapsed under me and I was up to the doors on the driver side, so I hooked the winch up to another vehicle and began pulling myself out. THe entire front bumper assembly popped right off the front of the truck, winch and all. Said bumper attached by a few metal screws. Appearance > function with most 4x4 trucks.

    Adverse weather - Treeplanting is most effective when done immediately after the frost melts, which means the first few days or weeks of Spring. Which in most places means heavy rain, sleet, and/or clouds of freshly hatched mosquitoes. Only the latter had no effect on the truck.

    *Never buy a used 4x4 truck, at least not in Canada or the Western US. Each year these wrecks are detailed to look almost new, then shipped off to be sold as 'lightly used' to various office cowboys who wanted a tough looking truck.

    2362:

    'lightly used'

    Ah, sales speak for "lighter and abused".

    The cleaning process removes rust, anything that can rust, most of the protective coatings, and probably a few less essential parts. So the truck really does get lighter. Abused... well, as you say :)

    2363:

    Yeah that confirms what I've always understood to be the case with American "trucks".

    I don't know about there and its hard to compare given that the Japanese and European light trucks aren't sold there, but here, where you can get both, a Daily 4x4 is about 3/4 the price of a 4wd Ram 1500 and you're getting 3 times the truck. It could be that Ram isn't serious about the Australian market, but the amount of TV advertising they're doing seems pretty serious. This runs about 5 times every night. https://youtu.be/aSqMjuMiOIU

    2364:

    I disagree - I'm reasonably sure she's from the UK, given some misunderstandings about US politics, and she does tend to talk about the UK and the EU.

    2365:

    Ah, news, if you hadn't heard: the woman who's the administrator of the GSA FINALLY released the money, office space, etc, to Biden that she'd been holding onto for weeks.

    Can't tell if it was Michigan certifying, or PA about to certify, or if Trumpolini's letter to her to tell her to do it is ex port facto.... Of course, I thought I read, last week, that she was looking for another job, so she may have found one.

    This is big....

    2366:

    You're wrong.

    Look @ what got deleted. Stuff about Pompeo etc. Look @ the time stamps.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-55042055

    That's fairly fantastic levels of precognition if you've not got access to the Diplomatic Cables.

    Bit naughty, but hey.

    "Speak English in this role" "You'll be Home Soon"

    ~

    She's Sumerian. She's told you that a thousand times.

    2367:

    Looks as though DJT has "Not quite conceded" - I think he is now following the German immediate-post WWI narrative - the "Stab in the Back" ... hoping of a re-run in 2024, assuming he's not either dead (old age etc ) or in jail ...

    whitroth No - her total misunderstanding of UK politics & even more telling, "society" is glaring.... ( I think )

    Presently @ 2366 Oh shit .... FIVE of them in a continuous stream-of-(*???calling-it-"consciousness-would-be-an insult)-dribble, or should that be incontinence?

    2368:

    her total misunderstanding of humanity kind of renders the location of her corporeal presence irrelevant.

    2369:

    One of the reasons I hang round here is the warm nostalgia I feel for my time on Usenet before the Eternal September; a bunch of people discussing interesting stuff, often with real knowledge and experience to back it up. In those days men were real men, women were real women, and net kooks were really kooky.

    There was never any point in engaging with these people. If you insulted them then they simply escalated the abuse while taking it as validation of their paranoid world-view. If you tried to point out the flaws in their logic you were simply ignored or "refuted" with even more dazzling displays of illogic. If you advised them to get medical help then that was just treated as abuse.

    In short, never wrestle with a pig. The only thing to do was to plonk them in the kill file.

    (BTW the link above says that Mike Corley was aka Boleslaw Tadeusz Szocik. You don't suppose...)

    2370:

    Whitroth: "I'm reasonably sure she's from the UK, given some misunderstandings about US politics,"

    Greg: "No - her total misunderstanding of UK politics & even more telling, "society" is glaring.... "

    Classic markers of pseudoscience (famously about Velikovsky, or maybe von Daniken but I can't recall the actual quote):
    Biologist: "the biology is total crap but the physics looks interesting" Physicist: "the physics is not even wrong but the biology looks interesting" [insert disciplines to taste] etc. etc.

    2371:

    I'm a bit younger - I got Usenet access in September 1995, so long into the Eternal September. Some Usenet groups were usable for a couple of years after that. The Finnish ones (sfnet and finet) were better for a bit longer time, though many interesting groups fell to trolls, sadly. The University groups hung on a little bit longer still, but they were kind of like the original ones, having mostly student and university staff as users.

    This kind of reminds me also of the Finnish BBS scene in the early Nineties when I got a bit into it. In Finland the phone call costs depended a bit on where you lived - where I lived the calls after 5 pm were 50 Finnish pennies a call, so basically free. (That's like 20 pence in current UK money, after a couple of exchange rates.) I think this contributed a lot to the BBSes compared to UK at the time.

    This place also reminds me of a couple of mailing lists I was on - I left the last one in 2014 having been there on and off since 1996, but during that time there were many good and informed discussions.

    2372:

    I love it here. I often disagree, but I'm disagreeing with bloody interesting people with interesting world views. I think I can honestly say I like everyone here. The discussions, even the ones about trains and second world war tactics that I'm unable to contribute to, are the highlight of my day.

    2373:

    You make me feel ancient - but, then, I suppose that I am :-)

    2374:

    If you tried to point out the flaws in their logic you were simply ignored or "refuted" with even more dazzling displays of illogic. If you advised them to get medical help then that was just treated as abuse.

    You mean Facebook.

    2375:

    Well, I was one of the younger people on Usenet and on the mailing lists, too. ;)

    2376:

    I started using its predecessors in 1979, and have been using it almost from its start (early 1980s) ....

    2377:

    gasdive @ 2356: I'm having trouble conveying this concept to our American cousins. (I once tried to explain what a panelvan was to some Americans before the internet, and that didn't go well either)

    Iveco make a range of trucks, and they use "Daily" for a bunch of the light trucks and vans. (light trucks doesn't mean what you think. A Ram doesn't even count as a truck in that concept, it's a car.)

    Probably because they've used the same name for a whole range of light commercial vehicles since 1978, in a whole bunch of different countries and their website (the one that comes up first in a Google search for "Iveco Daily") doesn't show the 4x4 you keep going on about. It features the delivery van.

    https://www.iveco.com/uk/products/pages/new-daily-van.aspx

    Although, if you have reason to dig around on the site, there's a vague mention of a 4x4 in the history.

    https://www.iveco.com/uk/products/pages/daily-history.aspx

    The Wikipedia page for the Iveco Daily doesn't mention a 4x4 either, although IF you know about it, you can recognize that the Carabinieri van pictured is a 4x4 [that looks like a Volkswagen Vanagon (T3) Syncro].

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iveco_Daily

    AND there's a brief, one sentence mention under "Variants" that Iveco produce a square body military version of the Daily - "40.10 WM (4 x 4) 1,500 kg light truck series"

    And finally, it doesn't matter, because there's no way to buy either one in the U.S. No dealers. Neither version is for sale in North America.

    PS: If it's such a great work truck, why don't any of the videos you linked show anyone using it to work?

    2378:

    Rocketpjs @ 2361: In my years as a treeplanting foreman in Northern BC and Alberta I had the opportunity to drive/destroy numerous brand new 4x4 trucks in extreme conditions. At the beginning of a season I would drive a truck with ~15km on the odometer off the lot, and 3-4 months later I would clean and polish a shambling wreck before returning it.*

    [ ... ]

    Adverse weather - Treeplanting is most effective when done immediately after the frost melts, which means the first few days or weeks of Spring. Which in most places means heavy rain, sleet, and/or clouds of freshly hatched mosquitoes. Only the latter had no effect on the truck

    *Never buy a used 4x4 truck, at least not in Canada or the Western US. Each year these wrecks are detailed to look almost new, then shipped off to be sold as 'lightly used' to various office cowboys who wanted a tough looking truck.

    Ninety-nine percent of my offroad driving experience involves vehicles with the letter 'M' prefixing a model number - M151, M35A2, M52, M813, M978A3, M113, M1059, etc. I've seen my share of heavy rain & sleet (rarely snow, but yes, even snow ... also freezing rain, flash floods & hurricanes).

    The only 4x4 I've ever personally owned is the Jeep I have now. I expect it will be adequate for where I want to go & what I want to do. If I ever decide to add a winch to the Jeep, I'll make damn sure it's securely anchored to the frame & not just screwed to the bumper.

    2379:

    Mikko Parviainen @ 2371: I'm a bit younger - I got Usenet access in September 1995, so long into the Eternal September. Some Usenet groups were usable for a couple of years after that. The Finnish ones (sfnet and finet) were better for a bit longer time, though many interesting groups fell to trolls, sadly.
    The University groups hung on a little bit longer still, but they were kind of like the original ones, having mostly student and university staff as users.

    This kind of reminds me also of the Finnish BBS scene in the early Nineties when I got a bit into it. In Finland the phone call costs depended a bit on where you lived - where I lived the calls after 5 pm were 50 Finnish pennies a call, so basically free. (That's like 20 pence in current UK money, after a couple of exchange rates.) I think this contributed a lot to the BBSes compared to UK at the time.

    This place also reminds me of a couple of mailing lists I was on - I left the last one in 2014 having been there on and off since 1996, but during that time there were many good and informed discussions.

    I still have a Usenet account. I don't use it much for discussions, but I can still get music & Doctor Who episodes.

    2380:

    Elderly Cynic @ 2376: I started using its predecessors in 1979, and have been using it almost from its start (early 1980s) ....

    It got started here. A couple of grad students at Duke University in Durham invented it so they could share mail & files with grad students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#History

    2381:

    Yes. I was referring to the use of msgs to read messages packaged as mail that was sent out to lists of sites and stored in a central file; I vaguely remember those distribution mechanisms being replaced by Usenet, though I continued to use msgs as an interface for a long time. My organisation was one of the first adopters outside the USA, unsurprisingly.

    2382:

    I put M52 in Google and got views of a BMW engine. That was a surprise. I looked around to see if that engine had been used by one of the BMW AWD cars. No such luck, so I guess it has to be a US Army truck.

    2383:

    JBS has decades of history in the US Army and reserves.

    2384:

    MP I joined the eternal September in 1993 - when I started my MSc course & the "Internet" had just-about ennabled ....

    EC @ 2376 FORTRAN-IV, about 1975/6, 80-chars per line, one line per card, in a stack ....

    The front bumper of a Land-Rover is bolted with effing large bolts, to the chassis & any winch will be mounted on that bumper ... Google images page here

    2385:

    That wasn't a newsreader or similar, though there were such things written in it.

    2386:

    Got on in late '91, when the company I was at - it qualified as a "research" organization - got back on, after about a year and a half off.

    And yes, I remember when the Eternal Sept hit, when AOL joined the 'Net, and auto-subscribed EVERYONE to specific, and often inappropriate newsgroups, like alt.best.of.usenet, where we reposted posts from other newsgroups that were far funnier than the original poster realized....

    2387:

    I took Fortran back when it was threetran... I think around '79, at Philly Community. Yep, decks of cards.

    I still have the textbook, which was one of the best textbooks I ever had, "Fortran for Humans". They had a sense of humor - the explanation of what an algorithm was, for example, "how to find a job". Then there was the cartoon for one problem, where you see a line of protestors, and one, very obviously, is the intelligence agent, because they have polished and shiny shoes.

    2388:

    How sad. Greg, ask yourself why your insults are tolerated. Then do some basic metacognition[1], and estimate the probability that you are correct/your confidence in your belief. Do similar metacognitive estimates for your attempts at SotMN location doxing and remote diagnoses. You (probably) won't. If do not, ask yourself why.

    I was responding to some content. (There was a lot of ... chaff.) The tweet thread "a rambling stream-of-consciousness apologia for the most hated 'model' in finance, the Black-Scholes model" is of interest as a short tutorial on some (very) applied mathematics used by quants in finance. Alex in The Rhesus Chart would have been very familiar with this and similar, and an expert(/"intuitive") level of such skills would seriously augment his magical talents.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition is OK, focused a bit too much on learning (where much of the research has been done) and ignoring some approaches learned in meditative traditions. [2] [2] Magnetic bumper sticker, on a metal part of my car: Don't Believe Everything You Think. Generates a lot of bemused looks.

    2389:

    When I asked the googles for "iveco daily 4wd" the first result was... https://www.iveco.com.au/product/daily-4-x-4

    The tubes also have a collection of advertisements for it, including campervan versions "from $190,000" {gasp!!} : https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=iveco+daily+4wd

    There's one "real person" type vid taking it for a test drive if you just want to hear an Australian accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUZI-U6lMGc

    2390:

    The M52 is either a Tractor Truck or Self-Propelled-Howitzer.

    As a partially-educated guess, my bet is that JBS was referring to the truck.

    2391:

    I don't have my first programming text any more, also for Fortran, but I came across something better not so long ago: a listing of the very first program I ever wrote, back in 1968! Green bar paper and all of that. Need to find a frame...

    2392:

    Well I did provide this link back in comment 2214

    https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/iveco-daily-4x4-2019-review-117161

    As for why the videos are of people having fun in their Iveco rather than working? Firstly, I was trying to show that despite repeated claims that they have no off road ability, they're about the most off road capable 4 wheel vehicle made after a Mog or similar (which are twice the price). People out having fun tackle the most difficult terrain. Who's going to put up a video of themselves driving the work truck off a cliff where the boss will see it? Secondly, there's a dearth of videos of people working with their trucks, probably because they're being paid to work, not make youtube videos.

    However they do work

    "The Iveco Daily 4x4 was chosen by Aaron Carlton, a long-term brigade volunteer with 30 years of experience and plenty of four-wheel drive know-how. By day Mr Carlton owns and operates a 4x4 mechanical service and modification workshop – a business he's run for over 20 years."

    https://www.trucksales.com.au/editorial/details/iveco-daily-4x4-feels-the-heat-50373

    Queensland Fire and rescue

    https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/765/32413507750_e89c17d35d_b.jpg

    Roweville. CFA (you have to scroll down)

    https://rowvillecfa.wixsite.com/rowvillecfa

    2393:

    Bill Arnold oh, you found some actual content ( maybe ) - the rest of us simply don't have the time or energy - &* it isn't just me - I respond in the hope that something might be done to help her & us ... There are the numerous people who simply killfile her comments, as well, whom you are carefully ignoring

    gasdive errr... no Land-Rover!

    2394:

    They don't count, all the photos show a ridiculously clean vehicle that's clearly never used off road :)

    2395:

    People out having fun tackle the most difficult terrain.

    I've never been able to locate its specific existence since I saw it in a magazine one time but there was this ex-military "thing" -- it was eight-wheel drive, all wheels independently powered with four axles and two-way swivel joints between each axle set. The owner who had purchased it as surplus and restored it claimed it could climb a tree.

    2396:

    Don't stress about it.

    The Correct Minds got the gist, are fronting their Fronts as we speak. You gotta not know what the moves are, otherwise they don't work!

    Narrator: They worked. It's only the USA State Department and Office of IL Sneakery, they're fucking terrible at this shit.

    We're doing this brutish/wylde because well: other bigger stuff on the plate than Minor Empire trouble and mass executions and so forth that you do.. like constantly. (Although - IL + TR working together in certain areas and pretending to work against in CR is a trip. Fucking arms dealers, always sampling their own product. Like, TR's currency is in the bin, and IL helps them out of that hole while pretending it's buddies with SA (NOT THE APARTHEID ONE!!"22"!¬!! QUICK, BEFORE THE PRO-KHANISTS GET INVOLVED AND BAN MORE TWITTER ACCOUNTS!) who are ideologically opposed to Qatar and so on.

    You'd be amazed to see a prominent USA media figure deleting tweets about inferred 'wrong think' about certain topics ten years ago. And he's... well. He gets paid a lot of money to 'Correct the Record' and he deleted a tweet.

    Biden Crew: fucking terrible, but they're no longer important. OOOHHH, NUKES AND SUBS. YOU TAUGHT US TOTAL DOMINANCE OR DESTRUCTION: THIS WAS A BAD FUCKING IDEA. The Med is a tiny little sea, and it's really shallow. But wait! There's one in the Antarctic Ocean! Too bad you used German steel, it has trackable isotypes you fucking weirdoes.

    ~

    Basically: No.

    AHAD? No.

    BE NOT AFRAID.

    2397:

    Sort of a full circle... referring back to my earlier comment, the CFA volunteers know how to keep their vehicles clean. But I guess if you don't leave the mud on, you can't expect to achieve the performance improvements due to removing half the panels as rust later.

    2398:

    Niala @ 2382: I put M52 in Google and got views of a BMW engine. That was a surprise. I looked around to see if that engine had been used by one of the BMW AWD cars. No such luck, so I guess it has to be a US Army truck.

    They're all U.S. Army trucks ... except for the tracks.

    M52 - https://olive-drab.com/images/id_m52_full_03.jpg

    M1059 - https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/smoke11.jpg

    2399:

    Do you mean the 1975 8 X 8 Lockheed Dragon Wagon?

    2400:

    Or were you thinking of the earlier XM-808 Lockheed Twister 8 X 8?

    2401:

    They spend a lot of time ... polishing the wagon?

    2402:

    Rabidchaos @ 2390: The M52 is either a Tractor Truck or Self-Propelled-Howitzer.

    As a partially-educated guess, my bet is that JBS was referring to the truck.

    Yeah the truck. That howitzer was before my time.

    I got to drive one of these one time, but I was never licensed on it.
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/FArtBtl_11_%282%29.jpg

    I did have license for the M274 Truck, Platform, Utility, 1/2 Ton, 4X4
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/M274_drawing.jpg

    The largest truck I was licensed on was the HEMTT
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Expanded_Mobility_Tactical_Truck

    Mainly the tanker because that was what we had to carry fuel for the M1059s & M113 on our platoon MTOE (Modified Table of Organization & Equipment). I was the platoon sergeant & it was my "job" to be able to operate everything our platoon had.

    2403:

    Yeah, we get in trouble when we point out that the Submarine deal GR - IL that's currently under massive investigation for corruption sourced WW2 era steel (without proper or even consideration of war dead, don't give a shit if they were Nazi's or not, you apply Maritime Law Universally or no-one does, you dumb arrogant shits) might have a massive issue.

    In that: ELF works.

    "Holds up Balloon Animal with DANGER! THEY'RE ELVES!" on it and get U.N. recognition?

    We're pissed because the IPCC has essentially been EVEN MORE neutered than it was before, by a country that is primarily a fucking desert who has been buying up farming land in... distinctly non-desert places (HELLO HARVARD: HOW THE FUCK DO YOU LOSE A BILLION ON THIS SHIT? EVEN THE DESERT FREMEN MADE MONEY), not like slavery is not a historical fact in said countries, but we're so glad you're working all so hard to re-implement it, hello CA and Uber (check the ties to Biden) and Prop 22 and so on.

    Basically: the baddies won.

    They're also total shit at doing anything with vast bundles of cash apart from burn it and make gaudy architecture so ...

    GREP FUCKING HI-RISE BY BALLARD: THIS IS HOW FUCKING RETARDED YOUR SPECIES IS.

    Bonus round: they all used the companies from Grenfell (remember that? hey, how, we got deleted data, a whistle-blower who will get hung out to dry, Firefighter Unions getting lied to and some sociopath who goes fucking hunting on his weekends not understanding ANY consequences at all, because... HE'S LACKING THE FRONTAL CRANIAL BIT THAT DOES THAT AND HE DOESN'T KNOW IT).

    Oh, and TERF ISLAND is like the UK's fucking tourist report now, why the fuck would anyone want to visit there? Literally nothing of value (say hello to the parts of Spain you infested).

    Like, literally.

    OH.

    And Ms Maxwelle (totes not Mossad / CIA / MI6) "was moved to isolation because someone near to her cell (not the fucking cameras, they usually die closer to the event) "GOT COVID""

    You know: if you're running "The Great Reset" (Klaus, 2020 - go look it up, it's a DAVOD / GR wank fest) and attempting people not to burn your buildings down.

    Fuck it.

    Your species really is this stupid.

    p.s.

    You want novelty?

    Check the Time stamps.

    No-one without access to Diplomatic Cables would know about such things. It's deleted now, but we didn't lie that your communications security are....PATHETIC.

    Hint: we do Minds. Pompeo's is *REAAAAAALLLLY* fucking easy to spot. Bibi's is like one of those sea urchins you get: all very crunchy on the outside, inner part taste like shit.

    ~

    Etc.

    Why bother?

    No idea at this point. Apparently Humans were all really good at this shit, and asked for it.

    It's a fucking disaster.

    2404:

    I loved that real world review.

    "4 seats in the back for all you good breeders out there pumpin them kids out"

    2405:

    Oh hey. Some of the photos, especially the 4x4 product home on the Iveco site (the one Mozx mentioned is his first hit in google), have some heavy telephoto compression/foreshortening that gives a strange idea of the size. Maybe that explains wossname's misthink about it being similar to a tiny mighty-boy-like farm thing.

    2406:

    Nojay @ 2395:

    People out having fun tackle the most difficult terrain.

    I've never been able to locate its specific existence since I saw it in a magazine one time but there was this ex-military "thing" -- it was eight-wheel drive, all wheels independently powered with four axles and two-way swivel joints between each axle set. The owner who had purchased it as surplus and restored it claimed it could climb a tree.

    Might it have been the M561 1-1/4-ton truck "Gama Goat"
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gama_Goat#/media/File:M561_Gama_Goat.JPEG

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly6Iwq3WmCI

    And I found this video of people playing with surplus 5-Ton trucks
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YogcVXC6BQs

    Starting about :52. These are actually the later M931 tractors (which I have also driven). They wouldn't have let me take one through anything like that with the semi-trailer attached because it might come off. But I've been through rougher spots with a regular 5-Ton, and even with a M35A2 2-½ Ton (Deuce-and-a-half) ... although I didn't get stuck & have to be pulled out.

    I was licensed on and have driven every one of the American military trucks shown in that video.

    2407:

    Some of those "big quad bike" things look remarkably like a 1/4 scale model of the Isuzu. Friend has one on his block and it's quite a weird experience. I prefer it over a naked quad bike because roll cage, seat belts etc on a steep block are very handy. But it's only barely wide enough for two chubby board-shouldered guys to sit in the front seats. And the wheels are tiny. The "tray" is likewise closer to an oven tray than a truck tray, you could mostly fit one small square hay bale into it if you wanted to.

    2408:

    Anyhow.

    You're probably aware of the Disney Author Contract issue by now.

    The issue isn't whether or not you produce good art or not (this is the silly Raw/Rabid/Covid Dogs SF thing that drew us here) it's if you're allowed to produce it or not (which, you know, that whole censorship and stuff like "Degenerate Art" is about). Rabid Puppies etc - right idea, completely clueless about Systems Thinking.

    In the UK, as Alexi Sayle said: "I'll say this now, because my career is essentially over".

    Which is why a 'Labour' MP's daughter happens to run content at parts of the BBC and why HIGNFI's content crew are so fucking depressingly bad.

    They're not producing humour: they don't understand it. You know, like if your dad was prosecuted for running a brothel, and knew about it, you might not be considered the 'correct fit' for hosting a TV / Radio show.

    Then we'll snap forward to shit-tier Ex-Tumblr Kids (most are kids, a couple are FBI, a few more are actual IL agents and one is randomly enough, a BR spook. That's probably sexual though).

    Like: The Klept (despite their flaws) are actually fairly boring. Buy up sports stuff (cough ignore the cheating), buy up the Arts, buy some MMA fighters, hunt some rare animals / poor people for fun.

    ~

    Here's the deal: Host's book really did save our lives once (lamp not the book, afaik) so we'll deal you in:

    Greta / XR was the progressive Davos stuff (told you, didn't work) Fourth Industrial Revolution / Build Back Better / Great Reset is the GR / SWE version (essentially CN model with nicer frills and you're polite to the work-force, you don't totally blank them) Dark Winter / Biden stuff is essentially Feudalism and a lot ... a fucking shit tonnes more of Prisons with clap female guards clap

    Oh, and Dark Winter is referencing all those mysterious Anthrax envelopes non-consenting USA Gov members received if they voted against the Patriot Act.

    True story.

    The other's you don't want to get into.

    ~

    But it's real.

    It's all real.

    But you probably do not want to do is what you've done to one of !US!.

    Nope, not (((one of us))).

    Wyrd. You've all these nukes and absolutely no will power to change your systems.

    :D

    2409:

    p.s.

    Over the last 50 years, reading Americans completely misunderstanding DUNE is hilarious.

    "It's about eugenics!1111"

    It's actually about preventing predestination and precognition on a genetic level, which is pretty much the fucking opposite, but don't tell anyone from MF. And that's counting in all the shit BG pulled on making HSS faster or neural-twitch cat stuff.

    "Aunt, why do you move so fast"

    Puts finger to lips and winks

    "We'll Teach you*

    *

    "You do that so fast! How can you do that?"

    "You'd be amazed how fast we actually are when we're not pretending to be human"

    To the Court "And She was bobbing around and moving so fast and I felt her breath on my ear but when I spun around she was meters away"

    Hey, it's #4. Kids: this isn't Vampire tech it's just... not quite Human (a pretty good BBC series by the by).

    If you need a crude analogy: it's like using CRISPR to make sure no-one else can use CRISPR to uplift themselves...

    When CRISPR isn't the metaphor you're looking for.

    p.s.

    Literally. True. Just not fond of ending up on cold slabs of various states (USA, IL, RU, CN) for you do to shit science upon.

    Remember this: "We're Faster than You".

    Hey. Not a lie.

    2410:

    All this about trucks reminds me of a story....

    For 25? 30? years on NPR, there was a show called Cah Tawk, sorry, that's Bostonian for Car Talk, with the two hosts Click and Clack. They sounded like the classic image of the mechanic they talked about, 300 lbs, and hairy knuckles dragging on the garage floor. They laughed, and cackled. They started by buying a garage, and renting bays for folks working on their own cars. Then they were renting tools, and it built from there. People would call in, and tell them what their vehicle was, and make the noise it was making, and they'd tell the caller what was wrong, and what they needed to do to fix it.

    Their favorite call (and mine, and a lot of others), was when this guy calls in, to tell them he drives a Grumman truck (and they go, Grumman? They don't make trucks), and the called goes on to say he turns on the ignition, and for the next 8 minutes it roars and shakes like a sopofabitch.

    It took them a minute or two to realize... it was an astronaut. I forget if he was calling from the Station, or the Shuttle....

    2411:

    Humans are weird.

    We've never ever ever seen so much push toward genocide when a human from (apparently, their science is shit) a different clade (this is incorrect: they use even more nonsense terms) shows a talent / ability that they cannot (at the present: ignoring all statistical tools that might point to past or future random genetic traits rising up in their various DNA webs).

    Cut the shit.

    There are a lot of groups of Humans doing this shit right fucking now: and some of them are Israeli.

    Here's a fucking true story: not getting hunted down, skinned and fucking dissected live and our skulls displayed is...

    A WISH FROM NINETEEN FUCKING EIGHTY YOU PSYCHOTIC FUCKS

    1960: FR 1990: IL

    etc.

    Literally going around with retrograde level shit in your Minds doing ecocide / genocide.

    And People of the Hajj?

    Real fucking low score as well.

    Hey: we got a load of white men here. Remind us WHY the world is this shit?

    HELLO WORLD

    KILL HER

    I SURVIVED

    ?

    Yeah. Here's a free-beeeeeeeee:

    Your "God" likes Mentally challenged people who are crap at actually running shit because that makes other stuff easier. And the rest of them? Couldn't resist shit, think Starbucks is a resistance movement.

    Literally: a Lower Oder Power could fucking skull-fuck you, infest your Mind and laugh.

    ?HEY KIDS

    REMEMMBMMBMBMBER WHEN THEY DID MULTIPLE KID SHOOTING INCIDENTS AND A SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING INCIDENT AND THESE FUCKS DID ABSLLLLLLLLLLLLLOUTEEEELY NOTHING?

    Yeah.

    It's fucking inspirational the USA these days. Insulin $300 a month? Fucking inspiring.

    2412:

    Do we REALLY have to trawl through / past continuous insults to all of us from someone with mental derangement ... ALL THE CAPS & all the swearing & all the not-cleverness. And claiming to be not human, too. ( Of course, there's always "Subhuman" a.k.a. Untermenschen - but I really think we ought not to go there, do you? ) I wonder how many casual visitors are put off by this?

    2414:

    The largest truck you were licensed for was the HEMTT, but did you ever get to just try the LARC-LX?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LARC-LX

    2415:

    The question to the ultimate answer, which is 42:

    I asked GPT-3 for the question to “42”. I didn’t like its answer and neither will you.

    It seems the question is "?". But read to learn more (and be talked down to).

    2416:

    They have your attention again, they have a toy to play with again.

    Advice, repeated yet again -- do not reply, do not respond, do not be a toy. Scroll down.

    2417:

    No, none of those. This 8x8 was basically an axle, a universal joint (like a Unimog), another axle, another joint, another axle, another joint and a final axle. It MAY have been hydraulically powered with a feed to each wheel or there may have been a diff on each axle, I can't remember. One picture in the magazine article showed it in a swamp, the front axle was pivoted at 90 degrees to the back axle and the entire drive train was bent round in a quarter-circle.

    2418:

    I agree and that’s what I’m getting at. So it’s quite reasonable for jreynoldsward to mistake the latter for the former. It’s just her reluctance to consider things outside her direct experience that makes that a problem.

    We all live in a bounded worldview of course. Sometimes communicating with others requires both parties mentally stepping outside it. Some people are not even aware of the boundary or that things can be different outside it (might in fact be quite belligerent in their disbelief in such things). Therein lies the source of much confusion.

    2419:

    Do we REALLY have to trawl through

    Greg I suspect that at least half of her/his posts are intended to see how big a rise they can get out of you. Have you ever considered just ignoring?

    2420:

    About odd vehicles. When in Paris a few years back we occasionaly saw what appeared to be a 4 wheel enclosed cab motorcycle. The cab was for one person. Like an F1 bred with a Le Car.

    Anyone got a brand / make / model for those things.

    Just curious.

    2421:

    Google is your friend. Here's the call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moAqzM4ptm8

    It's John from Houston, calling in 1997. It's a government vehicle, a van from Rockwell. He's calling from about two hundred miles north of Hawaii, on the space shuttle, docked with Mir.

    2422:

    My favorite car story was a work vehicle, a 1990s-era rag top Land Rover Defender, named Thelma by her previous driver. I was working in a really rugged area, and low 4WD let me go into, and occasionally out of, some pretty bad places.

    My favorite trick though was that the passenger side seat belt usually jammed the first three times someone tried to release the buckle. When I had a newbie in the car, they'd fumble trying to get the button to work, and it wouldn't let go. I'd then say, "Thelma, let him/her go," and the buckle would invariably release on the next try. They'd look around like the car was haunted, and I'd then explain that they had to be nice to Thelma.

    Good times. Only car I ever ran out of gas in.

    2423:

    Gordon Murray, the McLaren F1's designer, also designed a very narrow city car, the T.25.

    The driver's position is ahead and in the middle of the two passengers like in the F1. So, it might look like it was made for only one passenger, depending on the viewing angle.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.25

    2424:

    On the weird car/truck theme, I give you the Landmaster from Damnation Alley (a bad movie from the 70s). They actually built the damn [sic] thing, and it worked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmaster#:~:text=The%20Landmaster%20is%20a%20unique,science%20fiction%20film%20Damnation%20Alley.

    If you see the film, there is a spot where they hit a very large pothole, and you can see why the wheels are arranged that way.

    2425:

    My memory of the cab in the cars I saw were about 1/2 of that one. But it is a memory.

    Plus I was distracted by the couple in full wedding regalia circling the Arc de Triomphe on a motorcycle. Six or seven times. Long dress train held under her arm with other arm around dude in tux.

    2426:

    whitroth @ 2410: All this about trucks reminds me of a story....

    For 25? 30? years on NPR, there was a show called Cah Tawk, sorry, that's Bostonian for Car Talk, with the two hosts Click and Clack. They sounded like the classic image of the mechanic they talked about, 300 lbs, and hairy knuckles dragging on the garage floor. They laughed, and cackled. They started by buying a garage, and renting bays for folks working on their own cars. Then they were renting tools, and it built from there. People would call in, and tell them what their vehicle was, and make the noise it was making, and they'd tell the caller what was wrong, and what they needed to do to fix it.

    Their favorite call (and mine, and a lot of others), was when this guy calls in, to tell them he drives a Grumman truck (and they go, Grumman? They don't make trucks), and the called goes on to say he turns on the ignition, and for the next 8 minutes it roars and shakes like a sopofabitch.

    Their favorite call (and mine, and a lot of others), was when this guy calls in, to tell them he drives a Grumman truck (and they go, Grumman? They don't make trucks), and the called goes on to say he turns on the ignition, and for the next 8 minutes it roars and shakes like a sopofabitch.

    It took them a minute or two to realize... it was an astronaut. I forget if he was calling from the Station, or the Shuttle....

    I loved that show. Listened to it every chance I got, but every once in a while they'd miss something totally obvious. One I remember was a woman's car had broken down out on the interstate with no warning & they couldn't figure out why.

    The bulb in the dash behind the check engine light was burned out.

    2427:

    Niala @ 2414: The largest truck you were licensed for was the HEMTT, but did you ever get to just try the LARC-LX?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LARC-LX

    I wish, but no, not in the inventory of any of the units I was assigned to, nor any of the schools they sent me to.

    2428:

    Renault Twizy? Interesting vehicle, but Renault only rent the battery packs to owners on an annual basis based on expected mileage which drives up the running cost.

    2429:

    In honor of tomorrow’s (US) holiday, a variation on an old saying: “Give a man some corn and you feed him for a day. Teach him to grow corn and his people will massacre yours and steal your land.”

    2430:

    Nojay @ 2417: No, none of those. This 8x8 was basically an axle, a universal joint (like a Unimog), another axle, another joint, another axle, another joint and a final axle. It MAY have been hydraulically powered with a feed to each wheel or there may have been a diff on each axle, I can't remember. One picture in the magazine article showed it in a swamp, the front axle was pivoted at 90 degrees to the back axle and the entire drive train was bent round in a quarter-circle.

    Doesn't sound like anything I ever encountered. Probably a "one off" built for exploration. Did you get any sense of the size?

    2431:

    Now if I could only find a Herkimer Battle Jitney!

    https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wQEw4k4T42Y/maxresdefault.jpg

    2432:

    JBS Someone I knew & part-worked-with always said that slow-moving big diesel engines always took him back to 6/6/1944 ... He was helping to "drive" a Landing Craft @ Sword

    2433:

    The generic term is "microcar", they were around from ~1940's and are back in fashion in some of the more sensible cities.

    There are rather a lot of options... this is just French ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_microcars_by_country_of_origin:_F

    2434:

    Renault Twizy?

    Based on a Google search that might be it.

    As I said, the odd wedding couple routine distracted me. :)

    2435:

    Greg, Bill Arnold is one of the few commenters who consistently replies to SoTMN and uses a similar but shorter style to SoTMN, so I would draw your own conclusions about that. Like me, I’d strongly suggest you just scroll on by the posts and save yourself the rise in blood pressure. Responding is just giving them what they want.

    2436:

    "Aunt, why do you move so fast" Puts finger to lips and winks "We'll Teach you* * "You do that so fast! How can you do that?" "You'd be amazed how fast we actually are when we're not pretending to be human" To the Court "And She was bobbing around and moving so fast and I felt her breath on my ear but when I spun around she was meters away"

    Thanks, that's fun.

    2437:

    The CDC scientific brief on masks is pretty good. Scientific Brief: Community Use of Cloth Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2 (Nov. 20, 2020)

    This paper is interesting and might help drive public policy in many countries. Transmission heterogeneities, kinetics, and controllability of SARS-CoV-2 (Kaiyuan Sun et al, Science, 24 Nov 2020) China we find 80% of secondary infections traced back to 15% of SARS-CoV-2 primary infections, indicating substantial transmission heterogeneities. ... The reconstructed infectiousness profile of a typical SARS-CoV-2 patient peaks just before symptom presentation. Modeling indicates SARS-CoV-2 control requires the synergistic efforts of case isolation, contact quarantine, and population-level interventions, owing to the specific transmission kinetics of this virus.

    2438:

    "set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life"

    I got downvoted to hell on reddit a while ago for "what's a surprising bit of history" and I wrote something like

    It was the old history plaques you see round Australia from the 1970s, before modern PC language revised our history. "Foobar Station was founded by Samual Fakename in 1823. He cleared the land and raised sheep. In 1825 he bought a native girl from Mission faraway and called her Mary. They had two sons, Alfred and Thomas..." Hey, waitasec, back up... he bought a native girl? They 'had sons'??? C'mon, even the Americans say "Washington raped his slave" and we can't even be that honest with ourselves?

    2439:

    Sorry, say "jitney", and I remember the ones when I was a kid visiting Atlantic City, NJ. https://boardwalkplayground.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/jitney-from-1950s-300x245.png

    2440:

    By the way, saw this in the morning news, "why nuclear plants are so expensive". No, it's not all regulations and safety. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/

    2441:

    You missed comment 2246.

    ;)

    2442:

    And to continue the strangeness of this year.

    Zombie minks rise from the dead in Denmark.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/25/culled-mink-rise-from-the-dead-denmark-coronavirus

    2443:

    The bulb in the dash behind the check engine light was burned out.

    Long time back I was walking around a twiddly bit of Central London (it might have been Soho, can't remember exactly) when I came across a BMW with the bonnet up. Being a nosy bastard I asked the owner/driver what was wrong.

    "Dunno, it just stopped. I've called the RAC to come and fix it for me."

    "Did you run out of petrol?"

    "No, the low-fuel warning light hasn't come on. I fill it up when that happens."

    "Anything else wrong?"

    "The electric windows stopped working yesterday."

    I took a look in the fusebox, there was a fuse labelled "electric windows" and "fuel warning light". I bet you can guess where this is going... I checked the fuse, yep obviously blown. I swapped in a spare fuse racked in the box then told the owner to try his windows again.

    "Hey, they're working again! Thanks. Oh, and the fuel warning light's come on."

    I couldn't do anything else for him and the RAC was coming anyway so I left at that point.

    2444:

    BMW's don't have a fuel gauge?

    2445:

    There's a swag of similar incidents in aviation where they simply ignore the gauges.

    Air Transat Flight 236 for instance. They had a fuel leak.

    https://youtu.be/9becqrhsedE

    Hmm, the right engine is behaving strangely. Let's ignore it.

    Hmm, the right fuel tank is much lower than the left. Let's pump fuel across.

    Hmm, there's a checklist for this, should we open the checklist that will warm us not to pump all the fuel overboard in this situation? Let's not.

    Hmm, the fuel gauges say we are running out of fuel. Let's ignore them.

    Hmm, the flight computer says we won't make our destination. Maybe we should divert but I'm sure it's a computer glitch.

    Hmm, the right engine has stopped, the right fuel tank reads zero, the left fuel tank has enough fuel to fly to our diversion. Should we stop pumping fuel into the right tank? Let's not.

    Hmm, the left fuel tank reads zero. Damn annoying computer glitch.

    Hmm, the left engine has stopped. Should we find a closer alternate? Let's ignore it and see what a water landing in the Atlantic at night is like. (fortunately ATC talked them into going to an airport instead)

    Hmm, we've landed without a single drop of flammable liquid aboard, should we disembark normally? Let's not. We'll try out the slides instead, knowing full well that a few people will break bones.

    They got a medal for exceptional airmanship.

    2446:

    It might be the same as turn indicators in BMWs: they exist, but the driver rarely uses them. Much easier to look for the single light than learn how to read a needle.

    In my military service, there was this one guy serving with me. He had an old car, I think it was an Opel Escort. There were some problems with the car, like it didn't like rain that much, so the owner went and put a plastic bag over the carburator when it rained so he could start the car later... Also, the fuel gauge didn't work, so before he started the car he usually took off the long antenna on the car and used it to measure how much fuel he had left.

    2447:

    It fascinates me a lot hearing about all the very special tricks drivers develop to handle cranky old cars I once had a German built Ford which could only cold start with the help of a screwdriver, starter fluid and an umbrella... Automatic choke didn't work. So open hood, unscrew top of air filter, jam the air intake into open position with screwdriver, spray starter fluid into carburator, start engine, fix accelerator pedal with umbrella so suitable engine speed was maintained, reassemble air filter, close hood and drive away...

    2448:

    I took Air Transat only once, for one of my vacations in Europe. I vowed I would never take it again, because they mistreated all the passengers.

    To be fair Air Transat is not the only Canadian airline with a spotty maintenance record. Nationair-Nolisair would often fly with non-airworthy planes, we all learned later.

    The number of accidents and incidents with Nationair was too big to be counted. I didn't know that when I stepped into one of their DC-8s on a return flight to Montreal. Nearly half way during the flight the pilot announced that one of the 4 engines wasn't working and that we would have to land at Gander, Newfoundland instead of Montreal. All the passengers except me let out a long grumble. They were mad because they knew Gander was in the boondocks of North-Eastern Canada and that they would be extra late in getting to Montreal.

    I think I was the only passenger who wasn't angry. I was scared silly! I knew that if we lost another engine on the same side of the plane we would go in circles and probably end up in the drink.

    We made it to Gander, somehow, and landed safely. After landing we taxied past a big Aeroflot airliner. Its pilot was standing outside. When we were close up he looked at our cockpit and made a victory sign to our pilot.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolisair

    2449:

    Mikko P IIRC, pre-War small MG's did not have a fuel gauge - they were provided with a special, custom-made dipstick for the fuel ... Same as many cars still (?) use a dipstick for the engine oil

    Niala As opposed to "Quaint-Arse" ... who, so far, have never lost a passenger, though they came damned close a couple of years back ( Engine caught fire & part-disintegrated, IIRC )

    2450:

    I know someone who drives one of those.

    They are very nearly sensible, but the decision to make windows an expensive optional extra is a bit of an issue in the UK climate. Once you add those it becomes a reasonable way to get around.

    2451:

    Interesting vehicles.

    When I was young I had a friend who owned an old Morris Minor. On one occasion we were going somewhere when the engine stopped. A bit of troubleshooting identified the fuel pump as having failed. This fuel pump used a reciprocating action powered by a solenoid against a spring; the solenoid was energised at one end of the action and then the spring pushed it back. One of the contacts in this mechanism had broken.

    So my friend cannibalised some wire from the headlights (it was daytime), connected two lengths to the solenoid, and I sat in the passenger seat tapping these two bits of wire together to make the fuel pump work, with frequency varying according to acceleration.

    2452:

    Gander was/is used as an emergency diversion since it's got a very long runway, lots of tarmac to cope with planes with problems. I spent a few hours there one night as a holiday flight from Orlando, an elderly charter 747, had problems on takeoff with their flaps and the pilots weren't sure they'd deploy properly for landing in the UK. We had a long hard fast landing at Gander in the end so it looks like the flaps problem was real.

    The terminal building was shut for the night, no immigration or other admin staff there and three hundred or so passengers were crammed into a very small space. We were eventually allowed out into the car park to make some room. I saw the engineers hitting the wing-bits with hammers and we were eventually allowed back on board to complete our flight.

    The Aeroflot aircraft you saw was probably flying to Cuba. The US still doesn't permit direct flights to Cuba from the US so Gander is where some flights originate or stop off for refuelling before completing the last long leg down the US East Coast.

    2453:

    Niala, I don't really know anything about them, other than that incident.

    Greg, if we're thinking of the same incident there was no fire, but turbine disk failed and sent chunks of engine through most of the major systems. The news at the time was a minor incident, but it was a very badly damaged aircraft.

    https://youtu.be/JSMe1wAdMdg

    Geezer-with-a-hat, I had a Kombi. One day it developed an intermittent starting issue. I think it was a solenoid. Irritatingly it developed this new trait at the end of a sandy road. So I started it by jacking it up at the back, putting it in top gear and turning the back wheel by hand.

    2454:

    I had an Austin Cambridge where the battery and associated bits failed completely; I drove it for nearly a year on two hand-lamp batteries. I cranked it to start (which is what they were needed for), and the generator was OK, so even the headlights worked. Some people boggled, but I failed to see the problem.

    2455:

    German Fords with the Weber staged secondary 2bbl had fewer issues. I once drove an older small Chevrolet which had an unfortunately located ignition distributor which caused... issues in cold rainy weather, especially cold starting, once after a dose of ether it backfired, physically distorting the muffler as well as waking the neighbors.

    2456:

    Yes, they do that :) It's a good idea to keep a set of spare contacts in the glove box.

    There is also a non-electrical alternative to what you were doing: you could have been sat there repeatedly pulling a piece of string which goes out of the window, in through the crack at the back corner of the bonnet and onto the end of the rod which operates the contacts, which is the solenoid armature.

    This method also works when the fault is not the contacts but simply that the thing is refusing to move when energised and appears to have an open circuit solenoid... but is working again the next day... and it turns out that the real problem is that the fuel tank breather is blocked, so when you do a long journey starting with a full tank, eventually the depression in the fuel tank gets great enough that the solenoid no longer has the wellie to suck against it... but someone pulling the string does.

    Those fuel pumps are great. Being electrical, they ensure that the float bowl is full before you engage the starter motor, so the engine starts immediately instead of having to churn over and over while a mechanical pump slowly fills the float bowl before it will start. And because you can hear them go clunk every time the solenoid operates, they act as a precise indicator of exactly how much fuel you do have left when the fuel gauge is hard on zero. As the fuel level gets down to dribbles, air starts getting sucked into the pipe, so the pump starts clicking faster and faster the more air is coming through instead of fuel, and the rate of clicking is sufficiently informative that I used to be able to judge how big a dribble is left well enough to leave home, drive up this gentle rise, and have the engine conk out exactly as I got to the top, so I could then coast down the other side and into the petrol station at the bottom.

    Another peculiarity of the A-series engine as fitted to the Morris Minor is that it is quite a bit easier to work on the distributor if you take the lead off the low oil pressure switch first. And yet another peculiarity is that the oil filter sealing ring is a pain in the arse. It's a large diameter circle of about 2mm square section rubber and it sits in a groove on the underside of a horizontal surface. You have to pick the old one out with a terminal screwdriver, then fiddle the new one into the groove at arm's length from underneath, making sure you have straightened out the twists it invariably has in it as it comes. Then you have to hold it against falling out with at least three hands while you bring up the can of the oil filter with the fourth one and seat the rim of that in the groove on top of the ring (which of course involves the rim passing through the tips of your fingers). This often requires several attempts and a lot of bad language. And it has to take the full output pressure of the oil pump, so it's important to get it right.

    So one day I changed the oil and the filter and the points and the plugs - all the normal stuff - then went somewhere, and after about five miles the engine started going tight. I had nipped the fucking shitty fiddly sealing ring at one point between the filter can and the engine block, and once the engine was doing sustained revs the pressure popped it at that point and all my new oil had been left behind me on the road. And I had forgotten to put the fucking lead for the oil warning light back on after doing things to the distributor.

    I fixed the seal and put some more oil in and managed to get back home, but the engine was completely fucked, putting out such huge amounts of smoke that I couldn't see other cars waiting behind me at the lights in the mirror.

    Vehicles that require peculiar starting procedures: at one point I lived next door to someone who had an old diesel Transit that was thoroughly knackered. Every day at twenty past eight he would start it turning over and then just leave it. Nothing happened for a bit, then there would be the occasional chug and cough, then the intervals between chugs would gradually get shorter and shorter, until by twenty five past eight it would just about be firing continuously on all cylinders and he would come out and drive it away.

    2457:

    It always used to be Fords that were terrible for starting in the morning because of the dogshit carbs they used. Use a variable choke carb, fine, but instead of just buying them from SU like anyone sensible would have done, they made their own and it was a total abortion. Vauxhall did the same silly thing and didn't cock it up quite so badly, but it still wasn't great. At one point it seemed like everyone and their dog was selling kits to convert Fords and Vauxhalls to standard Weber carbs, not for performance but simply to get a carb that worked.

    2458:

    I did the same thing on a motorbike, using a 7.2V 4Ah nicad set out of an emergency light. Connect it in to start the bike and then it would be fine and would even start again without it if I didn't stop it for too long. Those nicads also got me home once when the generator failed, although in the final stages I had to proceed in a series of kangaroo bursts because I could have either the headlight on or the ignition working but not both at the same time.

    2459:

    There was at least once genius manufacturer who made a car with the electrics at the bottom, near the front, possibly to make them accessible for maintenance. And sold them in the UK! If you drove those through a deep puddle, let alone a ford or minor flood, they needed pushing or towing out.

    2460:

    Nojay @ 2452: The Aeroflot aircraft you saw was probably flying to Cuba.

    Yes, there were Cuban-looking people inside the terminal.

    And Gander owes its very long runway and big tarmac to the Lockheed Constellations and Douglas DC-6s which used it for refueling on the transatlantic route, after WWII and before the jet age.

    Gander came in handy on September 11, 2001 when more than 6.000 passengers on 38 airliners were diverted there.

    2461:

    All too often, the best thing about the "Good old days", is they're gone. Good stories though, if you survived...

    2462:

    "Hmm, the fuel gauges say we are running out of fuel. Let's ignore them. "

    Light aircraft are notorious for having inaccurate fuel gauges. This is not surprising as they use the same float-on-a-lever mechanism as cars, but the tanks (aka "wings") are wide, shallow, and frequently not horizontal. Trainee pilots are therefore taught not to trust them - but to verify the fuel level by looking or using a dipstick before takeoff. Unfortunately it seems the "ignore the fuel gauge, it's wrong" mantra carries over to larger aircraft, but the "verify by other means" message gets lost along the way.

    2463:

    Apologies, the all-bold was unintentional.

    2464:

    Actually, all that has changed in this respect is that we have a different set of imbecilic misdesigns to live with and, while failure is much rarer, its consequences are much more severe.

    I know someone who had to call in a specialist mechanic and waste a couple of days of his life because the battery died (he couldn't open the car to open the bonnet). My experience and observation is that failures are about ten times less common and, on average, five times more time- and money-wasting when they occur.

    2465:

    Let's see.

    Driving from Paducah KY to Greenville SC after Christmas. My 4 months pregnant wife, my hyper active 2 year old son and my parents. Two larger cars pulling enclosed trailers. Just after Christmas. Got to the mountains, low but still, and the car my father was driving had the alternator go out just as it was getting dark. So I turn my car/trailer around on the Interstate and we use mine to charge up his battery. We drive 40 to 60 minutes with father in the lead with only the parking/running lights on and me following. Then do the turnaround and charge when his lights get really dim. I think we did the charge up his car 3 times to get the last bit of the drive. All made more fun by my son's willingness to be confined to the back seat of a car hitting it's timer a few hours before the end. Traffic on that road was thin and stops with open repair shops non existent.

    I did change out the head gasket on a flat head Ford tractor in a field once. It blew out and I was within walking distance of the local parts house that had the gasket and gasket sealer. I had the correct wrench in the tool box. Ii was made worse as I had replaced the gasket that morning and forgot to re-torque the head bolts after it had warmed up. Which is why I happened to have the correct wrench in the toolbox.

    Then there was that total piece of junk 62 Buick Skylark with GM's experimental aluminum block engine. Would blow a head gasket every 5 or 6 months. I got to where I could replace both sides in around 4 hours in my garage. After using a flat file and framing square to re-level the block and heads. They would continually warp. I was 16 at the time and this was my first car.

    My father's story was the 30s car with a straight 6 he drove to school after WWII. Main or rod bearings were shot but money was tight. So he would drop the oil pan and put folded newspaper in as shims on the bearings. Once a week. He said he could come home from the school and replace the shims on Fridays and get cleaned up in time for a date.

    Points, condensers, cracked distributor caps, etc.. Glad to be rid of them.

    Yes it's great the good old days are gone.

    2466:

    waste a couple of days of his life because the battery died (he couldn't open the car to open the bonnet)

    I wonder if he just didn't know where the key was hidden in the fob. My Honda fob doesn't look like there is a key.

    And on the same car when the battery died I couldn't figure out how to open the trunk till I read about how in the manual. There's a level but it is very out of sight.

    2467:

    https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-yeats-test-criteria-reveal-we-are-doomed-1.3576078

    When bad history is on the way, people quote "The Second Coming" even more than usual.

    Link found at a discussion of Yeats poems in popular culture-- have some mashups and parodies.

    2468:

    I took Air Transat only once, for one of my vacations in Europe.

    Likewise. I was at the front and the toilet sprang a leak. The flight attendants went around gathering all the blankets they had handed out to make a dam, but you could see it getting closer and closer until we started our descent into Paris (when it started flowing into what passes for first class on a charter).

    Not as scary as an engine failure*, but enough to convince me that their maintenance wasn't up to par.

    *Only had one of those, right after takeoff on an Ottawa-Toronto hop. Something sounds wrong to me, and then the pilot calmly announces that he doesn't like the look of one of his engine indicators so we're going to go back and get it checked out. Passengers grumbling about delay, but I see the flight attendants buckling in and they both look scared so I know it's serious. When we land there's emergency equipment lining the runway. Grumbling mostly stops.

    2469:

    For those who are interested, this thread has now passed CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE to be the longest on this site yet.

    2470:

    Sigh. No. It was a Porker, sorry, Porsche, and didn't HAVE a key. I believe that there are other cars with the same imbecility.

    I have been in the situation that I couldn't open a window (thank heavens it wasn't that I couldn't close it!) because the sodding electric window sensors were playing funny buggers.

    2471:

    We are all collateral damage - Brexit / Monbiot /Grauniad ... on what is, in here, called "Disaster Capitalism" & spot on. The signs, this week, are not good - I will be looking to stock up on "stuff", by next Friday, if things don't move well between now & then.

    2472:

    Robert Prior: I had an experience on the runway on an Air Canada flight from Ottawa. Mother in law was an employee so I had been gifted a standby ticket, and had been bumped up to 'Business Class'. We stat there a long while receiving free goodies while they kept announcing maintenance issues, then ice on the wings etc etc. Person beside me was beside himself with impatience and anger at the 'taxpayer subsidized' airline making him late (for what, one wonders, it was 10pm).

    Being on what to me was a free flight in the lap of luxury I saw no reason to dispute everyone wanting to be certain that the plane would actually arrive in Vancouver intact. The first rule of 'fly free club' is you can't talk about 'fly free club' with paying customers, so I sat quietly and enjoyed the free whisky.

    Not long after 911 AC stopped allowing employees to give away standby tickets to friends and relatives, for 'security' reasons. We can still fly free/very cheap, but it has to be with my Mother in Law. The Venn Diagram of (Places I want to go) and (Places to go with Mother in Law) looks like a penny on a 2d basketball.

    2473:

    If you want to see a complicated starting procedure, I present "starting the the LANZ Bulldog" (tractor). A example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr_b6mTnHEo

    A few years ago, at a vintage machinery show in nearby Waikari, North Canterbury (these things are apparently very collectable) - I saw a competition to see how fast they could start them from cold - there were 8 people each with their own vintage tractor. From what I recall there were about 8 of these things. The winner took less than 10 minutes, but got a round of applause.

    And I had a friend who reckoned his (suburban) neighbour would practise starting his Bulldog every Sunday morning at about 6:30am.

    2474:

    We sat there a long while receiving free goodies while they kept announcing maintenance issues, then ice on the wings etc etc. Lemon-Soaked Paper Napkins, perchance (!)

    2475:

    There used to be a recording on-line of the start procedure for a Bristol Freighter aircraft being explained to an aviation journalist as it happened - 1950's sleeve-valve radials are complex electro-hydro-mechanical systems.

    2476:

    That guy with the pull cord wrapped around his hand... Geeze, that gave me cold sweats.

    Reminds me of being at a mate's farm one day. I look at his tractor and say something like "shouldn't you have a guard on that power takeoff?"

    "no, it's fine"

    "but you have to adjust that sometimes [points to an adjuster right by the spinning shaft that has like 60 hp behind it], if you got your sleeve caught it could pull you right in"

    "oh, yeah, it's torn the shirt right off me twice now"

    2477:

    ...starting the the LANZ Bulldog...

    That's a thing all right. I'm not familiar with the LANZ Bulldog tractor, as it seems to have missed the US, and I had to go look up the hot bulb engine too. Starting one of those looks like quite an adventure.

    2478:

    One of the first things to do when getting a new car is to find where the key and the keyhole are. Porsche hide both very well, but even on the latest the physical key hides inside the fob, and the keyhole is hidden behind the door handle - you have to pull on the handle to expose it.

    I don't think there are any yet that completely lose the key. If any do, it'll be Tesla, I guess.

    2479:

    Renault, I think. Certainly some cars do, at least according to various comments I've heard from people who do know enough about cars to be aware of secret keys and how to find them, and while I can't really remember what cars they were talking about, Renault are slightly notorious for doing electrical things which are fucking stupid in that style on their expensive offerings and the obvious and inevitable consequence ensuing.

    2480:

    "Yes it's great the good old days are gone."

    No. No. No, it isn't.

    As EC says, while faults may be less common these days, when they do occur they are many times more of a pain in the arse... but I would dispute his multiplier of 5; it is probably true for the case where the car is already in a commercial workshop when the fault shows up and the owner is clueless enough to have no other option for fixing faults in any case, but it's a good couple of orders of magnitude too low for the real world.

    With old vehicles if it stops in the middle of a journey there's a good chance of being able to get it going again using the tools in the boot and bits of random junk in the car, rubbish out of the ditch and other available stuff like bits of the car's own non-essential systems. It may not be going properly, but if it moves at all then you can still get home, which is the most immediately important thing, and then get it back to the state of going properly with full facilities available.

    With modern ones the chances are there is fuck all you can do about it on the spot, and you need full facilities plus a lot of time to even find out what the problem is - and that is if you actually can find out without replacing a succession of suspect but untestable parts (due to even the most basic test data being deliberately withheld, so you don't even know what the result of measuring resistance across the terminals means) on a trial and error basis. Unless you've broken down at the top of a hill and your home is at the bottom, all you can do is get someone with a truck to come out and haul the car home for you. That's hundreds of pounds (/dollars/etc) right there, before you even start on sorting the actual problem out.

    (Having said that, it is still the case, as it ever was, that those people with trucks spend the great majority of their time dealing with empty fuel tanks, discharged batteries, and airless tyres - the latter even more so since people these days are educated to be too flaming nesh to change the wheel themselves, and instead to sit on the verge waiting for the truck and whining about how scary it is.)

    Then there are faults which modern cars have that didn't even exist on old cars and are artificially exacerbated. So the airbag warning light comes on; so I don't give a shit, I'll just take the airbags out and stick a bit of tape over the light, then it'll be just like all the other cars I've had, problem solved. Only you can't do that because then it will fail the MoT (annual roadworthiness test). You have to fix it properly - at enormous trouble because you have to fight all the way against a computer that is doing its best to prevent you testing anything - or at the least build a little circuit to flash the light in the right pattern to satisfy the MoT tester, which may not be hard but it's still buckfuggery I can do without.

    There are great swathes of the MoT test which they simply skip over when I take my car in, because the things they are testing didn't exist when the car was made, and it's none the worse off for not having them, indeed it's better because it's that many fewer possible spurious extra sources of trouble and expense.

    And it's all about forcing people to spend money when they otherwise wouldn't need to, and at a level outside that, forcing people to put themselves in a position to have that money to unnecessarily spend and teaching them to address their problems by spending it, instead of using their wits and happily getting by without it. Your father shimming his bearings with newspaper every week (why didn't he use aluminium foil? That's the usual choice) - that kind of situation is a good thing. Obviously he did it because he didn't have any money but he still needed to get about. But these days that car would have been scrapped two or three owners back, and a "cheap old wreck" would (a) be not that cheap and (b) probably still be mechanically fairly sound, but need twice what you paid for it spent to fix shit you don't even care about to get it through its next test, due in a couple of months. If the situation with the fixability and the cost thereof of cars had been the same then as it is now, he would simply have been fucked.

    And the "still be mechanically fairly sound" bit is what really makes it so flaming bloody infuriating. The "change" is not a single area of difference, but two areas. On the one hand the genuinely expensive and difficult heavy oily bits are better made and longer lasting. On the other hand there is a pile of extra added shit and a pile of deliberate obfuscation of test and repair data which results in the car being considered fit only for scrapping when there's nothing fundamentally actually wrong with it. We could have cars that last several times as long as they used to and cause less average maintenance and repair hassle per mile while they're doing it, but what we do have is cars that last if anything a shorter time and keep costing money for stupid things that you'd just ignore if you had the option, and it's all entirely deliberate.

    2481:

    We could have cars that last several times as long as they used to and cause less average maintenance and repair hassle per mile while they're doing it, but what we do have is cars that last if anything a shorter time and keep costing money for stupid things that you'd just ignore if you had the option, and it's all entirely deliberate.

    Also, you don't even have a choice. Even if you buy an expensive (regular) car (not sure about the more heavy equipment ones) you can't get one with the reliability and no unnecessary fiddly bits. It seems that the more you pay the more of the fiddly stuff you get.

    I don't own a car, so take this with a grain of salt. Most of the modern cars I occasionally drive seem to have quite a lot of options, but I never use that many of them. Automatic gearbox and cruise control are things I do like, and also the stopping of the engine when it's not needed, but there's quite a lot of computerized things that I find completely unncessary.

    With some cars some control is nice. Last summer we rented a hybrid and it was nice to control which engine it preferred, but in the end I'm not sure how much we did save there. (I'd probably prefer a fully electric one if I could be arsed to figure out where to recharge it, as I didn't during one holiday trip.) Sadly, electric cars need more control than a simple combustion engine, so I think we're not getting rid of computers there...

    I think the person who said that everything is a computer nowadays was very correct. Cars are just computers you can use for driving around, and like most them they seem to get too many features. I kind of dread the pushed updates to cars, working in the IT has taught me that everybody can make bricking mistakes...

    2482:
    That's hundreds of pounds (/dollars/etc) right there, before you even start on sorting the actual problem out.

    With my car (Toyota), there is an insurance for this, costing about 50 EUR per year for all of Europe. Just call the number, someone comes and takes care of the problem!

    In some cars like Mercedes, there is even a button for that.

    I have not had a breakdown since I stopped driving French cars many years ago (probably why the recovery insurance is 50 EUR/yr).

    I don't care for working on cars at all, I prefer to enjoy the simple luxury of paying the garage to fix whatever needs fixing, whenever the car computer says it wants something.

    2483:

    Pigeon @ 2480 EXACTLY SO One of the principal reasons for my Land_rover is that I can doo all normal servicing myself, and well-over half the repairs & maintenance on top of that, as well.

    2484:

    I don't care for working on cars at all

    Likewise. Reminds me of the Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie's comments about Linux:

    "It's free!" they say, if you can get it to run The Geeks say, "Hey, that's half the fun!" Yeah, but I got a girlfriend, and things to get done

    2485:

    We just disagree. From my point of view you're discussion the 80s and 90s of cars. At least in the US.

    In my close family we have the following, all bought new or nearly new. 2009 Hyundai Elantra (just totaled by someone else) 2014 Hyundai Elantra 2014 Hyundai Accent 2014 Mazda 3 2008 Toyota Tundra not too old Subaru hatchback something 2016 Honda Civic

    All owned for at least 4 years or since new except for the Tundra I've only had for 2 1/2 years.

    Zero road failures that needed repair. The closest was some of us have had batteries go bad and needed a jump to get back to civilization to be replaced.

    But in general. Zip. Nada. None.

    And you're talking with someone who remembers points breaking, hairline cracked distributor caps failing in damp weather, brake lines breaking, etc... Even a drive shaft bearing going out. And I've overhauled engines from big cars to farm tractors to lawn mowers. Replaced clutches. My dad and I even swapped an engine and transmission in a truck back in the day. Heck my lawn mowers are more reliable these days than cars in the early 80s.

    And I still have a timing light and dwell meter that I haven't used in over 20 years.

    I'll take today's situation of very rare on the road failure to the past of it being crazy travel more than 30 miles from home without a good set of tools in the trunk/boot. I still carry the tools on long drives but don't sweat it much. Mostly I want to make sure I have a good set of flashlights in case I have to change a tire in the dark.

    The biggest pain was when the serpentine belt idler pulley would go out on my old Explorer every few years. Changing it wasn't so hard but the bearing squeal till you got it replaced annoyed most anyone within 100'. Including me.

    10K miles for points and condensers and timing. Or less. 10K to 20K for tires. And brakes. And so on. No thanks.

    2486:

    "Crazy" Brexit What the fuck is happening? BoZo seems to be facing both ways, as usual ... IF it crashes ( & inevitably, burns ) Two things: 1: Which is the most determinedly "R" of the US states - Congress/Senate/Governor/internal legislature - with the most determinedly "Slave or starve" internal policies? Because that is where a crash-Brexit will drive us, to drinking Victory Gin in Airstrip One. 2: I've realised the Brit historical parallel ... 1685-8 Lots of people were very nervous about James II ( & VI ) - but were told "It would be all right" He lasted 3.5 years & we then got the Glorious Revolution. About the right timespan between a crash-out & the next election.

    Any comments?

    2487:

    Oops - just saw this, it's got to be spread around: This is all your fault. We all knew Johnson was an incompetent bumbler, liar, and serial adulterer with the morals of a syphilitic stoat, whose entire cabinet was chosen on the basis of their loyalty and aptitude for arslikhan, not their talents or capabilities.

    To which I might add, that if Corbyn had actually campaigned against Brexit, rather than dithering & whimpering, it MIGHT have been better, I suppose

    2488:

    Which is the most determinedly "R" of the US states

    It matches closely to the infection, hospitalization, death rates from Covid-19 over the last month. NOT the absolute amounts but the rate per 100K of population.

    2489:

    Balderdash. If you're having those problems you're buying the wrong cars. My Prius has gone 165,000 miles with nothing more than ordinary maintenance,* and I've been told by my mechanic that I can safely buy a used one with up to 250,000 miles for my son without major worries. I haven't even needed to replace the brake pads yet!

    And what is this "Renault" you speak of? Are they some farcical European attempt to build a car? Buy a fucking Toyota. Or a Honda. Put on your big boy pants, get a copy of the annual Consumer Reports automotive edition, read it, and pick whatever they've identified as really, really good, (with the exception of something by Nissan.)

    And Greg, you're seventy-some years old. If you bought a new Prius you'd never have to do automotive work again aside from changing fluids. (And Toyota makes some bigger hybrids as well, including a hybrid Sienna Van - not sure what they call that in Europe.)

    *Body work is the one thing I've had to do, but that's because I was in accident, not because the car is crap.

    2490:

    And what is this "Renault" you speak of?

    I know someone who bought one 30+ years ago on the strong advice of a friend he trusted. I think after a few years he decided his friend had a secret grudge against him.

    2491:

    get a copy of the annual Consumer Reports automotive edition

    I wonder if they have this or similar in the UK or Europe. Cars there ARE different. Way more manual transmissions. And Skoda is big. And irritating to the German VW unions.

    2492:

    To which I might add, that if Corbyn had actually campaigned against Brexit, rather than dithering & whimpering, it MIGHT have been better, I suppose

    Greg, you keep saying this and reality keeps contradicting you. Labour lost the pro-Brexit Labour Red Wall in the north of England to Tories whose only campaign slogan was "Make Brexit happen". We now have a Labour party under Starmer whose stated policy is to make Brexit happen, part of a desperate attempt to reclaim the Red Wall constituencies. You might want to check in with Stella Creasey, your own pro-Starmerite MP and see what her current position on Brexit is. I'd be surprised, if you can get a proper answer out of her, if it differs much from Dear Leader if at all.

    2493:

    It's not just road failures. As Pigeon indicated, a lot of repair in the UK is for regulatory reasons, plus there are a lot of things that can go and do go wrong that used to be fixable at home and now need a day's effort to get it to the garage, wait for the fix, and get it back again.

    I mentioned electric window and central locking failure. I accept Bellinghman's correction, so I must have been confusing a separate battery failure (which my wife has had) with what happened to my friend (no, he would NOT have made that mistake) - but, before central locking, you could get in via another door if one failed and open it manually. I can add a flat battery on a couple of cars that needed an unusual tool to get the battery out, so it couldn't be charged (charging in place was infeasible). I can add failed dashboard lights and connection problems (remember, this is the UK and most cars are left out in the rain), and so on.

    I am not supporting Pigeon's estimate, because things like clutch replacements, new oil, fuel, engine and transmission seals, brake drum replacement and truing, and even valve regrinding and decoking if you go back far enough were needed much more often and those were NOT quick jobs.

    This is reflected in the cost of repairs. A dashboard light failed just out of warranty and I was told that it was a day's work and needed two mechanics - luckily, it wasn't critical, so I drove the car without it for most of its life. If it had been one of the many required lights, I would have had to grit my teeth and pay up; I know someone who had to because a seat belt indicator light failed.

    Yes, I agree that modern cars take less out of your life to maintain, but they are nothing like as much better as their proponents claim.

    2494:

    Oh my - I just watched a YouTube clip of how to get into a Renault when the keycard battery is flat. You pop out the key, and then use that to lever off one end of the door handle to expose the keyhole? Euw!

    I suspect a lot of keyless entry vehicle owners are unaware that they do actually have keys. My wife's previous car was a Nissan Note, and that required levering up part of the door handle on the passenger side (yeah, not the driver's side). This was something she was completely unaware of until the time she locked herself out with the engine running only to discover that the remote unlock doesn't work in that situation.

    Her current LEAF has visible keyholes, so Nissan at least may be rowing back on hiding them.

    2495:

    David L "it" - what "it" - you didn't say ... WHICH is the most Trumpian of the US states, determined to stamp on ordinary people, most determined not to have a decent public health system, etc ... And fulfils the criteria I laid out. Please answer the question?

    Troutwaxer A Prius has my head at about waist-level when driving, in the L-R my eye-level is higher than when I'm standing up (!) THINK about the safety-advantage that automatically gives you! Prius do not (AFAIK) make an "estate" car - they are all saloons. Also, they BEND - so far, in 17 years, I have given 4 other vehicles L-R "pressings" - not my fault in any case, nor ever had to make an insurance claim, though twice I've had to inform them, for legal reasons. With any other vehicle, it would have been expensive & time-consuming.

    Nojay Stella is, personally, pro-Remain, as is most of London. Corbyn was against the "Common Market" back in the 1970's & has, as usual, learnt nothing in the intervening period. He's on record as referring to the EU as a (paraphrase) "giant corporate employer's ramp". The ultra-tories knew what they wanted, Corbyn's Labour couldn't make up it's tiny mind - & lost, what a surprise.

    2496:

    Troutwaxer @ 2489: "And what is this "Renault" you speak of? Are they some farcical European attempt to build a car?"

    I once rented a brand-new medium-sized Renault for a 2 week vacation around Europe with a friend.

    The engine and manual transmission were good and every thing essential worked fine. But everything non-essential, like the cranks for lowering and raising the windows or the cap showing the changing of gears, literaly came apart in our hands as we drove.

    It was a bad joke but since we didn't have the time to go back to Paris to ask for a better car, we could only laugh as we discovered another badly assembled surprise, nearly every day.

    2497:

    And what is this "Renault" you speak of?

    The French part of Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi.

    I was driving Renaults about 30 years ago, ranging from the 5 through to the 25, and they were quite nice cars. I would certainly choose them over the Fords of the era.

    (It seems that the 21 - which was the one I drove the most - was known as the Eagle Medallion in the US.)

    2498:

    OK. I'll be your secretary for a bit. Charts are available.

    All in the range for varying degrees of what you are asking.

    Idaho, N & S Dakota, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa, etc...

    There's an NPR analysis of S. Dakota (I think) and Vermont. Both totally R controlled and how Vermont has 1/5 the Covid-19 rates due to acting sane.

    Totally R controlled doesn't automatically lead to your statements.

    Greg. The US is a big place. Frigging huge. Not many countries bigger. Absolute statements about how things work are almost always way too simplistic.

    2499:

    It's not just road failures. As Pigeon indicated, a lot of repair in the UK is for regulatory reasons, plus there are a lot of things that can go and do go wrong that used to be fixable at home and now need a day's effort to get it to the garage, wait for the fix, and get it back again.

    Yes I've had cars like that. But that was 20 years ago. Now most just don't break. And when they do there's a 3 to 10 year warranty.

    Yes, I agree that modern cars take less out of your life to maintain, but they are nothing like as much better as their proponents claim.

    We just disagree here. Cars today are in general just flat out better.

    2500:

    Elections in the US in the hinterlands back in the "Good Old Days".

    https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article247366504.html

    2501:

    There are Toyota hybrids, like the RAV-4 that will get you up much higher, and of course the vans will get you off the ground very nicely. Not sure about the Honda versions, but they're nice too.

    2502:

    The standard 10 year warranty is rarely for such things. Sometimes you can buy expensive warranty extensions, and the price of that, its restrictions, and its short period indicates the chances they think that something will fail. My car is 9 years old; I read the fine print, decided that they excluded everything that was likely to fail, and turned it down.

    The Mercedes Benz SLK was (is?) an exception, but you pay through the nose for that. Commodity cars are different.

    2503:

    There's an NPR analysis of S. Dakota (I think) and Vermont. Both totally R controlled and how Vermont has 1/5 the Covid-19 rates due to acting sane. Nitpicking: Vermont is R Gov, D State Senate, House https://ballotpedia.org/Party_control_of_Vermont_state_government

    This is decent on an aspect of Vermont's COVID-19 response: https://www.vox.com/2020/11/19/21541810/vermont-covid-19-coronavirus-social-distancing They are also pretty strict about quarantine. (I had to test/quarantine the past summer (Aug 2020) to get lodging for a few days in Vermont, and they've gotten stricter since.)

    2504:

    First, let me cover all the car complaints. Before I start, let me remind you of the old saying, "just because you can doesn't mean you should."

  • My Dearly Beloved Departed '86 Toyota Tercel wagon: in 2000, tuned up (I did plugs, adjusted the lifters, and set the timing twice a year*). Carburetor, and it was still getting 35-36mpg highway. No computer.
  • ) My '89 Grand Voyager minvan, around '98 or '99, the front passenger window fell down. About $160, and they replaced the belt. Not 10 years later, I had a '97 Grand Voyager, same thing... nope, Chrysler had made it a sealed unit, yeah, the motor was fine... but they couldn't open the panel to replace the belt, so it was $369 for the whole panel. 3. a) I got in my van a month or so ago ('08 Honda Odyssey), and only the driver lock and window worked. Dealer-only thing. "Master switch needed replacing", with a 15% online coupon, $600!!!! b) Same Odyssey, I found that i) they think it's a feature that if the internal, or external lights are left on after the ignition is turned off, THEY DO NOT GO OFF, they run the battery down, and ii) there is ONLY ONE KEYED DOOR, the driver's, so I have to drive with jumper cables under the driver's seat, instead of the storage box in the back, because I'd have to crawl through the whole damn vehicle to get it.
  • Oh, and in the early eighties, my late then-b-i-l, who was a mechanic working for a Ford dealer, and specializing in transmissions, told me back then, he was spending $3k-$4k A YEAR on "special service tools", which was a deliberate game of Ford, and all the other car makers, to increase their "revenue flow".

    2505:

    Really? Is this a thing about Linux? Because I install it and take the defaults for home, and the only issues I've had are with zoom.

    Or is this from someone who only knows Windows, and believes every piece of FUD from M$?

    2506:

    I am more than a bit angry about the assassination of M. Fakhrizadeh: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's top nuclear scientist, assassinated near Tehran Be careful of the framing describing him as the (former) "head of the Iranian nuclear program", and of the early reports about details and blame. They do not have an active nuclear program; e.g. the nitpicks in this are not evidence of a program: 2020 Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments (Compliance Report) (US Dep of State, Report, Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, 2020) And the document concludes: During the reporting period, the United States continued to assess that Iran is not currently engaged in key activities associated with the design and development of a nuclear weapon.

    Oh, and MEK has been used for assassinations where a motorcycle rider placed a bomb on a car. NBC: Israel and MEK Responsible for Murdering Iranian Scientists (2012/02/11, Kevin Jon Heller) The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

    And this might be perspective if that was the MO (via @thegrugq):

    Mad Max style Iranian motorbike units during the Iran Iraq War. They were used to hunt Iraqi armour using RPG-7s carried by a gunner on the back of the bikes. 🏍️ pic.twitter.com/0EPITSOuPE

    — Callsign Batya (@Reaperfeed1) November 25, 2020

    And Iranian Combat Motorbike Tactics in Iraq (May 18, 2008)

    2507:

    (Hot and humid) Alabama? Mississippi? (COLD) Montana? The Dakotas?

    And he may be getting antsy with Ireland's statements, and with the EU negotiator's statements.

    2508:

    the only issues I've had are with zoom Zoom works fine for me on Ubuntu 18.04 (on a Lenovo laptop), as does skype. (X-Ubuntu to be clear.) Had to install the zoom .deb manually (including updates), and launching a link with the browser needed a firefox plugin. Zoom also has a rpm download; what are the problems you're seeing?

    2509:

    And Skoda is big.

    Somewhat idle curiosity here, but I've only noticed two Skodas in the Americas in the past couple of decades, one in Texas and one in Panama. They aren't all that distinctive in appearance so I could well have missed a few, but even so they don't seem to cross the Atlantic well. Any idea why?

    2510:

    I was talking about Europe. VW bought Skoda standardized the basics on VW things. Rotors, brakes, etc... And now they sell for less that similar VWs due to labor costs. In my very limited European experience they seem big in the taxi market.

    Now I didn't seem many (if any) when I was in southern Germany for 2 weeks but I suspect that can be explained by the local presence of VW.

    2511:

    I hope all y'all had a "Happy Thanksgiving" whether you celebrate the U.S. holiday or not. Even if it was just another day for you, I hope it was a good one.

    I cooked, I ate, I played computer games & went to bed at a reasonable hour. Everything I planned for the holiday meal worked out, although the green beans in the stir fry were a little under-cooked. I even managed to get all the dishes washed before I went to bed.

    NOT going to any "Black Friday" sales.

    2512:

    The standard 10 year warranty is rarely for such things.

    I'm car shopping now. (Refer to my comment about our 09 Elantra being totaled by someone. Looked fine after being rear ended by an uninsured driver. But under the plastic the lower rear body was about 1 1/2 inches shorter than it should have been.)

    New cars IN THE US almost all come with 3/36 for the entire car. 5/50 for the drive train. Hyundai (I think) gives 5/50K and 10/100K. Tesla is around 8 years for at least some of the battery related things. Not sure of other EV/hybrids.

    Excluding consumables. Radiator fluid, washer fluid, tires, brake pads, etc...

    5/50K -> 5 years / 50K miles.

    And most dealers will sell you extensions for about $500 per year.

    I really would like to buy a Subaru Crosstrek plug in hybrid. But they don't sell OR SERVICE them within 200 or more miles of here. I'm sure they will soon but I don't know how long I want to keep driving my larger than average (for the US) Tundra truck around the urban area. Parking is just a total PITA. Gas mileage isn't all that good either. My wife has taken over my 2016 Honda Civic for now.

    2514:

    JBS @ 2511

    It's not just another day here. It's part of the count-down to December 1st, when we all need to have our snow tires on our motor vehicles. I think we're the only province where people get a stiff fine if they don't.

    2516:

    It's fairly comparable in Europe, but (a) what I was talking about as causing unnecessary expense and lost time was NOT the major components and (b) you need to read the fine print to see the restrictions on the extended warranty. I stand by what I said.

    2517:

    David L @ 2466:

    waste a couple of days of his life because the battery died (he couldn't open the car to open the bonnet)

    I wonder if he just didn't know where the key was hidden in the fob. My Honda fob doesn't look like there is a key.

    And on the same car when the battery died I couldn't figure out how to open the trunk till I read about how in the manual. There's a level but it is very out of sight.

    I'd have a problem with that if I couldn't get the car doors to open. I keep the manual in the glove box. And some newer fancy vehicles a backup key might be an extra cost option that buyers forego, not anticipating a dead battery.

    2518:

    Rocketpjs @ 2472: Robert Prior: I had an experience on the runway on an Air Canada flight from Ottawa. Mother in law was an employee so I had been gifted a standby ticket, and had been bumped up to 'Business Class'. We stat there a long while receiving free goodies while they kept announcing maintenance issues, then ice on the wings etc etc. Person beside me was beside himself with impatience and anger at the 'taxpayer subsidized' airline making him late (for what, one wonders, it was 10pm).

    The only "incident" I was a part of was coming home from Annual Training on a Government Transportation Request. Don't even remember if it was American or United, but I had to change planes at O'Hare. Everything went smoothly on the flight to RDU except for the very last. Just as we were about to touch down the pilot initiated a Go-Round; mere inches from it being a "touch & go". It was the steepest climb I ever experienced (including the C-130s going in and out of Mortaritaville (aka LSA Anaconda, aka Balad Air Base) - in Iraq.

    The flight attendant in her jump-seat at the front was gripping the armrest so tight I could see the bones in her fingers. There was never a PA announcement to tell us what was going on.

    That was also the flight where the airline lost my vintage Martin 12-string.

    I was in a UH-60 flying NOE across Iraq when we flew into a flock of ducks. Made it into LSA Anaconda Ok, but on the trip back we just barely got off the base before having to turn back and make a precautionary landing. They substituted a different UH-60 and we made it back to our own base without further problems.

    2519:

    I recall an acquaintance of mine told me about the time when he was about to board a plane and the co-pilot walked past, saying to his commander "It's a good thing everyone's wearing parachutes."

    Said acquaintance was in the process of doing his qualifying jumps before he joined the 3rd Parachute Regiment thus everyone on board was in fact wearing parachutes. It was still not a confidence-inducing thing to overhear.

    This was just before Iraq II and most of the combat-ready C-130s in the RAF had already been flown out to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus in preparation for the kickoff. All that was left in the UK for jump qualification were the back-of-the-hangar aircraft, the ones they didn't fly regularly for good reasons. He mentioned that a couple of his jumps were delayed due to aircraft problems after takeoff and return-to-base.

    2520:

    ... all you can do is get someone with a truck to come out and haul the car home for you. That's hundreds of pounds (/dollars/etc) right there, before you even start on sorting the actual problem out.

    Does the UK not have something like the American Automobile Association? Membership in Triple-A is to first approximation road trouble insurance (you can see services and prices here).

    Towing is a big one and I've always found it worth the price even if I didn't need it, since I knew if I did need it I'd just call one number and everything would be taken care of. Back when I had my beloved VW Beatle I needed it several times; I've not needed a tow yet for my 30 year newer Ford.

    I did call for help on my way out to the Westercon & NASFiC in Utah. I was out of my house and bound for another state when I found myself beside the road with a flat tire; I had a spare but the trunk was so full of luggage I couldn't find the jack! The AAA fellow who turned up had a much better jack anyway and swapped tires quickly - practice and the right tools make work easy. He did compliment Ford on giving me a real tire rather than a rubber donut. It might even have gotten me to Utah and back but I only used it for a mile or two to the tire store.

    They also have a truly prodigious map collection, which is apparently not a selling point to the younger drivers. I may not need them often but I still like having actual paper maps in the car.

    2521:

    We have the (original) Automobile Association, and the Royal Automobile Club and have had for over a century. There are also other organisations such as Green Flag in the roadside rescue/recovery business.

    2522:

    SS We have the AA ( Automobile Association ) which has been erm, privatised, sold on, sold off & now ( I think) taken over by an equity "company" oh dear .... As I'm a member, I'm NOT IMPRESSED.

    2523:

    I have repeatedly been pressured to join but, when I have looked at the fine print, they have had restrictions that meant it was useless to me. In particular, being towed to the nearest garage is sod-all use in the Highlands, and that's all they promise. If the breakdown needs specialist kit, as most do for modern cars, the cost of the MUCH longer tow to the nearest agent is on you.

    2524:

    You might check to see if they have a premium package. I have one here with AAA in the U.S. and the premium package will get me towed anywhere within a hundred miles for $20 more/year.

    2525:

    We have the AA ( Automobile Association ) which has been erm, privatised, sold on, sold off & now ( I think) taken over by an equity "company" oh dear .... As I'm a member, I'm NOT IMPRESSED.

    I'm sorry to hear that. Over here our version is a nonprofit and I've been very happy with the service in the northwestern US.

    This strikes me as doubly annoying as it should be much harder to break down fifty miles from civilization in the UK! (Maybe in the wilds of Scotland?) At least in Australia or the western US drivers expect miles of nothing for as far as the eye can see.

    I write this while Google Maps is open in another tab, idly thinking of a drive to take when the weather is better. The map is centered on the metropolis of Humptulips, population 255...

    2526:

    Likewise non-profit over here. Well, "non-profit". In theory it belongs to its members, but it's also an insurance company and not just for car insurance. But if you insure your car with them, you're automatically a member, whether or not you pay for their roadside assistance too. We have found it cost-effective for my wife to use her gold membership for roadside for her car, while I still have Mazda's new car roadside for mine.

    It's complicated for interstate travel because the roadside clubs are state based. So while we're in RACQ, in NSW (when cross border travel is easy, anyway) we'd rely on their partnering with NRMA, and in Victoria with RACV. We do have a per-km fee for more than 20km towing (if we don't get towed to their "authorised repairer"), but there are many other benefits (including accomodation, rental cars, and delivery to wherever you actually are when it's repaired). As hinted above, carmakers also offer roadside assistance, as do mechanic franchise/chains. In theory I could get free roadside from the company that our local mechanic who services our cars is a franchisee for, but I've never tried.

    2527:

    Whitroth @ 2505: Really? Is this a thing about Linux?

    I think it was from back in the days when Red Hat and Suze were just getting started. Editing the X config file for your particular combination of graphics card and monitor were definite things back then. These days, as you say, its a lot more streamlined.

    2528:

    Bill Arnold @ 2506: I am more than a bit angry about the assassination of M. Fakhrizadeh.

    I'm kind of struggling with this. This seems to have been a major operation. The Times of Israel has the most detailed account I've found so far:

    Iranian state television said a parked Nissan truck with explosives hidden under a load of wood blew up as Fakhrizadeh approached in a vehicle. As Fakhrizadeh’s sedan stopped on the wide, tree-lined avenue, five or six gunmen emerged from a nearby vehicle and opened fire on his car, the semi-official Tasnim news agency said. A firefight erupted between the assassins and Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards. The attackers wounded Fakhrizadeh and killed at least three of the guards before escaping.

    So where did this group of terrorist come from? Where did they get their weapons? The NBC story you link to suggests an internal terrorist group supplied/funded by Israel, but are we really saying that the Iranian government can't catch a group like this? The UK or US security services would make very short work of it, and we are a far more open society than Iran. How were these people recruited? How were they trained? How did they pick this particular target and form an effective plan of attack? Was this a suicide attack, or did they expect to be free to carry out operations in the future?

    Fakhrizadeh was a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. The IRG is constitutionally separate from the regular military. The latter were originally just the Shah's army, so they weren't trusted, and the IRG still has the whip hand over them and gets all the nice toys (like A-bombs).

    Meantime the quotes from Iranian leaders seem rather short on details or comments about this terrorist organisation. In the West politicians would be vowing to hunt down the survivors of the attack, the names of the dead terrorists would already be released, and forensic techs would already be searching their homes. Iranian politicians immediately focus on the usual foreign suspects and handwave about "terrorists" and "mercenaries".

    So if I were looking for suspects for this attack, I'd be taking a hard look at the regular military, as they are the ones with means, motive and opportunity. But I suspect that the Iranian state can't do that, because it would mean a purge of senior ranks in the regular military which they don't want to admit to. Its much easier to blame the bad news on evil foreigners.

    All the above is kremlinology, of course. But I wouldn't take anything coming out of Iran at face value.

    2529:

    Paul there appears ( & I stress appears ) to be a major internal faction-fight going on in Iran. The real madmen, the revolutionary Guard are competing with their regular armed forces & the "moderates" who want an accommodation with "the West",. Hence all the extra-judicial kidnappings which morph into hostage-taking, which morph into show trails - always for espionage against almost any foreigners/dual-nationals they can lay their hands on. The Rev guard are trying to make sure that a permanent state of revolution & war with the unbelievers continues, whilst everyone else just wants quiet life & an END to the constant, wearing tension. The Biden win has put a sharper edge of the nutters' desperation, of course.

    2530:

    Thanks for that Times of Israel link. The piece has more detail on the assassination itself and covers at least briefly many of the various lines of speculation that have been floated so far.

    2531:

    Except that I wouldn't trust anything coming out of Israel on Iran - e.g. who provided them with information, and what was their agenda? Al Jazeera is probably more reliable on Iran. When even the New York Times is pretty certain that Israel was responsible, it takes a pretty severe case of tinfoil hat syndrome to claim that it was an internal Iranian feud.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/27/top-iranian-nuclear-scientist-killed-iran-armed-forces https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/world/middleeast/israel-iran-nuclear-deal.html

    Furthermore, while the Revolutionary Guard was once a collection of dangerously loose cannons, it was reined in at least one Supreme Leader ago (to whom it is responsible). While its behaviour is extra-judicial, I need to remind the previous posters that so is the Israeli military's with regard to the occupied territories.

    Unfortunately, Iran is under existential attack from MASSIVELY stronger enemies, even 'neutral' countries like the UK and most of Europe support those enemies, and it is not surprising that it behaves as badly as the USA and UK did in the World Wars. And, no, those 'hostages' were NOT imprisoned by the Revolutionary Guard, but by the courts, after secretive and probably unjust trials of the sort now used in the UK.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/government-secretly-deployed-british-troops-to-defend-saudi-arabian-oil-fields/ar-BB1bpCf2

    I now return you to the tinfoil hat brigade.

    2532:

    I agree. This is a pisser.

    One has to wonder if this is Israeli... or Turnipolini-pushed. (Or both).

    Given that things will change in a month and a half - I expect Biden to talk about renewing the Iranian nuclear deal. In the meantime, since the Idiot pulled us out, we have no right to complain (esp. since there's no discussion even of talks - the Idiot's too stupid to think of that).

    2533:

    Screws with the sound when I leave the meeting and shut down zoom.

    Also, after discussing with another Linux person who was helping to run the virtual part of Philcon last weekend, I downgraded to zoom 5.3 from 5.4 - the later could crash, or crash my browser, and once, I think, caused me to reboot.

    Hobbit tells me it's a known bug, and zoom's working on it.

    No problems with discord. Otherwise, no problema.

    2534:

    Incidents: the only two I can remember are once, flying into Philly for a Philcon (mid-Nov) there was wind and a storm, and we were almost down when the pilot pulled up, fast, and went around again. No problem, I'd rather we didn't get blown into the Delaware River. Landed fine, if a little hard second time around, and the entire passenger compartment applauded.

    The other: flying to Phoenix from Austin via Houston, I think it was, in '87. We get there, board, and sit. 20 min after we were supposed to pull away from the gate, the passenger rep gets on the horn, and tells us we might have noticed this, and that they've got a hardware problem with an exit? exit ladder? and if they couldn't fix it in the next 10 min, they'd deplane us, and get us on another plane.

    AN HOUR LATER, they finally let us off, and we all rush for the phones. Half an hour, three quarters of an hour later, we're on a new plane. Food? Oh, no, it's too late, but we'll give you free drinks. Me: are you trying to get us drunk to forget all this?!

    On the flight back, we were near the front. They're coming through taking food orders, and they only had one chicken left, so my late wife took the seafood. And was ill for the next few hours.

    Needless to say, we NEVER FLEW Cattlecar, er, Continental Airlines again.

    2535:

    As of a few years ago, they don't want you to have an Xconfig file.

    Well, except for certain things... like the /etc/udev/ rules I had to write. There were these three guys, using software that hadn't been updated since '09, and the license was tied to the network card ID, and they had to have certain things.... (and no, the company that had bought the product, that was not updating it, wanted $15k just to generate new keys....)

    2536:

    The orange horror would have bragged about it, if it were. I agree with the New York Times.

    2537:

    Vulch @ 2521: We have the (original) Automobile Association, and the Royal Automobile Club and have had for over a century. There are also other organisations such as Green Flag in the roadside rescue/recovery business.

    What about On Board Diagnostics OBD which have been required equipment on every car sold in the U.S. for about 40 years (introduced in the early 1980s)? I've got a code reader around here somewhere, but it's moot because I now have a device that stays plugged in to the OBD connector & calls my cell phone if there's any kind of a problem & sends me a report once a month if there are none.

    https://www.hum.com/
    I don't have the speaker.

    But there's no hidden "basic test data". It's all readily available if you'll make an effort to look for it.
    https://www.tomsguide.com/best-picks/best-obd2-scanners

    2538:

    Thanks for the links. The NYTimes piece is surprisingly blunt. The Times of Israel piece just outlines the main lines, mainly Israel-did-it, and provided a useful description of the assassination, that aligns with other descriptions. Israel has very little deniability since the victim has been reported to be on an Israeli assassination list for at least a decade. They also haven't denied it (AFAIK) in part because it's in their interest for people to believe that they did it. There is also a little bit of personal threat to Biden and team. (That cultivated reputation for ruthless arrogant insanity.) It's loopy; the JCPOA and strengthening of reformist elements in Iran is in Israel's long term best interests, but they decided 10 years ago (well, longer; talking interference with the Obama administration 2009+) to go down the warmonger path re Iran, which necessarily meant increased interference with American (and UK) politics. Good chance that Iran will be within 1-2 month breakout time (with a non-zero probability (as viewed by external observers) of an already-covertly-built fission device or two) if pressed a lot further. So far Iran's moves re enrichment etc have been (carefully done and) reversible. (B. Netanyahu is now in my Rogues' Gallery (of image search results). Some spaces have opened up. :-)

    Another treaty that DJT (or rather his warmongering staff) is trying to destroy. Moves might be reversible: U.S. Withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty: Three Legal Issues (David Koplow, November 24, 2020) Donald Trump’s misguided decision to withdraw the United States from the 1992 Treaty on Open Skies has dealt a severe blow to global stability, alliance solidarity and U.S. national security. It has also raised a host of novel legal questions, three of which I explore in this posting: 1) whether the president possesses the legal authority unilaterally to withdraw the United States from a treaty in the face of congressional opposition; 2) whether the other parties to the treaty can take effective action to dodge the legal effects of the purported withdrawal; and 3) whether an expedited procedure could be invoked for the United States to rejoin the treaty, should the Biden administration decide to reverse course.

    2539:

    Elderly Cynic @ 2531: Except that I wouldn't trust anything coming out of Israel on Iran - e.g. who provided them with information, and what was their agenda?

    Certainly no more so than I trust anything coming out of Iran about Israel. Same questions.

    2540:

    whitroth @ 2534: Incidents: the only two I can remember are once, flying into Philly for a Philcon (mid-Nov) there was wind and a storm, and we were almost down when the pilot pulled up, fast, and went around again. No problem, I'd rather we didn't get blown into the Delaware River. Landed fine, if a little hard second time around, and the *entire* passenger compartment applauded.

    Yeah, would have been different if there had been any obvious reason for the go around or even a late announcement after we got back up in the air again ... but nada!

    The other: flying to Phoenix from Austin via Houston, I think it was, in '87. We get there, board, and sit. 20 min after we were supposed to pull away from the gate, the passenger rep gets on the horn, and tells us we might have noticed this, and that they've got a hardware problem with an exit? exit ladder? and if they couldn't fix it in the next 10 min, they'd deplane us, and get us on another plane.

    I had a trip from Atlanta to RDU once. Had a meeting in Atlanta where I turned in my company truck & my new company truck was waiting for me to pick it up back in Raleigh. For some reason, instead of a direct flight ATL to RDU it was a one stop where I had to change planes in Charlotte. The aircraft for the CLT to RDU leg was something like a Beech King Air. Taxied out & got to the end of the runway to do the run-up, then taxied back to the terminal where we all deplaned ... and went back to the 737 we had originally been on from Atlanta to Charlotte.

    AN HOUR LATER, they finally let us off, and we all rush for the phones. Half an hour, three quarters of an hour later, we're on a new plane. Food? Oh, no, it's too late, but we'll give you free drinks. Me: are you trying to get us drunk to forget all this?!

    On the flight back, we were near the front. They're coming through taking food orders, and they only had one chicken left, so my late wife took the seafood. And was ill for the next few hours.

    Needless to say, we NEVER FLEW Cattlecar, er, Continental Airlines again.

    I only flew Continental a couple of times. No problems with them. No worse than United or American ... or Piedmont or US Air.

    2541: 2445

    "They got a medal for exceptional airmanship."

    The MHDOIF, one assumes?

    2542:

    Yes. I meant to add 'or vice versa'! But the New York Times is slightly biassed towards Israel, so would trust it in this case, and I agree with Bill Arnold (#2538). Luckily, Iran has been playing the international politics fairly carefully, so is unlikely to put Biden in an impossible position. The question is whether he restores a degree of sanity or backs the Israel/Saudi axis.

    2543:

    It's Net-and-Yahoo. He's a warmonger, and his extremist faction is supported by the large influx of immigrants to Israel these last 15-20 years or more, from Eastern Europe and the FSSR. They have this insane plan of Yretz Israel - the ancient Israel at its height, ignoring the fact that this Israel was NOT GIVEN TO THEM BY GOD (tm), but by Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and the UN.

    Meanwhile, they treat the Palestinians, the Native Palestinians, like the US treated the Native Americans - too bad they have vaccines against smallpox.

    2544:

    Well, we have to admit it was exceptional, if not the variety of exceptional originally envisaged by the people who struck the medal.

    2545:

    I think OBD is now an EU requirement but I don't know when they first became standard. I didn't drive at all for something like 12 years, the car I had before (Vauxhall Astra) didn't have it and I think was built in 1993 but the current one (Skoda Fabia) does. I've got a Bluetooth dongle plugged in to mine which I must check is still there after the MoT and service last week.

    The whole car had been whingeing at me for 6 months before the service, due to lock down vehicles due an MoT between certain dates got a 6 month extension and most garages and service centres were shut for lockdown 1 anyway.

    2546:

    withroth @ 2543

    Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. The current borders of Israel were not given to the Israelites by Truman, Churchill and the UN. The Israelites were involved in several wars with their neighbors right from the start in 1948. The current borders are the results of compromises made for writing up armistice texts (and in some cases real peace treaties) between several warring neighbors from 1948 to 2006.

    Basing the borders of Israel on the borders of ancient Israel at its height would be a problem because it would mean resurrecting the Kingdom of Edom or some other non-judaic nation who pushed the Edomites out and was eventually ruled by Persia and after that by the Alexandrine Greeks.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edom#/media/File:Kingdoms_around_Israel_830_map.svg

    And that's just the big part in the South. There are plenty of smaller sections that do not quite fit.

    Regretfully, the AAA and its useful maps (I have bought quite a few) was not around in those time to mark up the place bilingually with 𒅖𒊏𒅋 and also 𐎊𐎌𐎗𐎛𐎍 in nice, friendly glyphs.

    2547:

    Oh, hell, of course saying Yeretz Israel would be "problematical" is like saying the Orange Hairball has, once or twice, exaggerated the facts. It's insane, and yes, I do know someone in Chicago wbo thinks all the Palestinians should go to Jordan, really.

    2548:

    So Boris is caving in to the Libertarians and Covid deniers in an attempt to quell a revolt within the Conservative Party.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lockdown-tiers-boris-johnson-sunset-clause-mps-b1763339.html

    2549:

    I thought the consensus was hell. The question is: are they there now, and if not would it be an improvement?

    The real solution is to give them North Korea. I'm somewhat surprised that the evil doll hasn't done that as part of his "best peace process ever".

    2550:

    Yes, "startup" using a cord like that done in the video was not something I have seen done in NZ and certainly wouldn't be something I would want to try. (I think that youtube video was German - couldn't find an NZ version).

    However, using the - demountable - steering wheel as a "crank" to turn the flywheel over is apparently authentic tho'.

    The "competition" to start these things that I saw was on a frosty morning where the tractors had all been left on an open field overnight. Much of the time was consumed with the blow-torch heat up aspect - which looked to me more an art than a science and required fine judgement and experience.

    For those of you who weren't sufficiently curious to look into the LaNZ Bulldog engine - the engine was a single cylinder two-stroke diesel of approx 10Litres - and thus heaps of torque. I am told the only "instrument" on the "dashboard" was an indicator designed to tell you which way the engine was rotating - apparently these could be started backwards!

    2551:

    Vulch I think OBD is now an EU requirement but I don't know when they first became standard. When "OBD" - 2004 according to Wiki - for the EU FORTUNATELY, my car was built in 1996 ANOTHER reason never, ever, to buy a new car .... More things to go wrong ....

    Ah yes ... 2-stroke diesels If you really want to hurt your brain, try THIS animation of a Napier Deltic in operation - used to power one of the few Diesel locomotives that were ever worth considering ...

    2552:

    "But there's no hidden "basic test data". It's all readily available if you'll make an effort to look for it."

    Bollocks.

    You do not get either basic static measurements of an item, or any indication - even if it's only two or three spot readings - of its response characteristics. You can't take the thing off and measure it and then make any useful deduction from the result; you quite likely don't even know what measurement to make in the first place.

    As a very simple illustration, consider the thermostat in the cooling system. You can easily look up in the book of words what its nominal opening temperature is supposed to be. The book of words also tells you what the "first crack" and "fully open" temperatures corresponding to the nominal figure are, and what alternative temperatures/ranges might be installed for different operating conditions. You can then take the thermostat out and cook it up in a pan of water on the stove with a thermometer in it, and see whether or not it is opening at all and if so is it doing it at the right temperature.

    An electronic system might have what seems to be a comparably simple component in the form of a temperature sensor. It's probably just a simple thermistor, since it only has two connections. You can measure the resistance between the terminals and get some reading which is neither open nor short circuit. You can cook it in a pan of water and see that the reading changes as the temperature goes up. But what the starting value is supposed to be could be anything within a range of two or three orders of magnitude, and the nature of its variation with temperature is similarly uncertain; you can't even be sure whether it is supposed to go down or up. Your measurements can tell you that something is happening, but you have no fucking idea whether it's actually the right thing, or whether the component has degraded and drifted and is reporting a temperature change from "Pluto" to "Rigel" when it's a bit sunnier than it was yesterday, or conversely "got a tad nippy, hasn't it?" on a drive from the Rub al-Khali to the Arctic.

    Even if it does seem to read like a completely open or short circuit you still can't be sure that means it's knackered. After all, it's only a guess that the thing is just a thermistor in the first place. It might be a device whose capacitance changes with temperature so you'll never get anything at all out of it unless you test it with AC. Or it might be some digital thing with a one-wire interface in which case you have no fucking idea.

    Trying to make measurements on the complete system is no more useful, if anything it's worse, because not only is there nothing at all to tell you what kind of readings you ought to be getting, there's a good chance that the subsystem you're trying to test isn't even in a measurable condition anyway, because the bloody computer has detected some anomaly within a millisecond of being switched on and is refusing to provide that subsystem with any of its normal inputs so everything just looks completely dead.

    With sixty year old analogue designs things are OK now - though they weren't when those designs were current - because there has been enough time elapsed and the systems are sufficiently tractable that people have made websites like http://members.rennlist.com/pbanders/ecu.htm and http://sw-em.com/bosch_d-jetronic_injection.htm which DO give the required detail, down to full circuit diagrams that tell you what's inside the "black boxes" and analyses of the characteristics of the auxiliary parts. With modern systems you don't get ANY of that... and the circuit diagrams are vastly more complicated, and you also need enormous wads of other data like full source code listings, FPGA configuration data, and reliable confirmation of the type numbers of the various ICs where the manufacturer has dremeled the number off them deliberately in order to be a wanker.

    2553:

    "things like clutch replacements, new oil, fuel, engine and transmission seals, brake drum replacement and truing, and even valve regrinding and decoking if you go back far enough were needed much more often and those were NOT quick jobs."

    That sort of thing is what I'm getting at by saying the matter needs to be considered as two separate sets of changes, and what makes it so bloody annoying. We could perfectly well have the improvements in materials, metallurgy, machining standards and so on WITHOUT any of the other infuriating and unnecessary electronic shit which is there to make sure you still have to spend lots of money on something even if it isn't major mechanical components any more.

    This is why I like 50+ year old Volvos, because Volvo were well ahead of the field with the useful improvements at a time when the bollocks hadn't even been invented. They were already capable of making a car which could happily do 200,000 miles without replacing the clutch or taking the head off all that time ago - for a long time the world record for mileage was a Volvo 1800 with something over a million, though I don't know what it is now - but they did not compensate by installing other sources of arseache and expense, because they didn't exist. (A few models had D-Jet, but that is a solved problem these days and in any case was never anywhere near as intractable either as its reputation at the time or as any variety of computer shit.)

    2554:

    Pigeon PRECISELY So that, if I cannot get a 1979-80 Range Rover for Under £8k, I will get a Volvo estate of the same vintage, even though my driving will slow down, because I will no longer be able to see a bloody thing ...

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Meanwhile Are they posturing before a crash ... or are we going to get a "tin" ( Still-a-load-of-shit ) "Deal of some sort? Opinions? I'm actually wondering if a crash would better in the long run, because of the complete implosion that would result, with a "Return to the EU" manifesto commitment by Labour in the run-up to the 2024 election. Resulting in our "Second Glorious Revolution" With something like 58-62% of the population now saying Brexshit was a really bad idea, it's anyone's guess ...

    2555:

    Are they posturing before a crash ... or are we going to get a "tin" ( Still-a-load-of-shit ) "Deal of some sort? Opinions?

    It's 2020, nobody can predict.

    That said, as the Covid lockdowns in England have demonstrated, Boris has lost control of the Conservatives. While the healthy majority potentially gives him some room to manoeuvre, if pressed to guess I would say he may view a no-deal as the better option for keeping him in number 10

    Also worth considering that Starmer is facing his own revolt over Brexit (and whether to support the Conservative bill when it comes in Parliament or not), and the other issues that have surfaced in the last several months and it seems safe to say neither major political party is stable and under control of the respective leaders.

    I mean Boris could potentially get enough Labour and other votes to pass a deal of some sort through, but he also (like May and Cameron before him) would as a result likely see the party turf him - perhaps followed by a new leader promptly violating the new deal thus perhaps forcing the EU to withdraw from it.

    I'm actually wondering if a crash would better in the long run, because of the complete implosion that would result, with a "Return to the EU" manifesto commitment by Labour in the run-up to the 2024 election. Resulting in our "Second Glorious Revolution"

    Labour is, like the Conservatives, seriously divided over the Brexit issue so I suspect your idea is simply wishful thinking - the Corbyn wing of the party would be just as happy to let any implosion remain in place so they could create their glorious revolution outside of the EU.

    Sadly, the only way to get what you want (based on my observation from afar) would be for both the Conservative and Labour party civil wars to end up with the parties splitting apart, and a new centre pro-EU party forming from the respective moderate wings of Labour and the Conservatives. And that just seems unlikely.

    2556:

    However, using the - demountable - steering wheel as a "crank" to turn the flywheel over is apparently authentic tho'.

    The "competition" to start these things that I saw was on a frosty morning where the tractors had all been left on an open field overnight. Much of the time was consumed with the blow-torch heat up aspect - which looked to me more an art than a science and required fine judgement and experience.

    The first riding lawn mower I remember was one my father and uncle built. It had 2 cylinder engine from a hay bailer, steering and transmission and rear end from Crosley station wagon, a motorcycle transmission and lots of welded parts and other odds and ends. Hand crank to start. By the time I was 10 or 11 it the rings were so worn that we started it with my uncle's 1/2" drill. They built it some time in the 50s and retired it in the later 60s.

    2557:

    I recall reading many years ago on Usenet about some big diesel engines that would sometimes start themselves when left-over fuel vapour in the engine detonated due to warm conditions and a passing gremlin.

    The result was that in this big warehouse full of machinery something would mysteriously start running. The minor problem was that this gave the poor night watchman a heart attack. The major problem was that there was a 50% chance that the engine would be running backwards, which meant that the oil pump wasn't doing anything.

    2558:

    Diesel engines that can run "backwards" would be two-strokes, just like petrol engines which can do the same thing given the chance and absent the transmission etc. getting wrecked for some reason by being run backwards. Really big marine diesel engines are often two-stroke.

    The normal way to stop an older valved 2-stroke or 4-stroke diesel engine with engine-coupled mechanical fuel injectors was to open the cylinder decompressors. They pushed down on the exhaust valve(s) opening the cylinder(s) and thus prevented compression. I used to help start a 6.5 litre twin-cylinder marine diesel (called "SweePea" because it was painted green and it had come out of an old canal boat named "Olive") on a narrowboat tug. This engine had a chain-geared hand-crank start. The normal process was to open the decompressors, start cranking and once the heavy flywheel was up to speed, roughly 30 or 40 rpm, open the fuel feed to the injectors and then flip the decompressor levers on the top of the cylinders down so compression could happen once more.

    2559:

    IIRC, US-built cars did not have six positions on the odometer until the 80's. But, I mean, you are going to trade your ancient car in every two years for a new one, right? [rolls eyes]

    2560:

    Reminds me of an old Fabulous Furry Freak Bros. strip, where Phineas, I think, has two cars, one a sports car perhaps, both rear wheel drive (this was the sixties), and one has steering, but no working engine, the other a working engine, but no steering, so he has the front of one on top of the back of the other, and drives cross country.

    busted in Mississippi for miscegenation.

    2561:

    mdive SOME of Labour is divided over Brexshit. The majority are "Remain" - a few fuckwit opprtunists want to support Brexshit, because ... the usual politician's greedy-stupid-&-shortsighted "reasons" ... & another few are of the Bennite/Corbyn/communist wing who want a glorious People's Socialist Republic, away from the vile Capitalist EU. There are very few actual moderates left in what used to be "The Conservative & Unionist Party" - BoZo threw out Ken Clarke & Nick Soames, remember, they are now, merely the tories.

    David L Do you actually mean "Crosley" - which I know nothing about, or "Crossley" who used to make Buses, etc??

    Nojay That sounds like even more "fun" than push-starting a Ferguson Tractor ( Fortunately, with me driving, so I didn't have to do the pushing! )

    2562:

    We could perfectly well have the improvements in materials, metallurgy, machining standards and so on WITHOUT any of the other infuriating and unnecessary electronic shit

    Yes. But you would be unhappy with the result, because instead of requiring safer, more efficient vehicles we would probably have decided that we needed fewer vehicles, driven more carefully. So you'd be looking at an annual version of the advanced driver training course, permanent loss of license for major infractions, and 100-fold increase in operating costs, probably with outright bans in many places. That would keep the death toll more or less constant, rather than an order of magnitude higher which is the outcome you're probably hoping for.

    The good news is that the obvious consequence for be much more public transport, used much more, and in many more places. The real question would be whether, having gone that route, we'd have stopped at the current death toll rather than continuing until Prince Philip was one of the very few amateur motorists in the UK.

    2563:

    For those of you who weren't sufficiently curious to look into the LaNZ Bulldog engine - the engine was a single cylinder two-stroke diesel of approx 10Litres - and thus heaps of torque. I am told the only "instrument" on the "dashboard" was an indicator designed to tell you which way the engine was rotating - apparently these could be started backwards!

    Yep! This was a feature of hot bulb engines that some users found helpful. When mounted on vehicles, this let skilled users back up without needing the fancy advanced technology of a gearbox. (eyeroll) I read this could lead to an unusual failure mode though: when not under load there's less kinetic energy in the engine's moving bits and it can spontaneously reverse without warning, giving no sign that anything has happened until the tractor starts crawling away in the wrong direction...

    2564:

    Do you actually mean "Crosley" - which I know nothing about, or "Crossley" who used to make Buses, etc??

    First one.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosley

    They used the steering box and front axle, transmission, rear end and axle, and emergency brake. Front wheels and tires were taken from ones intended for wheelbarrows. My distant memory was that it was a 1948 model.

    Some pictures

    https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk03oF6VC2vqAEFsgofv6RJ_ZXMyAvQ:1606686004548&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=Crosley+automobile&client=firefox-b-1-e&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi77sPk26jtAhUrwFkKHSjSCIcQjJkEegQIBBAB&biw=1103&bih=657

    2565:

    If you really want to hurt your brain, try THIS animation of a Napier Deltic in operation - used to power one of the few Diesel locomotives that were ever worth considering ...

    Wow, that's really something. Having watched both animations, of the cross section and of the firing sequence, I can say that I'm happy I never had to synchronize all that. Or try to fix it - Wiki says that when possible the Royal Navy and British Railways just shipped engines back to the manufacturer for repair.

    I certainly believe the reports of a characteristic buzzing noise and smooth power production.

    2566:

    There used to be a rather nice British motorcycle made by Scott - the Silk 600. Very rare, pretty much handmade2 stroke twin. I only ever saw a single one in Poole when I still lived there. They had the ‘charming’ ability to run backwards if carelessly kick-started (no electric start, natch) and just occasionally one might see it reversing as lights went green.

    Personally i’ll take the electronic wotsits to make my EVs work - super high efficiency multi-phase investors, the compute power to manipulate the motors efficiently, the cameras for nav and security etc, and yes, even fart mode. I didn’t spend a career working in the field to put up with 16th century manual spark advance, manual mixing of foul smelling explosive vapour, etc etc. I’ve done my time stuffed in a stupid unseated, unlit, wooden block suspension Land Rover careening down mud tracks wondering if I’m going to get blown up.

    2567:

    D’oh. unheated.

    2568:

    David L Thanks - fascinating ....

    SS Actually, a "Deltic" locomotive on "full song" i.e. powering along at about 98.5 mph emitted a continuous low-pitched scream, which was wonderful to hear Example clip

    2569:

    One advantage of electric vehicles is that the task of ripping out the entire electrical system and rebuilding it from scratch - which is necessary these days for a third reason that I haven't mentioned yet, the need to prevent it spying on you and related evils - is paradoxically more straightforward. It is a lot easier to build a PWM inverter than it is to build an engine management system and calibrate it to pass annual emissions testing. And it does not need lots of computing power; the important advance that has made inverters so much less hassle these days is that high power switching devices are so enormously better.

    2570:

    Yer wot? Electronics has very very little to do with safety. It absolutely would not lead to an order of magnitude increase in fatal accidents - the very suggestion is ridiculous. It's hard to think of anything that would have such an enormous influence - even reverting to crossply tyres as standard - let alone something which has hardly anything to do with the matter in the first place.

    2571:

    Four stroke diesel engines can also run backwards. I've managed to start a rope-start Petter AA1 backwards. If you get it to come up to compression just hard enough to fire but with not quite enough inertia to take it over, it will fire and go back the way it came. Since the usual starting procedure involves bouncing it off the compression a few times to prime it before you give it the full heave, you are tickling the edge of this in any case. You definitely do not want to wrap the rope around your wrist with one of those.

    Since with a diesel the inlet and outlet are both just pipes, and the injection takes place direct into the cylinder, it can run quite happily pumping the other way. The injection timing is miles off, but the same would apply to a two-stroke.

    Indeed the oil pump is running backwards, but those things will run for a long time at full power and well over their rated speed with the oil pump not working at all before they are seriously damaged. So there's plenty of time to shut it down again and no need to panic.

    (Those engines will also run with one valve not opening at all, performing both induction and exhaust through the one that is working. They don't run very well like that, but they do still go.)

    2572:

    The Messerschmitt bubble car of the 1950s and 60s had a reversible single cylinder two stroke engine. To put it in reverse you pushed the ignition key in farther. This reversed the engine so the four speed gearbox was for forward and reverse gears.

    2573:

    "Wiki says that when possible the Royal Navy and British Railways just shipped engines back to the manufacturer for repair."

    Last time Greg posted about Deltics I mentioned them to my stepson, who has been running diesel workshops for earthmoving contractors. He made it quite clear that he wanted never, ever, to work on them.

    JHomes.

    2574:

    SOME of Labour is divided over Brexshit. The majority are "Remain" - a few fuckwit opprtunists want to support Brexshit, because ... the usual politician's greedy-stupid-&-shortsighted "reasons" ... & another few are of the Bennite/Corbyn/communist wing who want a glorious People's Socialist Republic, away from the vile Capitalist EU.

    Motivations/reasons aside, the point remains that Labour is divided on the issue - and as such are in no capability to provide a stay in the EU choice if things go badly.

    There are very few actual moderates left in what used to be "The Conservative & Unionist Party" - BoZo threw out Ken Clarke & Nick Soames, remember, they are now, merely the tories.

    Easy to dismiss a party who represents things one hates.

    I don't think the Conservatives are as unified on the issue as Boris might hope, and as the Brexiters think.

    But throwing out Clarke and others did the job - it scared the other moderates into keeping their mouths shut if they want to remain on the MP gravy train.

    Add in those who want Brexit with a deal, and then the purists who want a no-deal Brexit, and the Conservatives are just like Labour a deeply divided party on the issue.

    2575:

    ABS, traction control, airbags, automatic gearboxes, LED lighting, navigation systems, sensor operated lights and climate control... no one of them will cut the killing by an order of magnitude but they add up. Now add in emissions control and the death rate from pollution dives. That's the big one, and the one that will lead to primitive cars being exiled from city centres. Is leading to it now.

    In trucks especially, engine control computers have a huge effect on emissions. But even in cars the difference between a manual version like the PI Triumph and anything with electronic fuel injections is huge.

    2576:

    The fundamental problem with Brexit is that it cuts orthogonally across the traditional left-right dividing lines. So any party except for single-issue Brexiteers is going to be split by it.

    The left-right divide broadly splits people by class; people with money prefer politics where they get to keep it, while people without money prefer politics where they are given some.

    The EU has nothing to do with money redistribution; it doesn't set tax rates or define a minimum allowable welfare state. That leaves a split between the romantics and the pragmatists.

    The right-wing romantics hark back to an imaginary past golden age of national greatness when men were real men, women knew their place, and homosexuals were in prison (and lets not even get on to the crypto-racism). Meanwhile the left-wing romantics hark forwards to an imaginary future golden age where capitalism is abolished and replaced by ... something which will be socialist, so it will be better than capitalism by definition, even if we don't know what it is yet.

    The pragmatists are natural Remainers; work within the EU to make it better, reform the Common Agricultural Policy (which is the one big chunk of EU budget that is really boneheaded) and use the collective EU economic clout to make the world a better place in quiet, technocratic ways. Meanwhile the romantics of both left and right find this a horrible vision because, whatever the practical virtues of the EU may be, there is very little romance in it.

    That said, the sight of the EU flag being waved over barricades in Kiev does have a certain something.

    [[ html link fixed - mod ]]

    2577:

    Yes. Something like 1/3 of Labour supporters voted for Brexit, some of whom were as fanatically anti-EU as are the people who are currently ruining the country. No Labour leader could have come out for Remain and not split his party, and Corbyn's position was about as good at avoiding that as possible.

    You have omitted the pro-EU parties, which were not split, but the only one of consequence is the SNP since Clegg destroyed the LibDems.

    2578:

    ABS, traction control, airbags, automatic gearboxes, LED lighting, navigation systems, sensor operated lights and climate control...

    The only one of those that can even be argued to be a significant safety factor in the UK is the first, and it's down in the noise level, at best.

    There is also considerable evidence that many safety improvements to cars may have increased the overall death toll by discouraging walking and cycling. Seat belts have been analysed as increasing average speeds by 10%, and I could give other examples. 'Climate control' certainly has, by significantly increasing emissions especially at low speed, and by insulating drivers from the external conditions; in UK speed awareness courses, people are told to turn it off an open a window.

    2579:

    Its easy to be cynical about the impact of safety measures, but the fact remains that cars are historically the safest they have ever been, and this has been achieved by incremental improvement in many aspects of safety. Any individual improvement might be "down in the noise level", but cumulatively the impact is huge.

    And no, people don't just drive in a riskier manner to compensate because part of the improvement is arranging things so that they don't.

    2580:

    Sigh. That is true, and the reasons are fairly well-known - but were none of those things in the UK. In the USA, at least airbags were a major factor, but they never used seatbelts (unlike the UK).

    However, AS I SAID, speeds increased by 10% due to seat belts alone, and better cornering and brakes mean that people drive much faster round (often largely blind) corners than used to be the case. Both have been scientifically documented.

    The discouragement of walking and cycling is also well-documented, and is one of the major factors in the 'obesity epidemic' (which is also an unfitness epidemic). Furthermore, the discouragement of walking and cycling has meant that cars are now a major (often the predominant) form of transport within cities and suburbia, which has led to the atmospheric pollution crisis within them, and the consequent increase in deaths.

    2581:

    Elderly Cynic @ 2578:

    "in UK speed awareness courses, people are told to turn it (climate control) off an open a window."

    This is a major step in proving my impression that the UK is an earthly paradise.

    In my corner of Canada turning it off and opening a window in winter would freeze us solid and turning it off and opening a window in summer would let in black flies, mosquitos, chiggers and a host of other biting things.

    2582:

    but they never used seatbelts (unlike the UK).

    As always, such generalizations about the US tend to be untrue.

    And while the assortment of laws may seem a mess (and stupid) from the perspective of those outside the US only New Hampshire has no seat belt laws for adults.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_laws_in_the_United_States

    2583:

    I'm not contradicting anything you said; its just that you are cherry-picking a few facts in support of what seems to be a wider argument that safety improvements are futile and things were better in the good old days of rumble seats. (Maybe I'm reading too much into your 'nym.)

    As for the "seatbelts cause people to speed" argument, a large study in the US failed to replicate it (https://web.stanford.edu/~leinav/pubs/RESTAT2003.pdf). However with anti-lock brakes the problem does seem to exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation#Road_transport. So in short, its complicated.

    2584:

    I was posting in haste, and omitted the word "much". The current laws are irrelevant, because the context was their introduction in the 1970s.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#As_a_substitute_to_seat_belts

    2585:

    You are reading too much, not carefully enough, and I am not cherry picking. By the time of that report, airbags were standard. I was specifically referring to the UK, and an earlier period, where my points stand.

    2586:

    You have omitted the pro-EU parties, which were not split, but the only one of consequence is the SNP since Clegg destroyed the LibDems.

    Ahh yes, I meant to mention those.

    In the SNP the romantics are keen on Scottish independence from London rather than British independence from the EU. They know that Scotland isn't viable as a Little Scotland trading with everyone else on WTO terms, so becoming an independent nation inside the EU has been their policy for as long as I can recall.

    However the Lib Dems, for all their small size, are a real counter-example to my thesis. I suspect that they just tend to attract political pragmatists who are turned off by the romantic nutters on the wings of the main parties. In the Lib Dems the more extreme views tend to be about personal and social liberty, such as decriminalising cannabis and allowing gay marriage.

    2587:

    For me, it's not so much the computer as design decisions that are logical for production, but a PITA to service, or only releasing minimum information to third party OBD reader manufacturers. Electronic engine and automatic transmission management is a good thing, and if one wished to go to the trouble, some 70's thing, like a Capri would be immensely improved by a contemporary engine, transmission and ECM box*, and the longitudinally mounted engine would be easier to service. Another thing, being a seventies design,most of the issues Ralph Nader noted in "Unsafe At Any Speed" had been addressed, so they weren't as much of a deathtrap as earlier designs. *Such a conversion could use a smaller motor, since the computer and a six or eight speed automatic could keep a 1.5 liter in it's happy place most of the time.

    2588:

    The current laws are irrelevant, because the context was their introduction in the 1970s.

    In the US seat belt laws came about in the mid 60s. My family was involved.

    Shoulder belts was a later fist fight over freedoms.

    2589:

    the more extreme views tend to be about personal and social liberty, such as decriminalising cannabis and allowing gay marriage

    What's extreme about those?

    2590:

    In Canada seat belt laws came about in the 1980s.

    Canadians had been driving with seat belts a long time before that. The laws were meant to catch the last of the Résistance.

    It never worked for my father's second wife. She was scared to death that the sealt belt removal mechanism would break during a crash and keep her inside the car after the crash. Then she would get burned alive.

    So, she would click the belt closed and then sit on top of the closed belt to foil the detectors.

    2591:

    Seatbelts became non-optional items in the U.S. starting in the late 1960s or early 1970s. By the 1980s seatbelts were coming with shoulder straps, at least in the front seats, and seatbelt use became mandatory in (I think) the late 1980s or early 1990s. Certainly I had friends using the phrase "seatbelt nazis" by the mid 1990s.

    2592:

    Paul Except that Labour have always claimed to be an "Internationalist" party, so how ANY of them could support Brexit is beyond me ... except, of course for very short-term political gain in places that hang monkeys as Frenchmen, of course!

    But, unfortunately, EC is correct - especially in Hartlepool ( see above )

    Rbt Prior Ah, you oviously were not around 1955-67! Homosexuality finally decriminalised in the UK - 1967. After a monumental fight with the churches, of course.

    2593:

    All right, if you say so, they started in the mid 1960s. But walking and cycling had all but disappeared from USA roads as mainstream forms of transport by then, so any reference to those laws' reducing them OBVIOUSLY did not apply to the USA. The Pedestrian was published in 1951, which might tell you something.

    Even in 1970, the rush hour in several UK cities was composed primarily of bicycles. It no longer is, not even in Cambridge.

    2594:
    the more extreme views tend to be about personal and social liberty, such as decriminalising cannabis and allowing gay marriage What's extreme about those?

    These days, of course, the answer is nothing. But back in the 1990s they were considered to be the preserve of swivel-eyed loons. In those days a teacher who "promote[ed] the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship" could be prosecuted, and cannabis was still considered a gateway drug.

    2595:

    In Canada seat belt laws came about in the 1980s.

    Again, beware generalizations based on experience in one province.

    Ontario and Quebec both led the nation in making seatbelts mandatory in 1976.

    2596:

    In the US seat belt laws came about in the mid 60s. My family was involved.

    To clarify. It started in the 60s with car makers being required (encouraged) to install anchor bolts. We installed ones we bought in the mid 60s. Laws making them mandatory evolved over several decades with at one point people revolting over having to buckle up their groceries when placed in the front passenger seat.

    In so many ways it resembles the current Covid-19 fights about killer belts vs lying stats vs whatever "I got MY FREEDOM".

    2597:

    It's not just parties: it cuts across capitalists - as the article puts it, the "house trained" ones, vs the vultures.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/24/brexit-capitalism

    2598:

    She was scared to death that the sealt belt removal mechanism would break during a crash and keep her inside the car after the crash. Then she would get burned alive.

    I was around someone for a while 25 years ago who wasn't the brightest bulb in the fixture.

    He was completely convinced that he didn't need to wear a seat belt as he could put his arm's up and grab the dash in time to deal with any situation.

    I NEVER got into any situations where he was involved and any kind of machinery was around. He was a danger to others as much as himself.

    2599:

    mdive @ 2595 "Ontario and Quebec both led the nation in making seatbelts mandatory in 1976."

    And Yukon finished last in 1991.

    To me that puts an average in the 1980s.

    2600:

    Fords had lap belts in 1965, I remember my1971 Pinto (Not as flammable as portrayed!) had shoulder belts. Cars sold in the U.S. in 1968 were required to have an energy absorbing steering column and reinforced doors, dual circuit brake hydraulics 3 years earlier.

    2601:

    There are actually good reasons to not wear seatbelts, some of which are permitted exemptions in the UK, such as physical limitations making it impossible to do so. Unfortunately, there is no requirement on car makers to install seat belts that actually improve the safety for all non-exempt people. For example, a seatbelt with a top attachment point significantly below someone's shoulder is likely to cause a serious spinal injury in the case of a bad crash, and most rear seat belts are like that for taller people. Also, data from before they were used in the UK indicates that rear passengers have only c. 8% of the risk of front passengers in a crash without a seat belt.

    2602:

    And Yukon finished last in 1991.

    To me that puts an average in the 1980s.

    The Yukon, with 36k people, isn't very relevant.

    With Ontario and Quebec in 1976, and BC and Saskatchewan in 1977, 75% of the population of Canada was covered at that point by 1977.

    2603:

    "decriminalising cannabis and allowing gay marriage" ... What's extreme about those?

    For a long time the US would beat you to death for even discussing the Mexican drugs that make black people crazy. That led to a whole bunch of pseudoscience and international treaties banning the material.

    Gay marriage is more widely condemned, but loosely at the time white marriage was formalised it was largely political and reproductive, but since men were people the idea of selling one for political gain was less prevalent than selling women ditto. Patrilinial and patriarchal societies meant that where the man goes, there goes the world. Which meant men marrying each other wasn't necessary or really relevant, and women marrying each other wasn't practical (for the most part). Plus before test tube babies the obvious question was always "who is the father" and patriliniality meant that was a really important question. Add in some biblical homophobia and church marriage... none of that here. One we invented the nuclear family it was almost too late, the gays came along shortly afterwards and started wrecking everything.

    Meanwhile in subject populations marriage was often simpler and/or more flexible. Polynesia is somewhat notorious for confusing Europeans with their attitude towards sex, marriage and children. Much of what's now Australia had a wonderfully subtle set of rules governing who could marry who and how the resulting obligations tied into the rest of society. But that was marriage-as-childrearing, and from what I know same-sex sex wasn't considered relevant... people did it, but as with everything else the British were very keen to wipe out all evidence that it ever existed, and were largely successful.

    2604:

    I remember the histrionics when seatbelts were made mandatory in Alberta. Otherwise rational people insisting that they preferred to be 'thrown free' in the event of a crash. Friends of mine taking it as a personal insult when I chose to buckle up in their car (my parents operated a driver training school, I was hardwired for driving safety).

    Of course I also remember a classmate and neighbour who was beheaded when his vehicle hit the one in front and he went through the windshield (thrown free). He got his page in the yearbook, but I suspect he'd have preferred to live.

    As for all the multifarious incremental safety and other additions to vehicles that some posters here are exasperated with, I disagree. I've got an 09 Accent with close to 200k on it and have had to do almost zero in the form of repairs aside from regular maintenance (brakes, fluids, tires, battery). Of course, new cars can also be built badly, but that is why we don't buy North American vehicles as a general policy.

    It's all very well to harrumph and say that you never needed all that stuff, but many people do better with more safety in place. The other stuff (i.e. encouraging more active transportation and transit etc) is important but orthogonal to improvements in vehicle safety.

    Unless the position is that vehicles should be outrageously dangerous so as to encourage other forms of transportation. Remove all safety requirements, discourage seatbelts, remove the doors, and place jagged spikes coated with painful venoms on the dashboards of all vehicles so people will take the bus instead.

    2605:

    Just have them drive Austin Champs or BMC Mini-Mokes with no roll bars.

    2606:

    Ah, the famous "safety spike". For those who favour a more darwinian approach to education.

    I'm still sad that Australia hasn't seen fit to have a proper university in Darwin. I'd do a course there purely for the bragging rights.

    2607:

    Ah, you oviously were not around 1955-67!

    Well, I was around for part of that time, but not paying attention to politics :-)

    Still, my comment was directed more at the idea that in contemporary British politics those views are considered extreme.

    2608:

    In so many ways it resembles the current Covid-19 fights about killer belts vs lying stats vs whatever "I got MY FREEDOM".

    Along with the 'urban legends'. Everyone knew someone who's brother's friend had slip off the road into a lake and drowned because the seatbelt jammed. I remember in the early 80s when this was a big thing in Alberta and I was listening to a lot of AM talk radio. (Field technician, long days on the road, two techs with different tastes in music sharing a truck.)

    One of the hosts of one program actually checked fatality records (which was a lot tougher back then, before the internet and online data). No one in Canada had died in the way that multiple callers kept insisting had happened in the next county/province. Next chap to call in with the story got called a liar on air, mocked, and disconnected. Such was right-wing talk radio in Alberta in the early 80s.

    2609:

    David L @ 2588:

    The current laws are irrelevant, because the context was their introduction in the 1970s.

    In the US seat belt laws came about in the mid 60s. My family was involved.

    Shoulder belts was a later fist fight over freedoms.

    The first car my family had that had seat belts was a 1961 Chevrolet Bel Air - seat belts front AND back. It was my dad's "company car" that he bought for my mom at the end of the year's lease.

    The first car my family had with shoulder belts was a 1965 Chevrolet Caprice - again my dad's "company car" that he bought for my mom at the end of lease. They were the kind where there was an extra buckle down on the seat you had to clip them in to, separate from the lap belt.

    My dad was an executive at an insurance company (Blue Cross). Insurance companies were early proponents of seat belts because "Seat belts save lives!", but more importantly, they save insurance companies MONEY.

    2610:

    Elderly Cynic @ 2584: I was posting in haste, and omitted the word "much". The current laws are irrelevant, because the context was their introduction in the 1970s.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#As_a_substitute_to_seat_belts

    Seems to me like we have a case of hunting an invisible dragon as much as anything else ... or perhaps dancing goalposts.

    Not to mention the number of straw-men sacrificed along the way.

    2611:

    What I remember most about early shoulder belts from Detroit is how convenient they made them to not use them. They actually had clips to stow them in the roof. Then they had those 'automatic' shoulder belts the moved into place after you shut the door. Trouble was you had to connect the lap belt manually, but of course that was just too much trouble for a lot of people.

    2612:

    Air-Bags ISTM that airbags are a fundamentally bad idea - economically & environmentally, even if they do (maybe) save lives ) - why? Because, if you have an "older" i.e greater than ~8 yrs old or thereabouts .. car & for any reason, the airbags cook off ... you have to scrap an otherwise perfectly-useable & working car, because of the cost of repair/replace said fucking airbags. Is this true? I believe it to be so, but, of course my car doesn't need them ( It's crumple zones are other cars ) OTOH I would really HATE going back to driving without a seat-belt on ... shudder, no thanks. Or having no servo-assisted disc brakes, or decent 4wd. Oh yes & decent headlights - I can remember the days of "Lucas, prince of Darkness" & have no wish to return there, either.

    2613:

    Then they had those 'automatic' shoulder belts the moved into place after you shut the door.

    We called those attack belts. From the early to mid 80s I think.

    2614:

    When the hyperbole is stripped away, the core freedom the conservative project seeks is the freedom to pillage.

    2615:

    the airbags cook off ... you have to scrap an otherwise perfectly-useable & working car, because of the cost of repair/replace said fucking airbags.

    My memory from a few years ago is that airbags cost $700 each in terms of replacing them. In the US in general a car is considered totaled when the repair costs exceeds 75% of the value of the car.

    We lost a $7000 car 2 months ago after getting rear ended while stopped. It LOOKED like all that was wrong were the plastic bumpers scratched up a bit. (We were also pushed in to the car ahead.) But after they looked into it the metal floor of the trunk was 1 to 2 inches shorter than normal. So instead of a repair we got a check.

    Why this matters is that a salvage company will buy the car and fix it up or dismantle it for parts. Likely the later. Airbags will net $2000 or so wholesale. Then the hood, trunk/boot lid, doors and such will net even more. Plus the engine, NEW TIRES, etc... another few grande and all of those go into the inventory of used repair parts.

    2616:

    Why weed became illegal... that article doesn't even mention that a) Harry Anslinger, last head of Prohibition, campaigned for a year and a half or two years to get weed made illegal (if you haven't seen Reefer Madness....). The other reason is that Hearst, of yellow journalism, etc, had just bought four huge paper mills, making wood pulp paper, and didn't want competition from hemp paper.

    2617:

    Airbags.

    The one "advantage" that airbags have over seatbelts, provided only that they are standard equipment included in the base price so you cannot see that you are paying through the nose for them, is that you can completely ignore them right up until the point when you really need them.

    Seatbelts, of course, only work if you fasten them in advance, and expecting that to be done is a gross violation of MAH FREEDUMBS!

    Me, I'm happy to do up my seatbelt, and frankly I'd rather not have to pay for airbags that give me very little additional protection, and may even have caused accidents by deploying at the wrong time, which does not happen with seatbelts.

    JHomes

    2618:

    I thought modern seatbelts had pretensioners that could definitely fire at the wrong time? Or is that just some of them?

    I was going to include the pre-tensioning under "electronics that save lives" but couldn't be bothered looking it up then arguing about it.

    Also, I'm all in on the right to kill yourself, not so keen on the right to kill others. But that puts me in a tiny whiny minority so I'll just go back to wishing and hoping. Guns, cars, and FREEDOOM!

    2619:

    Just to cause trouble, I tend to figure that the right to lethal self-defense in extremis and the right to an abortion are different parts of the same spectrum, as is the right to euthanasia.

    It's not necessarily that they're all right or wrong, but the reasons to draw the various lines get interesting, ugly, sexist, and religiously bigoted if one is not careful.

    2620:

    To me euthanasia is different in that you're unambiguously killing yourself. Now arguably there might be a limitation if you're pregnant, but then that same argument applies to some degree if you have external dependents as well. And obviously a vegan could never commit suicide in any form because of their symbiotes :)

    But abortion and slavery are two sides of the same coin, and whether you can justifiably kill someone who is enslaving you is open to debate (that's an observation, not a moral principle of mine). As is whether an abortion does actually involve a person, let alone a slave-owner. And only the really committed anti-abortionists argue that both mother and fetus should die in preference to killing the fetus to save the mothers life. Oddly the pro-life folk are largely silent on that issue.

    2621:

    It should be noted that Anslinger and Hearst both campaigned in the ugliest and most racist fashion imaginable - really a complete horrorshow in modern terms.

    2622:

    The Australian War Crimes investigation looks like another dud. Some soldiers may face administrative punishments, as yet only a suggestion that their commanders might. And then this stupid article skips over the real history of "How commanding officers were dealt with in the past"... we stuck them in front on an international tribunal, and those have a history of hanging people they don't like. Right up to the level of the Prime Minister... who is, of course, outside the remit of the Australian investigation.

    About all we can say is that it's slightly better than the similar one in Aotearoa, and might even manage to be better than the usual UK ones. (we need not mention the US approach).

    https://theconversation.com/why-australian-commanders-need-to-be-held-responsible-for-alleged-war-crimes-in-afghanistan-151030

    2623:

    I thought modern seatbelts had pretensioners that could definitely fire at the wrong time? Or is that just some of them?

    I've never heard of ACTIVE pretensioners. All the ones I've seen are based on the rollup mechanism having "brakes" the extend when the belt is pulled out fast. Which is why you can pull the shoulder belt off of you with a light touch but is "grabs" if you pull it hard/fast.

    2624:

    and may even have caused accidents by deploying at the wrong time,

    Airbags

    Is this a tale similar to the car driving into the pond and the occupants dying due to the seat belts jamming as was mentioned up thread?

    2625:

    David L No It's extremely rare & unusual, but it does, v occasionally, happen. Don't think anyone has been killed by this, though. There is a documented ( filmed ) case of a little-old-lady being hooted at, whilst crossing the road, stopping & swinging her handbag at the offending driver's car .... & setting the air-bags off! [ It's somewhere on YouTube, or was ]

    2626:

    I have heard of them, and have experience of seatbelts operating by something like a rolling ball (i.e. their locking was triggered by the car's deceleration, not fast movement of the belt). I have had trouble with the normal sort, where I needed to reach the dashboard FAST and it wouldn't let me!

    The normal way that airbags kill people is that the latter are 'the wrong size', and the former break their necks, which is why you have to disable them in the passenger seat for smaller people, but airbags have killed people in other ways. Still, they reduce deaths and injuries to car occupants more than they cause, ESPECIALLY if seat belts are not used.

    On the original point, I bumped across this by accident. Note that it is talking only about the road accident deaths, and not the less direct effects.

    content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1564465,00.html

    2627:

    Moz wrote: "To me euthanasia is different in that you're unambiguously killing yourself."

    Huh? You probably meant suicide here.

    Because the problematic nature of euthanasia stems precisely from the examples of it being used to kill others, namely those people that you have deemed to have a 'life not worth living'.

    That's of course a whole different kettle of fish to what nowadays is called 'assisted suicide' (or to unassisted suicide, for that matter).

    2628:

    MSB @ 2627 That's of course a whole different kettle of fish to what nowadays is called 'assisted suicide'

    Or MAID

    Medical assistance in dying

    https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assistance-dying.html

    2629:

    In other news from 2020: Arecibo Observatory is... gone.

    2630:

    No seatbelt law discussion is complete without this classic Darwin Award winner being mentioned.

    2631:

    It had already been decided to not repair it from earlier damage. There was going to be a plan put together to get the platform down safely. Now that's somewhat moot.

    2632:

    What will SETI do now? - They were "temporarily" stopped, because they had a data-mountain to chew on, but when that is crunched up, what then?

    2633:

    " unambiguously killing yourself " Good Grief!! ' 'unambiguously ' Ever suffered from major attacks of Clinical Depression? I have ..Twice, this before I decided that ,since I had the option I should retire early rather than die of overwork in public service. Just in time I identified the symptoms of my second topple into hell and decided that ..it just wasn't worth the risk. And so? My various collogues response when I told them that I was ILL and that my doctor had told me to turn up at his practice the following morning rather than go to work ? It was, in one instance, to say .."ILL!!! But you are NEVER ILL, and I need you to support me in ..." And he was sort of right in my never displaying illness.This since I was addicted to work and ..well. 'Holidays! were an alien concept. And thus it was in my last university job I conducted a personnel tutorial to a poor sod who was terrified, and who badly needed to learn of the art and science of Appraisal Interviewing. People who are sufficiently desperate for help will watch you bleeding over their feet and still wonder why you aren't helping them with their dire problems...which are ever so more serious than anything that you might be suffering.

    2634:

    the problematic nature of euthanasia stems precisely from the examples of it being used to kill others,

    I'm sorry if you regard euthanasia and murder* as synonyms, that wasn't my intention.

    I suspect this is the core of the argument over legalising euthanasia, actually. To some people it means "others can decide to kill me" and to others it means "I'm allowed to decide when I want to die". The two situations are very different, and very hard to reconcile. When each side describes the other sides position you get "you want to force people to torture me until it's no longer possible to keep me alive" vs "you want doctors to be able to kill me whenever that's easier than treating me".

    I struggle to see the latter as more than a strawman. We have processes to deal with murder, those murders already happen in places where euthanasia is illegal... making it legal seems to help clarify those situations and makes it easier to deal with rather than harder.

    Also: if you're afraid your family and friends want to kill you, that's a whole different thing.

    • no proposal for legalised euthanasia allows killing an unwilling person, hence "I'm afraid they'll euthanise me against my will" doesn't make sense to me. They can't do that, they can only murder you.
    2635:

    I've just come upon a news item in the Daily Male ..err that is to say the Daily Mail ..that I can't resist sharing with you all ..oh, Happy Joy..even Charlie couldn't make this up ... " "Hungarian MEP for Viktor Orban's anti-LGBT party resigns after being caught by cops shinning down a drainpipe when they raided 25-strong male sex party also attended by 'naked' EU diplomats

    Hungarian MEP Jozsef Szajer, of anti-LGBT Fidesz party, has resigned after being caught by police in Brussels Officers broke up a mostly-male sex party attended by 25 people held illegally during lockdown on Friday Brussels prosecutors say 'SJ' fled via a window, hurt himself shinning down a drainpipe, and was caught Szajer was one of the founding members of Hungarian premier Viktor Orban's Right-wing Fidesz party " https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9005991/Police-raid-lockdown-orgy-diplomats-MEP-Brussels.html
    2636:

    I think the meaning has shifted, probably faster in some places than others. In Aotearoa we've just had a whole referendum campaign on the topic of euthanasia ... and it wasn't called "voluntary euthanasia".

    But in countries like the USA and Germany where the term is normally used to refer to killing off undesirables, the connotations are quite different. Although interestingly wikipedia may have settled on the efinition I was using, they've moved the US history of "involuntary euthanasia" into the eugenics discussion. Ah, Hitler, how annoying that you tainted so many noble concepts by losing the war {/sarcasm}.

    2637:

    That does seem to be yet another example of "the most vocal opponents of immorality are generally the least moral in their private lives". I'm sure there's a pity label for that.

    I imagine that every comedy/satire writing in the world is currently struggling to contain their glee.

    2639:

    I thought with Arecibo the big loss was near-Earth radar to verify things that might hit us? AFAIK Arecibo was kind of it for big, directional radar systems? The Chinese 500m dish is receive-only and the usual astro dishes are useless for sending, while the military have moved away from megawatt-level up-facing radars.

    2640:

    Yeah, people have been killed. Mostly by the faulty ones. A lot of these they thought the airbag went off in a very minor accident that shouldn't have triggered them, but they're finding lately that the airbag going off is the cause of the accident, not the other way around.

    amp.abc.net.au/article/11538628

    2641:

    Moz Arecibo was only partially steerable You really need something like an re-updated version of the Mark One to be really effective.

    2642:

    You seem to be agreeing that we don't have a big radar any more, which was my point.

    2643:

    Chinas 500 meter aperture dish ("FAST") doesn't count ?

    2644:

    Euthanasia.

    On the one hand, my first reaction is to remember when we did it, large scale, but then I spell that youth-in-Asia, and generally refer to it as the Vietnam War.

    On the other hand... yes, it has been misused. On the other hand... if you're a decent human being, you know when it's time to put your pet down. You know it's a decent, if terribly hard thing to do. And you need to be there when the vet gives them the needle.

    On the other hand, I think of it as a very "Christian" thing, "you're suffering, and maybe in terrible pain, and there's no cure, nor will you get better, but God's Plan (tm) means we need to keep you suffering, rather than give the coup de grace.

    2645:

    On the other hand... if you're a decent human being, you know when it's time to put your pet down. You know it's a decent, if terribly hard thing to do. And you need to be there when the vet gives them the needle.

    People who study pet psychology are fairly certain that dogs and cats don't have a concept of "tomorrow". At least not like we do. So putting a pet down is not the same thing. The live in the moment.

    2646:

    The essence of a radar system is that it transmits a pulse and listens for the reflection. Not being able to transmit makes FAST a pretty poor radar system. They haven't suggested that they're going to change that, or build a transmitter nearby, so... I don't count it as a radar system. YMMV.

    Point 5 in the comparison on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope#Comparison_with_Arecibo_Observatory

    2647:

    Moz @2638 I thought with Arecibo the big loss was near-Earth radar to verify things that might hit us?

    Well yes, it was useful for the study of possible civilisation killers but it was a really big loss because because of the basic Science that super-radar could do to these objects and find out more about the Universe.

    2648:

    My daughter and I have both had speed awareness courses. For those outside the UK that means we chose them as an alternative to a fine and penalty points after a speeding offence. Neither of us was told to open a window instead of using air conditioning. Before air conditioning was common in cars you could see people hanging out of windows and passengers dangling their feet out of windows on hot days. Hardly conducive to safe driving.

    2649:

    RE: Airbags

    I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the ongoing mess with Takata airbags in the US. There have been massive and ongoing recalls of the airbags, because they did, in fact, kill people. Well, ones manufactured by their Mexican subsidiary (Tacata) did. Takata's in bankruptcy now, because they had 20% of the market in airbags, and most of them need to be replaced.

    The problem was that as the defective airbags deployed, they shot metal fragments at and into the drivers. When the fragments hit critical arteries or veins (normally in the neck) death resulted.

    2650:

    Oh, right. That really makes a major difference.

    Not.

    I can't tell if you're belittling cats and dogs, or if you are under the delusion that no human being, ever, said, "ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

    2651:

    I don't know. With our cat, he was pretty clearly suffering and we took him to the vet and killed him. With our dog, it was harder to tell. She was sick, and sometimes in pain, but up til a day before her death, she would run in the park and look around, happy. On her last day, she stayed in the stroller. Still, I'm not sure how well I read her or if it was just wishful thinking.

    While I'm generally in favor of euthanasia for people, the very elderly, like children, are often a vulnerable population and sometimes have evil caretakers.* Significant caution is advisable.

    *It is rather more likely than not that several of my grandparents were 'disciplined' to encourage docility in their later years. While some of this may have been related to preventing suicide, other portions were likely related to cantankerousness.

    2652:

    Neither. I just put them into a different category than people.

    I don't have to prove my pet bona fides to you.

    2653:

    Authors like Singer and especially Hare talk about the capacity to have preferences (as in "preference utilitarianism") and this is something that cats and dogs are usually agreed to possess. To prefer to be continue having preferences is not necessarily contingent on a concept of the future, although I don't think the idea that cats and dogs lack such a concept is quite settled (there are questions about the assumptions embedded in the models of some early experiments and other empirical studies in this space and much is under review).

    2654:

    Watching a 15 minute interview with former Australian PM Kevin Rudd. He's discussing the evil of the Murdoch publishing empire and associated other companies. And how they basically gave us Trump, Boris, and Brexit.

    By way of interest, Rudd was on Australian TV last night with another interview. This time he has been called up to comment on the deteriorating bilateral relationship between Australia and China.

    https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/former-pm,-kevin-rudd,-says-the-current-state-of/12940430

    I don't think it's geoblocked, but it occurs to me that I wouldn't really know if it were. If it does turn out to be, I'm pretty sure there will be other ways to get to it.

    2655:

    These days the preferred term is "voluntary assisted dying", at least in Australian (and I believe Canadian) jurisdictions grappling with the task of introducing legislation to clarify the situation. There is currently a strong distinction in most jurisdictions between withdrawing life-prolonging treatment (which is totally allowed as a sort of endpoint to palliative care, which itself can totally permissibly include palliative medications that themselves shorten life, so long as they have a palliative purpose and are not intentionally used to end life) and wilful assistance, such as providing support in the refusal to eat, administering a lethal drug or anything that requires a causative action on the part of the person providing assistance. The "voluntary" refers both to the person who wishes to die and to anyone who may be needed to supply assistance in achieving this outcome. Clinicians have a right to conscientious objection, though I believe this is only covered unevenly across jurisdictions in existing legislation.

    In the absence of such legislation (it's still very thin on the ground) common law jurisdictions refer to the famous UK case, which was focused on the withdrawal of treatment for Tony Bland, a victim of the Hillsborough disaster.

    2656:

    "Not being able to transmit makes FAST a pretty poor radar system."

    No, that actually makes it a damn good half radar system.

    The problem in radars have always been the S/N of the transmit/receive switch and the obvious solution for ground-based radar was "bistatic radar" where you use different antennas to transmit and receive.

    For the kind of radar work Arecibo did, the big dish was only needed for the receiver, a much smaller dish could have done for transmitting, and would have given a better result, because it would have eliminated the near-end crosstalk.

    As far as I have read, the chinese deliberately did not design FAST to transmit, because of the negative near-end crosstalk experiences from Arecibo.

    These days state-of-the-art radar is passive: There are people in Sweden who know everything about what flies over the Baltic and far into Russia, without ever sending a single photon in that direction, by simply receiving reflections and occultations of all the radio-waves being transmitted for all other purposes.

    2657:

    Damian @ 2654 : These days the preferred term is "voluntary assisted dying", at least in Australian (and I believe Canadian) jurisdictions

    No,the term "voluntary assisted dying" is more or less unknown in Canada and the term "medical assistance in dying (MAID)" is preferred.

    There was a MAID law enacted in 2016 and right now there is a new law proposed to amend all of this mess, Bill C-7

    https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/index.html

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-medical-assistance-in-dying-maid-legislation-1.5790710

    2658:

    As in "Make homosexuality illegal - I want to feel dirty again..." (said IIRC by Chris Addison on Mock the Week some years ago)

    2659:

    I remember driving behind one of the original Fiat 500 (cinquecento) cars in Italy; it was occupied by two muscular gents who each had their window open and a (large) arm dangling outside with their knuckles almost touching the ground. For some reason I kept thinking of the Flintstones.

    2660:

    Sorry, 2658 was meant to be a reply to 2647 from Mike Collins

    2661:

    Okay. Some of the law lecturers I have recently studied with also work in Canada, but I guess there's some translating they customarily do when talking about stuff (I did read some Canadian papers and cases, but I could easily have edited the terms in memory).

    2662:

    A neighbour of mine who was a lorry driver got into an altercation with an Isetta bubble car. He was about 5’4”. The bubble car driver got out of his vehicle and was about 6’3 and well built. When the confronted each other they both started laughing and the situation was defused.

    2663:

    I borrowed one, once. The only way I could drive it was to open the sun roof, and put my head out, like the officer of a tank.

    2664:

    Not geoblocked to me (southern Britain). Thanks for the link!

    2665:

    Damian @ 2660

    To remember which term goes where just think of a Canadian-looking maid coming into a room holding a tray with a syringe on it.

    2666:

    Since nobody else has mentioned the latest craziness yet:

    Trump pardons: US justice department unveils bribery inquiry

    They've released a document with names redacted, although they also say "government official is being probed". So this could be anything from a random millionaire fraudster trying to set up a deal to a full blown bribery scandal. Of course Rudy Giuliani is not a government official.

    Could Trump pardon himself for selling pardons? I beg your pardon.

    2667:

    Sorry, that should be "no government official is being probed."

    2668:

    One hopes this isn't a shakedown by some Orange-dyed new DoJ hires to get more money for the boss, after which the probe will be quickly withdrawn from whatever orifice it's currently in.

    The more interesting political angle is whether the Republicans, in a brief fit of insanity, support judicial processes that overturn many/all of Agent Orange's pardons, because they want to trash Biden's ability to pardon anyone.

    Personally I doubt it, for the same reason Pelosi didn't act to limit Obama's power after the Bush II overreach: both parties are power-hungry, and they don't want to take power away from their future bosses, even when it's the sane thing to do. That in turn sets the stage for yet another attempt at an Imperial Presidency, and says yet again that in America, the appearance of politically sane actions is a pareidola.

    2669:

    gasdive @ 2639: Yeah, people have been killed. Mostly by the faulty ones. A lot of these they thought the airbag went off in a very minor accident that shouldn't have triggered them, but they're finding lately that the airbag going off is the cause of the accident, not the other way around.

    amp.abc.net.au/article/11538628

    They appear to have all been manufactured by a single, now bankrupt, corporation with a problematic history of manufacturing defective safety equipment.

    There was an earlier recall affecting 8+ million automobiles equipped with defective seat belts.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takata_Corporation

    https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/24/business/international/honda-nissan-and-mazda-join-recall-over-faulty-air-bags.html?_r=0

    Instead of condemning airbags in general, I think you should be closely looking at corporate malfeasance. They knew about the problems for a long time & covered them up before being forced by government regulators to do something about it.

    But it's not just Takata, there's clear evidence ALL of the automobile manufacturers using Takata airbags knew about the problems, continued to install the faulty airbags after they were aware of the defects and resisted taking action to correct the problem even after people started dying.

    There is a world-wide corporate culture of indifference to the harm corporations do because individual employees of those corporations won't be held to account even when their specific decisions lead directly to murdering their customers. And murder IS the right word.

    2670:

    Speaking of pardons, it looks like Flynn (pardoned for dealing with the Russians and lying about it) is advocating suspending the constitution and using the military to run an election to get the right results.

    https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/alarm-bells-sound-after-mike-flynn-endorses-military-coup-actual-fascism/

    2671:

    Heteromeles @ 2648: RE: Airbags

    I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the ongoing mess with Takata airbags in the US. There have been massive and ongoing recalls of the airbags, because they did, in fact, kill people. Well, ones manufactured by their Mexican subsidiary (Tacata) did. Takata's in bankruptcy now, because they had 20% of the market in airbags, and most of them need to be replaced.

    The problem was that as the defective airbags deployed, they shot metal fragments at and into the drivers. When the fragments hit critical arteries or veins (normally in the neck) death resulted.

    It's not just the Mexican subsidiary - I doubt the defective airbags used by Australian auto manufacturers came from Mexico. China, Singapore, Taiwan & Vietnam are all a lot closer "off shore" suppliers.

    And the exploding initiators were not the only problem. Many of the replacement airbags that didn't have the exploding initiators were defective in other ways. Enough of them to cause a second forced recall.

    2672:

    whitroth @ 2649:

    You are such an ASS sometimes!

    2673:

    Heteromeles @ 2667: One hopes this isn't a shakedown by some Orange-dyed new DoJ hires to get more money for the boss, after which the probe will be quickly withdrawn from whatever orifice it's currently in.

    More likely it represents an assessment of Trumpolini's character by some sketchy elements outside of the political arena. I don't think they've actually offered a bribe yet, but they've hinted around it like they think he'd be willing to take one. Also I think this is the real key:

    They say individuals - whose identities are redacted - appear to have "acted as lobbyists to senior White House officials without complying with the registration requirements" for such activity.

    I'm guessing it's just another scofflaw grifter looking for a way to short-circuit a prosecution. Maybe Senator Perdue is looking to sleaze his way out of an insider trading investigation?

    2674:

    Rbt Prior & everyone ...

    That's the least of it Selling "pardons" & every other crooked trick in the book. Though they may have retrospectively screwed themselves: They are openly saying that one of Biden's picks is "Nevah!" going to pass their Senate ( They are assuming they are going to win in Georgia, not guaranteed ) approval. Who cares - Biden can say "You did it!" & appoint whoever-it-is as "Acting" & hold up 2 fingers.

    Meanwhile, here, it looks as though BoZo is selling-out to the extreme Brexshiteers & we are going to have an extremely unpleasant January & February ( At the least ) WHAT should I stock up on? Those of us needing medicines are going to worry a lot, I think.

    If/when it really does implode - what then? The tories are not going to vote themselves out of office, yet they are plainly incompetent & paralysed. BoZo is thrown out, but all the competent, honest members of the old Conservative party are either expelled or no-longer interested. And appointing an even-more-extreme Brexshitteer won't work, and the police/army will only be able to "control" v. small areas if it really goes tits-up. Will the power stay on? If that goes down, in Winter, it will be really grim.

    2675:

    {insert evil cackle here} We scored some of the good stuff this week at last - actual Marmite! Woo-hoo!

    2676:

    Returning to an old topic - the Beirut Explosion . Try this for an overview Try this for an overview

    2677:

    I confess I've been hoarding Marmite. When my local grocery got in a couple of bottles I bought them both. Then they got a dozen and I bought them all. And this week I bought enough to bring me to two dozen bottles (leaving some on the shelf this time).

    Should last me at least to next summer.

    I rationalize it by looking at the way grocery prices are going up. Investing in non-perishable groceries gives a higher rate-of-return than most investments these days. :-/

    2678:

    Meanwhile, here, it looks as though BoZo is selling-out to the extreme Brexshiteers & we are going to have an extremely unpleasant January & February ( At the least )

    As I believe OGH said back in the spring, and I agreed, it was clear after Boris had Covid and his spell in the hospital than he was a PM in name only with no real power. His inability to deal with any of the issues of that time (the starting of the replacement process as though he was already dead, his inability to punish Cummings, etc.).

    Nothing that I have seen from my position across the Atlantic since then has convinced me otherwise, and if anything his humiliation at doing the PM equivalent of begging in the lobby as MP's voted on the new Covid stuff provided further proof.

    Which is a way of pointing out it isn't a case of Boris selling out, because Boris isn't in charge.

    WHAT should I stock up on? Those of us needing medicines are going to worry a lot, I think.

    Difficult to answer, in part because it really depends on unique circumstances (budget, storage ability, what one needs and is willing to eat, etc.). And security.

    As you note medicine is the obvious one, but beyond that it depends - though the obvious relation to medicine is any specific dietary requirements that a health condition may require.

    If/when it really does implode - what then?

    No one really knows.

    The tories are not going to vote themselves out of office, yet they are plainly incompetent & paralysed.

    Yes and no. The view if one is a Conservative supporter, or a Brexiter, is very different than the view many of us on here have.

    Even the remaining moderate Conservative MPs are at the moment dealing with the simple fact that the last election was one on a very simple thing - deliver Brexit - which the party is still doing even if it is a particular version people outside the party don't like.

    And on that they so far aren't incompetent, with the only real paralysis being in a (assumed) internal fight on what the outcome on January 1st is - but regardless of what choice the party makes on January 1st they finalize the Brexit process.

    Which is what they were voted into office a year ago to do.

    BoZo is thrown out,

    Maybe.

    He is potentially still the useful fool and scapegoat, particularly for say another 6 months.

    As it will have dawned on a lot of contenders and power brokers in the party over the last 2 months Covid wasn't a "3 month spring 2020 problem" - which in turn means the fallout from Covid is continuing and will for a while yet - and no new leader wants to enter office and promptly get tainted with that continuing fallout.

    So my guess is Boris stays around until at least say the Summer, when (hopefully) much of the at least western world is well on the way to getting enough people vaccinated that things can start to return to normal. Then the party can remove him for his "incompetence" in dealing with Covid, with all the reversals used as proof, and choose a new leader who can start without being in the middle of a crisis.

    (that said, they may delay it even further if it looks like Brexit has made a mess and the world isn't recovering from Covid as fast as hoped - they still have lots of time to juggle things until 2024 and Biden's statements today have made it clear that a UK/US trade deal is very unlikely before 2024 regardless of the Ireland issue).

    but all the competent, honest members of the old Conservative party are either expelled or no-longer interested.

    To early to tell. A key will be to watch what Nigel gets up to, and if his antics on his new project gain any traction or not.

    If Nigel falls flat there may be an opportunity for the more moderate side of the Conservatives to reassert themselves with Brexit over and done with.

    and the police/army will only be able to "control" v. small areas if it really goes tits-up. Will the power stay on? If that goes down, in Winter, it will be really grim.

    I could end up being wrong, but I wouldn't expect the power to be a problem.

    And as long as people are warm in their home, most will be content enough to stay in and be entertained by the TV or to vent their frustration in some online forum - even if their stomach isn't as full as they would like.

    2679:

    They are assuming they are going to win in Georgia

    Georgia is totally up in the air. Trump has gone so far off the rails that his die hard supporters are considering ignoring the election. Google some searches and you'll find out just how whacked out it is.

    2680:

    "no government official is being probed."

    Not even the ones being held by space aliens?

    I am disappointed. Why bother even having alien overlords if we can't get a thorough probing every now and then.

    2681:

    Medicine.

    OGH could probably shed more light on this, but a lot of medicine has a short use by date for reasons unrelated to deterioration.

    There's a paper from Nigeria

    (Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Expired Anti-Inflammatory Medicines in Tropical Africa using Mice Chibueze Peter Ihekwereme, Chinonye Chimdinma Chidebelu and Lotanna Chinemelem Nwadiliorah.)

    that concluded some drugs aren't as good once expired but also speculated that this was due to storage at under tropical conditions.

    Otherwise most literature seems to say that medicines should last decades. I've got a stock of over the counter pain medication that lives in the bottom of my fridge that's two years out of date and I can't tell any difference from new.

    2682:

    As long as it's a consensual probing...

    2683:

    gasdive @ 2681

    Personally, I throw out any medicine past its due date. I keep the little empty containers and put them with my hardware stuff, to eventually place tiny screws and other small odds and ends in them.

    I did my high school and junior college in a Science concentration but there's no way I would try to figure out by myself if any particular due date is chemically and medically correct or not.

    I would advise anyone else to do the same, unless they're married to a pharmacist.

    2684:

    These days state-of-the-art radar is passive

    Indeed, googling on "passive radar" finds a number of interesting articles, including how to build your own. IIRC, back in the 90's there was a demonstration of such a system in which it tracked a Shuttle on ascent using local radio and TV stations.

    2685:

    Apropos of nothing in particular, but possibly of interest to some of the UK-based members here, this is a railway map of the UK which allows the user to adjust the date and see what the network looked like. (OGH might possibly have uses for this? IRC one of the DLD sequence is set in the 1870s?)

    I'm not knowledgeable enough to say anything about its accuracy, but per its facebook page the writer has professional railway interests.

    https://railwaymap.org/?fbclid=IwAR3unf4CrdnmMb-12D5yMJS8VIikS53LC0fVdwCN3KPntaNe0EG6R5pXSRU#

    2686:

    waldo That map has its uses ... However, the "authority" is a book usually referred to as "Cobb" from the author, which maps everything ( almost ) with dates of openings & closings - & yes, I have a copy.

    2687:

    I still want to know what they're looking for with the anal probes - do they think some human swallowed their wedding ring? Or the key to the Mothership?

    2688:

    In the case of Trump and Johnson, you would be looking for their heads.

    2689:

    "I still want to know what they're looking for with the anal probes"

    Temperature. The simplest explanation to the alien abduction and surgery is accidental awareness under anaesthesia. They is no referent to some of these memories and they may be recalled years later. The descriptions of aliens are very similar to gowned and masked surgeons and nurses, indistinct mouth and nose, smooth features, no hair and anal temperature probes are used in operating theatres. When the memories are recalled quickly they are associated by the patients with the surgery but when recalled some times later the link is lost. I had such an experience to a much lesser degree after fairly minor surgery which needed a general anaesthetic. I woke up for a couple of nights after the surgery dreaming if a large female face looking down at me. Eventually realised that it was a nurse checking me during recovery from the anaesthetic.

    The link below also links to the Royal College of Anaesthetists report on the frequency of accidental awareness http://www.educatinghumanity.com/2014/11/alien-abduction-cases.html

    2690:

    These days it's common to do transperineal rather than transrectal prostate biopsies, but they insert an ultrasound transducer rectally to help with guidance of the biopsy needle. You don't need to move a temperature sensor around, while an ultrasound transducer must be aimed. One might imagine that the sensation in the case of awareness could resemble a good, hard probing...

    2691:

    NSF have released video footage of the Arecibo collapse.

    First segment is from a land based camera, then several seconds of black screen, and then footage from a drone that was inspecting things when the collapse happened.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssHkMWcGat4

    2692:

    In US news, this one surprised me. Still smiling. :-) SCOOP: Don Jr. eyes a run for NRA chief. It's one more way the Trump family is making big plays to cement itself in GOP conservative politics for the next 4 years. (Tom LoBianco, 3 Dec 2020) It also covers his other adult kids and their spouses. "Politics is now the family business," one Republican close to the Trump family said. e.g. Jared Kushner has been discussing the idea of a Trump-themed news outlet amid reports that he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, may move to a house on the president's New Jersey golf course. Imagine, if you can, Jared playing golf.

    2693:

    I couldn't watch. Bad enough to see the aftermath. A little money to maintain stuff that needs it? I enjoy that our country has nice things.

    2694:

    Bill Arnold @ 2692: In US news, this one surprised me. Still smiling. :-)
    SCOOP: Don Jr. eyes a run for NRA chief. It's one more way the Trump family is making big plays to cement itself in GOP conservative politics for the next 4 years. (Tom LoBianco, 3 Dec 2020)

    Pay-walled. But one thought does occur? Does the NRA have anything left to loot after Wayne LaPiere and Oliver North got through with it?

    2695:

    In US news, this one surprised me. Still smiling. :-) SCOOP: Don Jr. eyes a run for NRA chief. It's one more way the Trump family is making big plays to cement itself in GOP conservative politics for the next 4 years.

    On one hand, given the apparent problems within the NRA at the moment and the problems with the current leadership, it would seem to be an organization that would be easy to take over.

    The flip side is, would Don Jr. be able to run it effectively and return it to its former influence? The family legacy so far would make that appear to be doubtful.

    It also covers his other adult kids and their spouses. "Politics is now the family business," one Republican close to the Trump family said.

    Well, they think it is the family business.

    Jared Kushner has been discussing the idea of a Trump-themed news outlet amid reports that he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, may move to a house on the president's New Jersey golf course. Imagine, if you can, Jared playing golf.

    More a reflection that they have made themselves socially unacceptable in NYC, and unlike daddy they don't want to run away to Florida.

    Being on a Trump owned golf course will give security advantages in dealing with protestors (on the assumption that the Trump family manages to hold on to the golf courses of course).

    2696:

    I have a favorite cousin who's been an emergency room nurse in BC for close to 4 decades now. As you might expect she has a highly experienced and somewhat unique view on death and dying.

    She has very clear and well informed opinions on the right to die. She has seen uncountable people who are at the end of their lives and were not (until quite recently) able to choose to let go of their lives.

    The use of MAID in Canada was long overdue and may be the most important thing the current government has done. Of course, there are many tricky bits to figure out, including but not limited to:

  • If you have early stage Alzheimers but are not yet ready to die, how do you make that decision in advance? Current legislation means the person must be of sound mind at the point of decision, but the whole problem with Alzheimers is that the 'life not worth living' stage happens when the sound mind is gone. My personal biggest fear.

  • People with debilitating disabilities - how do you decide who decides and what constitutes 'life worth living' for a nonverbal person? How do you separate out the possible self-interest of heavily burdened guardians from the right to live/die?

  • Fascinating and I hope not to have direct experience of the legal application for a long time, but on the advice of my cousin we have very specific and detailed instructions in our wills.

    2697:

    People with debilitating disabilities - how do you decide who decides and what constitutes 'life worth living' for a nonverbal person? How do you separate out the possible self-interest of heavily burdened guardians from the right to live/die?

    Stephen Hawking

    All it takes is money.

    2698:

    A little money to maintain stuff that needs it?

    One off big engineering projects tend to be very hard to maintain. Or predict costs 50 years down the road. Looking at it I can see it costing 10 to 20 years of operating budgets to overhaul the cable and pylon system. Or more.

    2699:

    For 1, there is already a solution in widespread use in Australia (at least), that doesn't necessarily relate to VAD (or MAID). This is called an Advance Care Directive (ACD), something for which there is now legislative support in most states. You get to make an ACD at any time, it needs to be recorded and kept in a form accessible to care providers, and it can contain what sorts of interventions you do and don't endorse including when to withdraw life prolonging treatment. The controversial (well it wasn't controversial when it was opt-in, but it went ballistic when the tories changed it to opt-out) My Health Record, a nationwide EHR with the premise that a person has control of their own health information including which healthcare providers have access to it, contains a provision for hosting an ACD. But health systems and individual healthcare facilities will have their own procedures for getting ACDs when they think they are needed and are able to act early enough. From a patient and family perspective, you'd want to be making an ACD around the same time that you are considering enduring power of attorney (EPOA) and who you would trust to make decisions on your behalf (or, as is becoming more common, to assist you in still making your own decisions, making up for anything you no longer understand... that is there is a trend away from "substitute decision making" toward "assisted decision making") if you lose capacity. In general it's also a good idea to make a will. In most Australian jurisdictions, if you die intestate your executor ends up being your Next of Kin according to a prescribed formula, and it's not guaranteed that will be someone you trust (especially if your spouse dies with you, say in a car accident... spouses are usually each other's closest NoK and most trusted person, so most people don't think past that, but once they are out of the loop it can get messy).

    Anyway I'm reasonably sure the concept of an ACD is not isolated to Australia, but I'd have to go looking for references to a Canadian equivalent.

    2 is a bit fraught, but I'd also suggest it's something that arises more in speculation than in practice: in practice it is often not as hard as you might think to understand what a person's wishes are, even in the case of severe disability. In general it isn't a decision we'd allow someone else to make on their behalf, so part of the question doesn't really arise anyway. See also the trend from substitute to assisted decision making.

    2700:

    rocketpjs @ 2696 "I hope not to have direct experience of the legal application (of MAID) for a long time"

    Then drive carefully and avoid dumb animals. One of my second cousins accidentally drove his little Renault into a moose that had rushed across the highway. He became a quadriplegic.

    2701:

    CRAZY? ( As in countdown to ) Try this headline for size: Pottery association president forced to resign in New Zealand over ceramic dildos row Take it away, peoples, I'm sure there's a whole set of very silly ( & rude ) stories in there.

    2702:

    I was sure they'd be artful objects, meant to be looked at only. Boy, was I wrong.

    https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2020/12/04/2003748105

    2703:

    Funny, I thought of that later....

    2704:

    I hate to say it, but the most likely explanation is that they're wackos, or that they're looking for attention, any attention.

    Like trolls on the 'Net, who I can only assume had real shits for parents, and the only time, growing up, that their parents paid attention to them was when they were bad. With that, any attention is better than none.., and they keep it up.

    2705:

    An... ultrasound transducer? Is that like... a Sonic Transducer, Frankenfurter?

    Sorry, couldn't resist.

    2706:

    We certainly have something similar to ACD here. I've got something like that in my will. There is a subtle but crucial difference between deciding whether to receive 'life prolonging treatment' and making a decision to die with medical assistance. Commission versus omission.

    Wife's cousin was brain dead after an industrial accident and his family chose not to continue treatment, he physically died shortly thereafter. His family did not choose to actively end his life. That is a different animal from a person with a painful degenerative disease choosing MAID when things become intolerable - and it involves someone else administering the fatal dose.

    As for the disability and MAID question, it is a fraught question that was a big part of a highly publicized legal case here a decade or two ago. The Robert Latimer trial and conviction was highly polarizing. For all the details google it, but the tldr is that his daughter had extreme disabilities and constant pain, and he chose to end her pain by ending her life. Under the laws of the time he was convicted of murder, though it involved at least 2 Supreme Court decisions.

    It was a heartbreaking case from every angle, and it has informed a lot of the current discussion of MAID here.

    2707:

    ACDs in Australia vary between states and are the result of common law rather than legislation, so can be a bit hit and miss. In NSW you must nominate someone as your guardian as well as expressing your wishes, and what you can request is quite restricted (it has to be legal, in a country with anti-euthanasia laws). At least in theory your ACD is legally binding... but can be challenged in court. The guardian job is not one I'd wish on anyone because it amounts to "if anyone disagrees with your plan, it's up to your guardian to fight them".

    For me the whole point of an ACD is that I don't trust the random relatives who have varying opinions to actually respect my wishes. Is there anyone close to me that I want to push into that particular shitfight while they're coping with me being incapacitated? Haha fuck no.

    Luckily there appears to be an out, or at least I've found a solicitor who is willing to take my money. He's the executor of my will, and quite possibly the executor of me.

    2708:

    Generally I also don't use drugs much past their use by date.

    But if I'm faced with a possible interruption in supply for a drug that makes a significant difference to my quality of life, I'd rather expired than no drug at all. That's the context of a possible interruption of supply that we were discussing.

    Having said that, in my case I knew that over the counter supply was ending. I'd discussed it with my GP and had dug up the papers where the particular drugs had been tested for shelf life in warehouse conditions by the DoD and found to be good for decades after the use by date. GPs were going to be under a lot of pressure not to prescribe the drugs we knew worked, that I hadn't become addicted to, and instead prescribe drugs with worse side effects that aren't effective or alternatively much stronger doses of drugs that we knew are effective but mind bogglingly addictive in those doses.

    Seemed like a no brainer to both of us, and my pharmacist.

    2709:

    The flip side is, would Don Jr. be able to run it effectively and return it to its former influence? I'm mainly amused because they're all so arrogant, and have not yet developed an accurate understanding of how much they (including DJT) have made the Trump name toxic. [1]

    Being on a Trump owned golf course will give security advantages in dealing with protesters Good point. Anyway, here's a google maps link for the most plausible (for a faux MotU) house-like structure on the golf course. Switch to satellite view. Far enough away from the course that they probably won't get hit by golf balls by accident. (Deliberately, though, would be easy. :-)

    [1] "What is 17 times 6" ("Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump, Jr., fail a pop quiz during a 2006 appearance") - watch it to see a con man (DJT) in action.

    2710:

    I'm mainly amused because they're all so arrogant, and have not yet developed an accurate understanding of how much they (including DJT) have made the Trump name toxic.

    In the US with 40% to 60% of the population that's true. But for 30% to 40% of the population they adore the name.

    It's not a very desirable situation.

    2711:

    ACDs in Australia vary between states and are the result of common law rather than legislation

    So sorry, I usually look at Victoria and the ACT after Queensland when I check legislation. In NSW (and Tasmania) it's common law only, but the other three states and both territories have legislation. I like to think also that including one in your MHR would have some legal force, regardless of the state, but it's a shifting space I guess.

    It's still the case that family basically get to override your wishes in relation to organ donation, and may do so unwittingly. At the time of your death, no-one really wants to put the question to the recently bereaved, but in most places in Aus it's required for your NoK to explicitly authorise clinicians to take your organs. There are multiple NGOs working on this right up to and including people who specialise in chatting up your grieving spouse and getting them to sign. But as a society we still face a massive undersupply of donor organs despite most people being registered donors. Partly this is because the circumstances when a donor organ is likely to be viable are rare, but the legal situation definitely exacerbates that.

    2712:

    including one in your MHR

    Ah, the infamous "electronic health record" that the government assures us will never leak or be accessed by non-approved people (mostly because almost anyone who might want it is on the list of authorised parties), and definitely can only be modified by half of the people who can access it.

    I've opted out, because I don't trust that system to be accurate, let alone secure. It's designed not to accurately record names, FFS, let alone sex and gender. And the specification is secret, because of course it has to be so I can't even tell you whether names are allowed to be more than 45 characters yet.

    https://developer.digitalhealth.gov.au/specifications/clinical-documents/ep-1818-2015/nehta-1850-2015

    2713:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-55172063

    Art from ~10,000 years ago. Article is interesting but I only laughed when I got to "All photos subject to copyright". It's weird how simply taking a documentary photo of someone else's art triggers copyright.

    2714:

    his family chose not to continue treatment, he physically died shortly thereafter

    Ah, 'benign neglect'. What my father chose in the end — no more IVs except for pain meds, and waited for his kidneys to shut down. "I wasn't supposed to wake up" is a heartbreaking thing to hear in the morning. Took a few days for him to die in his sleep. Waking up and realizing that I was alone in the room was… indescribable.

    MAID wasn't available then. Don't know if he'd have used it — as a medical professional he made clear-eyed decisions about his treatments, at least some of which were painful and (he knew) useless, but left my mother the comfort of knowing everything had been tried.

    2715:

    Well it was designed as a CDA document repository indexed by the IHI. That means any person id functionality is outsourced to the Healthcare Identifier (HI) service run by Services Australia (really Medicare) where you can look up IHIs (as well as HPI-Is and HPI-Os). I suppose it's important to emphasise that the name, sex, etc of the person in a CDA document belong only to that document and not to the overarching record. MHR doesn't even provide a way to change these details in the overarching record, they come from Medicare via the HI service. In the MHR consumer portal, under "Profile & Settings" it displays a message saying "Some information on this screen is based on information held by Department of Human Services (DHS)" and instead of providing an "edit" function it basically gives you a number to call DHS and change your Medicare details. There is an intro to the HI service here:

    https://developer.digitalhealth.gov.au/developer-guide/introduction-healthcare-identifier-service

    Medicare/Services Australia has its own requirement to sign up with their developer/vendor portal. Don't recall whether that's easy or hard (I don't currently have access, might get it sometime if I decide to develop a clinical app). Assuming you already have access to the ADHA developer portal (since you linked to documents that you need to sign up to download), I'd recommend reviewing the material under here:

    https://developer.digitalhealth.gov.au/products/my-health-record-b2b-gateway

    For instance the technical service spec docs list any constraints on things like string length in various schemas. You might find the FHIR (RESTful) interface interesting: it targets mobile app developers, so while it's most query only it covers more ground in less verbiage than the B2B interface (and you get a spreadsheet of data mappings... though the things you're talking about are only in the "result" payloads). In contrast the CDA document specs really are just XSDs, if there isn't a specified limit to string length for a field, there most likely is no such limit. The backend is a specialised XML repository in the Oracle Health suite tailored to CDA docs, it really uses XSDs (or something equivalent) to define entities, it's not a straight relational database.

    I'm not going to offer any opinions on the opt-out model or security. I have some, of course, and I definitely think certain consumers with a high risk of negative impact in the event of a breach of their health information should opt out (I know some such, and they have). But there are benefits that IMHO outweigh the negatives for over 90% of people, especially people with chronic conditions and the elderly. Many of the purported negatives are actually existing problems in the health system it wasn't designed to solve, but which have come to public attention as part of the backlash to the transition to opt-out. But I totally agree it's not for everyone, I just don't agree this means no-one should have it.

    2716:

    My involvement was limited to a brief period a few years ago, but my feedback to the effect that the HI was fundamentally broken got the reply "we know, that is by design". You might be right about the internals, but if clients can't send or receive longer strings then they might as well not exist. But I'm sure they've improved many things since I saw it, and everything is much better now.

    My understanding of the benefits are that for the ~30% of the population with chronic health conditions it can make repeated circling the same series of services faster, and for people actively shopping around different medical people it can simplify that process. But the primary benefit is to medical providers because they get paid for their involvement.

    For the 50% or so of the population that don't regularly engage with the healthcare system (other than paying their tithe to the health insurance industry), I struggle to see what the benefit of having a record would be even in theory. As someone who does the "first visit" process every time I go to the doctor (most decades!), an electronic record might help if the doctor had time to read it. But since our health system is predicated on them not having that time I don't see the point.

    2717:

    shrug I haven't been involved in projects integrating with it for a few years either (it was still called PCEHR when I was). It was helpful for me switching GP, because the old practice basically told the new one they had no records to share. There is a lot of vertical integration occurring in GPland that has some quite negative implications in terms of this sort of behaviour only getting worse in the future. I won't argue about the direct benefits of a shared record here, but my perspective is obviously different to yours.

    You talk of a "tithe", but to me that model is purposeful in that it gives us a buffer against the neoliberal inclination to cut unfunded costs (because they are so obviously "funded", it's built into the structure, a clever defensive trick by Keating). My overriding concern is that globally the cost of healthcare as a proportion of host economies is rising steadily but persistently, and will attract the attention of the same neoliberals, with outcomes that endanger access and especially equity. That's not a defence of the MHR; it's just clarifying my perspective on the topic.

    2718:

    I'm mainly amused because they're all so arrogant, and have not yet developed an accurate understanding of how much they (including DJT) have made the Trump name toxic.

    So toxic that the Trump and RNC have a combined haul of $207.5 million since the election, nominally to fight the corrupt election though the fine print escape clauses have already been discussed on here.

    Perhaps more important for those wondering why the Republicans don't break ranks regarding Trump, a lot of that money can be used to punish anyone who doesn't remain loyal in the 2022 and 2024 campaigns by funding opponents.

    And for the rest of us the news gets more worrisome, with the Republicans apparently raising twice as much money as the Democrats for the Georgia election runoff

    https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/03/trump-pac-fundraising-442775

    2719:

    On one hand, given the apparent problems within the NRA at the moment and the problems with the current leadership, it would seem to be an organization that would be easy to take over.

    The flip side is, would Don Jr. be able to run it effectively and return it to its former influence? The family legacy so far would make that appear to be doubtful.

    I think that's not the point. When has any Trump turned something into an effective, efficient, and money making operation? That skill seems to have died with Fred Trump.

    Look at it another way. The NRA is an organization skilled in drawing media attention, the upper leadership has been pocketing millions of dollars in bribes, and it commands a fanatically loyal swarm of swivel-eyed loonies. How could a Trump resist that?

    2720:

    I don't think this has been mentioned here.

    What does a pardon mean?

    SCOTUS Burdick v. United States "a pardon carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance carries a confession"

    2721:

    I've always thought this was crap. It means you can't use a pardon to right a wrong--say a racist jury or a conviction later proved wrong via DNA evidence. And if you know you're innocent, it's a helluva choice they force you to make.

    2722:

    In Aotearoa a pardon has been used as an admission of guilt by the courts, and compensation paid.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Allan_Thomas

    2723:

    Talking of crazy ... I really can't figure out if BoZo is going to snatch utter disaster from the jaws of defeat, or claim a victory in a minor defeat, by getting a deal ... The posturing & Bullshit-levels are almost impentrable.

    2724:

    Presumably the person who writes the pardon can address that issue; "Due to multiple violations by the prosecution, etc."

    2725:

    Niala @ 2700: On moose

    Moose and elk are a particular danger to cars because the belly is at about the height of a car bonnet/hood. So if you hit one the front of the car snaps the legs and you now have a ton of meat coming at you through the windscreen. See this video for a real-life example.

    2726:

    Wow! I didn't knwow moose could fly.

    2727:

    the belly is at about the height of a car bonnet/hood

    Maybe there's an evolutionary arms race between taller moose and taller cars? Which may be how we got giraffes?

    2728:

    Moose and elk are a particular danger to cars because the belly is at about the height of a car bonnet/hood.

    Saw my first such in northern California 2 years ago. Grazing in a small park. I knew they were big but in person, wow.

    2729:

    Ongaku @ 2721: I've always thought this was crap. It means you can't use a pardon to right a wrong--say a racist jury or a conviction later proved wrong via DNA evidence. And if you know you're innocent, it's a helluva choice they force you to make.

    Actually, at the State level you can. It's called a "Pardon of Innocence" or something similar. It's a pardon that explicitly states it's purpose is to undo an injustice.

    2730:

    Just got an email from Congressman Jim Banks (R-Illinois) with the following item:

    "Thanks to the success of President Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed, a vaccine is on the way. Now it's time for Indiana to start planning how best to distribute it."

    Interestingly, it then goes on to talk about the Pfizer vaccine which isn't part of Warp Speed. Seems entirely normal to give credit to Trump for something he didn't actually do…

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